Convert miles to feet

A statute mile holds exactly 5,280 feet. To convert miles to feet, multiply your value by that number.

A few results turn up more often than the rest. A quarter mile is 1,320 feet and half a mile is 2,640 feet. Three miles already come to 15,840 feet.

Going the other way, you divide by the same number, and the feet to miles converter will do it for you.

Formula: feet = miles × 5,280

The same distance can be written in other ways too. A mile holds 1,760 yards, and in metric units it comes to 1,609.344 metres[1], because a single foot measures 0.3048 metres[2].

Alongside the statute mile there is the nautical mile, and that is the one distances are measured in at sea and in the air. It is longer than the statute mile, and its value comes straight out of geography. One nautical mile matches one minute of latitude, which is a slice of the Earth's circumference.

Since 1929 it has been fixed at 1,852 metres[3], which works out at 6,076.115 feet. The multiplier becomes 6,076, and the gap against the statute mile reaches fifteen per cent.

Over short distances that gap stays small, but over longer ones it grows quickly. Ten nautical miles come to 60,761 feet, while ten statute miles come to 52,800 feet. Eight thousand feet of difference shows up on any chart.

You choose the kind of mile in the card below the fields, and the result updates the moment you switch.

If you need the answer in metric units, open the miles to metres, miles to kilometres or feet to metres converter.

The name goes back to the Roman mille passus, a thousand double paces of a legionary. The Roman mile ran to a round 5,000 Roman feet, so its length was perfectly regular at the time. Converted into today's units that comes to roughly 1,479 metres[1], about eight per cent short of the mile we use now.

The number 5,280 was settled by an English act of parliament in 1593. Its wording runs: a mile shall contain eight furlongs, every furlong forty poles, and every pole sixteen and a half feet[1]. Eight times forty times sixteen and a half comes to exactly 5,280 feet.

Parliament kept the old length of the pole because fields were measured off it. Shortening the pole would have meant re-surveying every holding and raising the tax due on the land, so it was easier to add feet to the mile. That is why a number which looks arbitrary is really the arithmetic of three older units.

The furlong itself holds 660 feet and came from the length of a furrow a team of oxen could plough without a rest[4]. It remains in official use in horse racing in Britain, Ireland, Canada and the United States.

The present value was fixed on 1 July 1959, when the English-speaking countries harmonised the yard and the pound. From that day the mile has measured exactly 1,609.344 metres[1].

Put the number of miles in cell A1 and enter =A1*5280 in the cell next to it. Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc all handle it the same way, and copying that cell downwards converts the whole column. For nautical miles only the multiplier changes, to =A1*6076.1155.

A decimal result can be split into whole miles and the feet left over. Whole miles come from =INT(A1), and the remainder in feet comes from =(A1-INT(A1))*5280. For 2.3 miles that gives two miles and 1,584 feet.

To round the feet to a whole number, wrap the sum in the rounding function: =ROUND(A1*5280, 0).