Hectares to Acres Calculator - Convert ha to Acres

About the Hectares to Acres Calculator

The hectare is the standard unit for land across Europe, Australia, Africa and most of Asia, used for farms, forests, vineyards, parks and development sites. The acre is the land unit in the United States and remains common in the UK, Ireland and elsewhere. Farmers comparing yields, buyers comparing land prices, and anyone reading an international report on crops or forests regularly need to turn hectares into acres.

This hectares to acres calculator converts hectares to acres exactly. It also shows the area in square metres, square kilometres and square feet, and converts an optional price or rent per hectare into a price per acre.

How to Use the Hectares to Acres Calculator

Enter the area in hectares. Decimals such as 0.5 or 12.75 are fine.

Optionally, enter a price per hectare — a land price or an annual rent — to see the equivalent per acre.

The acres appear straight away with the other units.

The Formula

  square metres = hectares × 10,000
  acres         = square metres ÷ 4,046.8564224
                ≈ hectares × 2.47105
  price per acre = price per hectare ÷ 2.47105

A hectare is exactly 10,000 m², a square 100 metres on each side. An acre is exactly 4,046.8564224 m², so the factor 2.47105 is a rounded form of 10,000 ÷ 4,046.8564224.

Step-by-Step Example

One hectare.

  1 × 10,000 = 10,000 m²
  10,000 ÷ 4,046.8564224 = 2.47105 acres

A 40-hectare farm with land priced at 10,000 per hectare.

  Area:    400,000 m² ÷ 4,046.8564224 = 98.8422 acres
  Price:   10,000 ÷ 2.47105 = 4,046.86 per acre

So the farm is just under 99 acres, and the land costs about 4,046.86 per acre in the same currency.

Quick Reference

The table covers everything from a large garden to a sizeable estate. Each hectare adds about two and a half acres, so values in between are easy to estimate.

  0.5 ha  =   1.23553 acres       20 ha   =  49.4211 acres
  1 ha    =   2.47105 acres       50 ha   = 123.553 acres
  2 ha    =   4.94211 acres       100 ha  = 247.105 acres (1 km²)
  5 ha    =  12.3553 acres        400 ha  = 988.422 acres
  10 ha   =  24.7105 acres        259 ha  ≈ 640 acres (1 mi²)

A quick mental conversion is to multiply hectares by 2.5, which is about 1 percent high. For acres to hectares, multiply by 0.4.

Where the Hectare Comes From

The metric system originally defined the are, 100 square metres, a square 10 metres on each side. The hectare is a hundred ares — hecto meaning hundred — giving 10,000 square metres. It fitted naturally between the square metre, too small for land, and the square kilometre, too large for most farms. The are itself is now rarely used outside a few countries.

Comparing Farms and Yields

Crop yields follow the same conversion. Yields per hectare look larger than yields per acre for the same field, simply because a hectare is bigger. A wheat yield of 8 tonnes per hectare is about 3.24 tonnes per acre. When comparing agricultural statistics between countries, make sure both figures use the same area unit — and the same unit of weight, since American yields are often in bushels per acre.

Land Prices and Rents

Land prices and rents are published per hectare in Europe and per acre in the US and UK. To compare them fairly, convert the price as well as the area. A European rent of 250 per hectare a year is about 101.17 per acre; a US price of 5,000 per acre is about 12,355.27 per hectare, before converting the currency.

Picturing a Hectare

A hectare is easier to imagine than its number suggests. It is a square 100 metres on each side, about the length of a football pitch in each direction, and roughly one and a half full-size soccer pitches in area. Walking round its edge is a 400-metre walk, the same as one lap of a running track, though a track encloses a little more than a hectare. A typical suburban house plot is between a twentieth and a tenth of a hectare, 500 to 1,000 square metres, which is about an eighth to a quarter of an acre.

Forests, Parks and Conservation

Forest cover, national parks and conservation areas are reported in hectares in most international statistics, including those of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Large areas are then given in thousands or millions of hectares, or in square kilometres, where 1 km² is 100 hectares. A national park of 50,000 hectares is 500 km², about 123,553 acres or 193 square miles. Tree planting is similarly measured, with typical densities quoted as trees per hectare; 1,600 trees per hectare is about 647 trees per acre.

Understanding Your Result

The headline is the area in acres.

The metric line gives square metres and square kilometres.

The square feet line gives the area in square feet.

The price per acre line converts a price per hectare, if you entered one.

When Should You Use This Calculator?

Use it to compare farm and land sizes between countries.

Use it to convert land prices and rents per hectare into per acre.

Use it for crop yields, forestry and conservation reports.

Use it for building sites and developments described in hectares.

Common Mistakes

Dividing instead of multiplying. From hectares to acres, multiply by 2.47105.

Converting the area but not the price. Prices per hectare must be divided by 2.47.

Confusing hectares with square kilometres. One square kilometre is 100 hectares, or about 247 acres.

Using 2.5 for precise work. It is about 1.2 percent high, which adds up to more than an acre on a 40-hectare farm.

Forgetting the are. An are is 100 m², a hundredth of a hectare, and still appears in some European land records.