Convert yards to feet

The yard is the working measure of length in the United States and the United Kingdom wherever a distance runs longer than a few paces and shorter than a mile. Field dimensions, cloth over a shop counter and the carry on a golf hole are all quoted in it.

The yard, written yd, is exactly 0.9144 metres[1], leaving it 8.56 cm short of a full metre. The ruler that matches it is the yardstick: a stick exactly one yard long, with the inch scale running to the very end.

The foot, written ft, is a third of a yard and comes to exactly 0.3048 metres[2]. It divides further into twelve inches, which puts thirty-six inches in a single yard.

The split into three parts has its roots in English law. The act written down around 1300, known as the Composition of Yards and Perches, built every measure up from a grain of barley: three grains made an inch, twelve inches a foot, and three feet a yard. Today's value comes from the agreement six English-speaking countries signed on 1 July 1959[3].

Cloth is the place the fraction still earns its keep. American and British shops sell fabric by the yard and cut it in halves and quarters, so an order reads 1/2 yd or 1 1/2 yd rather than a decimal — and the field at the top of this page takes those fractions exactly as written.

Twenty yards is exactly 60 feet. Nothing is left over, because multiplying by three always gives an exact value.

That is the substantial difference between the two directions of this conversion. Yards turned into feet give a number you can write down in full. Feet turned into yards give a repeating decimal for two out of every three whole values, because there you are dividing by three.

A few results come up more often than the rest. Ten yards is 30 feet, the distance a team has to cover for a new set of downs in American football. One hundred yards gives 300 feet, the length of the field between the goal lines. One thousand seven hundred and sixty yards is 5,280 feet, which is exactly one mile.

The table below sets out every value from one to thirty yards, and the converter at the top of the page will handle any other.

Multiply the number of yards by three and you have the answer in feet. Seven yards works out at 21 feet.

Formula: feet = yards × 3

Going the other way, the multiplication becomes a division by that same three, and the feet to yards converter will do it for you.

The three here is exact and follows straight from the definitions of the two units. A yard is 0.9144 metres and a foot 0.3048 metres, so the first divides by the second exactly three times. The same ratio held in the now retired US survey system, where a yard ran to 3600/3937 metres and a foot to 1200/3937 metres. Your source can rest on either definition, then, and the number of feet comes out the same.

The input field also takes common fractions. Typing 1/2 reads as half a yard and returns 1.5 feet, and 1 1/2 reads as one and a half yards and returns 4.5 feet. Where cloth is sold in quarters and halves of a yard, you can enter the fraction exactly as the product description writes it.

For a metric answer, use the feet to metres converter. Anything smaller than a foot goes through the feet to inches converter, and distances longer than a field through the feet to miles converter.

Type the number of yards 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,"yd","ft"). Unit codes go in quotation marks[7].

Swapping the target unit for "in" returns inches instead of feet. To split that answer, take the whole feet with =INT(A1*3) and the remaining inches with =MOD(A1*3,1)*12. For one and a half yards the first formula returns 4 and the second returns 6, that is four feet and six inches.