Meters to feet

International real estate listings quoting ceiling height or room dimensions in meters are a common reason to reach for this conversion, alongside track and field, where a 100-meter sprint has no exact foot equivalent worth memorizing — roughly 328 feet — which is part of why the two measurement traditions rarely mix within the same sport. A European apartment listing a 2.4-meter ceiling is describing a fairly ordinary 7-foot-10-inch clearance, not the unusually tall room the raw number might suggest to someone thinking in feet by habit.

Recreational scuba diving is another setting where this exact pair matters: depth limits and dive computer readouts are usually set in meters outside the US, and a diver trained on feet needs to recalibrate quickly. A commonly cited recreational depth limit of 18 meters converts to about 59.06 feet, not the round 60 feet divers often say in conversation, and a deeper 30-meter limit converts to roughly 98.43 feet — small gaps that matter when a dive plan, and the no-decompression time that goes with it, is built around a hard depth ceiling rather than a rounded-off one.

The meter is the SI base unit of length, and the foot is defined as exactly 0.3048 meter, so the conversion is exact rather than approximate.

Multiply a meter value by 3.280839895 to get feet:

ft = m × 3.280839895

One meter converts to 3.28084 feet. Ten meters, roughly the length of a city bus, converts to 32.8084 feet. And 100 meters, a standard sprint distance, converts to 328.084 feet.

For everyday use, rounding the factor to 3.28 is accurate to within about 0.03%, which is fine for estimating a room's dimensions or a hiking distance. Surveying, construction, and anything measured against a legal boundary should keep the full factor, since even a small rounding error compounds over a long distance like a property line or a building's footprint.

A common mistake is assuming 1 meter is close to 1 yard and treating the two as interchangeable when a foot figure is actually needed: a yard is exactly 3 feet, while a meter is about 3.28 feet, so swapping one for the other introduces a small but real error that grows with distance.