Convert Quarts to Liters

About converting Quarts to Liters

Quarts (qt) and Liters (L) are both units of volume, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Quarts figure by 0.9464. Ten Quarts comes to 9.4635 Liters, and a hundred works out at 94.6353 Liters.

Rule of thumb: going from Quarts to Liters divides, so the figure always shrinks — it takes about 1.0567 Quarts to make a single Liter. If your answer came out bigger, you have the conversion the wrong way round.

What is a Quart?

A quart is a quarter of a gallon, which is exactly where the name comes from — the Latin for a fourth part. Because the American and imperial gallons are different sizes, so are their quarts: the imperial quart is the larger by roughly a fifth, a discrepancy that quietly ruins recipes and technical specs copied across the Atlantic without checking. In the United States the quart is a supermarket fixture — milk, cream, motor oil and paint are all sold in them. Britain, having gone metric on the shelf, has largely dropped it and kept only the pint.

What is a Liter?

The liter is not, strictly speaking, an SI unit — it is merely accepted for use alongside SI, and is defined as exactly one cubic decimetre: the volume of a cube ten centimetres on a side. That pedantic status has done nothing to slow it down, since it is how most of the world buys fuel, milk, paint and soft drinks. Both L and l are accepted symbols, but the capital L is preferred in the United States and increasingly elsewhere, because a lowercase l in most typefaces is almost indistinguishable from the digit 1 — a genuine hazard on a dosage label.

To put both in perspective: a quart is the size of a standard carton of American milk, while a large bottle of soda holds two liters.

The converter above updates as you type, and the table lists common values for quick reference. Need the opposite direction? Use the Liters to Quarts converter, or browse all Volume converters.