Area Converter

Areas convert through the square metre. The important thing to remember is that area factors are the square of length factors: a foot is 0.3048 metres, so a square foot is 0.3048² = 0.09290304 square metres.

That squaring is why area intuition fails. Doubling the sides of a room quadruples its floor. A plot twice as wide and twice as deep is four times the land, not two. People consistently underestimate this, and it is the source of most surprises when comparing properties.

The dunam is included because it is the working unit for land across Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. The modern metric dunam is exactly 1,000 square metres, so ten dunams make a hectare — a clean relationship worth knowing.

Historically the dunam was an Ottoman measure of about 919 m², and older deeds may use that value. If you are converting from a document rather than a current listing, check which definition it uses before trusting the number.

A plot in Jordan is advertised at 4 dunams. You want to know what that means in units you can picture.

Type 4, choose dunam. That is 4,000 m², 0.4 hectares, 0.988 acres — near enough to one acre — and 43,056 square feet. A square of roughly 63 by 63 metres.

Now the squaring trap in practice. A neighbouring plot is described as being “twice as big” at 8 dunams. In frontage terms it is not twice as wide: a square 8-dunam plot is 89 metres on a side against 63, only 41% wider. The area doubled; the dimensions grew by the square root of two.

A second case, apartments. A listing says 120 m² and another says 1,400 ft². Type 1,400, choose square feet: 130 m². The second is about 8% larger — which is not obvious from two numbers in different units, and is the difference between a room and a corridor.

For the plot boundaries rather than the area, the length converter handles metres and feet.