Convert feet to yards

The foot and the yard belong to the same system of measures, the one still used day to day in the United States and the United Kingdom. Both units started out as body measurements, and both now have a length fixed to a tenth of a millimetre.

The foot, written ft, is exactly 0.3048 metres[1]. It divides into twelve inches. On American drawings and in catalogues it often appears as a single prime instead of the abbreviation, so 6′ means six feet.

The yard, written yd, is exactly 0.9144 metres[2], which leaves it 8.56 cm short of a metre. Three feet make one yard, and so do thirty-six inches — both spellings describe the same length.

Both figures come from a single document. On 1 July 1959 six countries, the United States and the United Kingdom among them, signed the agreement on a common yard and pound[2]. The yard was set at 0.9144 metres, and the foot, as a third of it, came out at 0.3048 metres. From that day the two units have meant the same thing on both sides of the Atlantic.

Britain still puts the yard on the road. Almost every warning sign that carries a distance gives it in yards, and the Traffic Signs Regulations of 2016 keep metric units off distance signs altogether[3]. The drawings behind those signs are metric, so a contractor sets a marker at 100 m and the sign in front of it reads 100 yards.

Twenty feet is 6.6667 yards. Written in whole units it is six yards and two feet.

That second form is the one you will want more often, because dividing by three rarely lands on a round number. Whole yards come out when the number of feet divides by three, so at 3, 6, 9, 12 and every further multiple of three.

A handful of values come up more often than the rest. Sixteen feet gives 5.3333 yards, which is five yards and one foot. One hundred feet is 33.3333 yards, or thirty-three yards and one foot in the mixed form. Three hundred feet lands exactly on one hundred yards, the length of an American football field measured between the goal lines.

Any other value is in the table below, or you can type it straight into the converter at the top of the page.

Divide the number of feet by three and you have the answer in yards. Twenty-one feet works out at exactly seven yards.

Formula: yards = feet ÷ 3

Going the other way rests on the same number, with the division turning into a multiplication. Seven yards is 21 feet, and the yards to feet converter will do the whole swap for you.

The three in that formula is an exact value, and that sets this pair apart from every other imperial conversion. The foot has two definitions. The international one is 0.3048 metres; the survey foot is 1200/3937 metres and it was the one the United States used for land measurement. NIST retired it on 1 January 2023[4].

For feet to metres that difference matters, because each definition gives a different number. The ratio of a foot to a yard stays identical in both systems. The survey yard is 3600/3937 metres and the survey foot 1200/3937 metres, so the first divides by the second exactly three times. The international system gives the same answer: 0.9144 metres divided by 0.3048 metres is exactly three.

Whatever source your figure in feet came from, then, this converter returns the same result.

For a metric answer, use the feet to metres converter. Distances longer than a field are easier to read with the feet to miles converter, and anything smaller than a foot with the feet to inches converter.

Type the number of feet into cell A1 and put the formula =A1/3 in the cell beside it. Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc all read it the same way, and copying that cell down converts the whole column.

The built-in unit function gives the same answer: =CONVERT(A1,"ft","yd"). Unit codes go in quotation marks[8].

For the whole yards, round down with =INT(A1/3). The leftover feet come from the remainder: =MOD(A1,3). For twenty feet the first formula returns 6 and the second returns 2, which is exactly six yards and two feet.