📐 Acres to Hectares Converter

Converting acres to hectares

One acre is 0.4046856422 hectares, and one hectare is 2.471053815 acres.

hectares = acres × 0.4046856422

Getting the precision right

One acre is 0.40468564224 hectares, so a hectare is 2.471 acres. The acre has an odd history: it was the area a yoke of oxen could plough in a day, standardised as one chain by one furlong, which is 4,840 square yards. The hectare is simply 100 by 100 metres, which is why it is the easier unit to picture.

Where each unit is used

Acres are used for land in the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland. Hectares are the metric standard for agriculture and are used in EU subsidy calculations, so British and Irish farmers routinely deal in both — fields in acres, paperwork in hectares.

Values worth knowing

A hectare is 10,000 m², about one and a half football pitches. An acre is 4,047 m², close to a single pitch. A square mile is 640 acres or 259 hectares.

Where the two units came from

The acre was defined by what a team of oxen could plough in a day, which made it a measure of labour as much as land — and explains its odd shape of one furlong by one chain, long and narrow because turning a plough team was slow. The hectare was invented to replace exactly that kind of unit: a square 100 metres on a side, with no reference to ploughing. Both survive because field boundaries drawn in acres did not move when the metric system arrived.

Round the result to the precision your own work needs. These converters carry the full factor, which is useful for checking but rarely what you want to write down.

Two neighbours worth knowing: the sq ft to sq m, for the question this one leads into, and the days to hours, which answers it from the other direction.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)