Feet to Miles Converter (feet, yards and miles)

This feet to miles converter moves a distance between feet, yards and miles in any direction, and shows the metric equivalent in metres alongside. Choose the unit you have and the unit you want, type the number, and every unit is listed under the answer.

The three units are tied together by definition, not by measurement. NIST Handbook 44 sets a yard at 3 feet and a mile at 5,280 feet, which makes it 1,760 yards. Since 1959 the yard itself has been exactly 0.9144 metres, so a foot is exactly 0.3048 m and a mile exactly 1,609.344 m. Every figure here comes from those definitions.

Feet to miles is the direction people get wrong, because 5,280 is an awkward number to divide by in your head. The converter does the division exactly and rounds only the displayed miles, to six decimal places.

1. Type the distance. Decimals are fine.
2. Choose the unit you have in From and the unit you want in To.
3. Read the result at the top. The cards below repeat the distance in feet, yards, miles and metres.

The preset buttons answer common questions: how many yards a foot is, what a yard is in miles, 10,000 feet in miles, and a quarter mile in feet. The two tables below the converter list feet to miles and miles to feet and yards, and both download as CSV.

1. Choose the units. The From unit says what your number means; the To unit chooses the headline. A negative distance is read as zero.

1. Convert through the metre. The foot is stored as exactly 0.3048 m, the yard as 0.9144 m and the mile as 5,280 × 0.3048 = 1,609.344 m. The converter multiplies your number by the size of the unit you started in and divides by the size of the unit you want, so the ratios come out as exactly 3, 1,760 and 5,280.

1. Show every unit. The same distance is converted to feet, yards, miles and metres.

1. Round for display only. Feet, yards and metres are shown to four decimal places and miles to six, rounded half up with trailing zeros dropped. Feet and yards worked out from whole or simple fractional miles are exact.

The default, 1 mile to feet:

1. Feet: 1 × 5,280 = 5,280 ft.
2. Yards: 1,760 yd. Metres: 1,609.344 m.

10,000 feet to miles: 10,000 ÷ 5,280 = 1.8939393..., shown as 1.893939 mi. That is also 3,333.3333 yd and exactly 3,048 m.

A quarter mile to feet: 0.25 × 5,280 = 1,320 ft, or 440 yd and 402.336 m. Drag racing's quarter mile is this distance.

One yard in miles: 1 ÷ 1,760 = 0.000568..., shown as 0.000568 mi.

A foot is one third of a yard, which the converter shows as 0.3333 yd. The other way round, a yard is exactly 3 feet, or 36 inches.

Football fields, fabric and carpet are often sold by the yard, so the conversion comes up when a room or a lawn is measured in feet: 300 feet is 100 yards, and 30,000 feet is 10,000 yards.

35,000 feet, a typical cruising altitude for airliners, is about six and two thirds miles straight up.

Divide the feet by 5,280. For 2,640 feet that gives exactly half a mile; for 10,000 feet it gives 1.893939 miles. To go from miles to feet, multiply by 5,280. For yards to miles, divide by 1,760, and for miles to yards multiply by 1,760.

A rough check you can do in your head: 1,000 feet is a little under a fifth of a mile (0.189394 in the table), so 5,000 feet is a little under a mile.

The mile comes from the Roman mille passus, a thousand paces. The English later fixed it at 8 furlongs, and a furlong at 660 feet, the length of a plowed furrow. Eight times 660 is 5,280, which is why the number looks so arbitrary next to the metric system.

The 660 foot furlong is still in the table as an eighth of a mile.

• The US survey foot. Older US land surveys used a survey foot slightly longer than the international foot, and a survey mile to match. NIST retired the survey foot at the end of 2022; this converter uses the international foot.
• Nautical miles. Charts and aviation use the nautical mile of 1,852 m. The km to miles converter shows nautical miles.
• Inches. For lengths with inches, use the feet to inches converter.
• Areas. A square mile is far more than 5,280 square feet, because both sides of the square are converted. Use the square feet to square yards converter for areas.

• Using 5,000 for a mile. 5,000 feet is only 0.94697 miles, so the round number undercounts every mile, and the error adds up on a long distance.
• Dividing by 3 for yards to miles. That converts yards to feet, not miles. Yards to miles is a division by 1,760.
• Treating decimal miles as miles and feet. 1.5 miles is 1 mile and 2,640 feet, not 1 mile and 500 feet.
• Mixing elevation and distance. A mountain 10,000 feet high and a trail 10,000 feet long both convert to 1.893939 miles, but only one of them is how far you walk.

• NIST Handbook 44, Appendix C, General Tables of Units of Measurement: the foot, yard, furlong and mile. nist.gov/pml/owm/nist-handbook-44-current-edition
• National Bureau of Standards Miscellaneous Publication 233, Units of Weight and Measure (revised to the 1959 refinement of the yard and the pound announced in the Federal Register, 24 FR 5348). nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/MP/nbsmiscellaneouspub233.pdf
• NIST, The US Survey Foot: retirement of the survey foot at the end of 2022. nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot