Miles to Feet Converter
Convert miles to feet — and why a nautical mile is a different number.
Updated
feet
5,280ft
1 mi = 5,280 ft
In short
How many feet are in a mile?
Exactly 5,280 feet in a statute mile, so multiply miles by 5,280: three miles is 15,840 feet. A nautical mile is a different unit at exactly 1,852 metres, or about 6,076 feet — roughly fifteen percent longer.
The statute mile is exactly 1,609.344 metres, following from the international foot of 0.3048 m fixed in 1959.
miles to feet — quick reference
| miles (mi) | feet (ft) |
|---|---|
| 0.3 mi | 1,320 ft |
| 0.5 mi | 2,640 ft |
| 1 mi | 5,280 ft |
| 2 mi | 10,560 ft |
| 3 mi | 15,840 ft |
| 5 mi | 26,400 ft |
| 10 mi | 52,800 ft |
| 26.2 mi | 138,336 ft |
The formula, worked line by line
One multiplication by an exact integer. The mile is 5,280 feet by definition and 1,609.344 metres by consequence, so nothing on this page is approximate except where it says so.
“A number without its unit is not a measurement. It is a number that happens to look like one.”
Both of the well-known aerospace cases come down to that sentence. Neither involved anyone getting a conversion factor wrong. In both, a correct number crossed a boundary without the unit that gave it meaning, and everything downstream treated it as though it were in the expected one.
feet = miles x 5,280
1 mile = 8 furlongs = 320 rods
3 x 5,280 = 15,840 ft
1 mile = 1,609.344 m exactly
1 nautical mile = 1,852 m = about 6,076.12 ft- The distance
- 42.195 km
- In miles
- 26.2188 mi
- In feet
- 138,435 ft
- Using the rounded 26.2
- 138,336 ft — 99 ft short
- Feet
- 138,435 ft
Ninety-nine feet over a marathon is nothing to a runner and everything to whoever measures the course. Race courses are certified against the metric distance for exactly this reason.
Why 1.6 km is a shortcut, not a value
A mile is 1.609344 km, so the familiar 1.6 runs about 0.58 percent short — roughly nine metres per mile. It is an excellent mental approximation and has no place in anything recorded, where the exact figure costs nothing to carry.
The units the mile is built from
- 1 rod
- 16.5 ft
- 1 chain
- 4 rods = 66 ft
- 1 furlong
- 10 chains = 660 ft
- 1 mile
- 8 furlongs = 5,280 ft
The same chain gives the acre: one chain by one furlong is 43,560 square feet. Distance and land area in the imperial system share their awkwardness because they share their ancestry.
How to use the miles to feet converter
Multiply by 5,280. The factor is exact — a statute mile has been 5,280 feet for centuries, and since 1959 the foot itself has been exactly 0.3048 metres, which fixes the mile at exactly 1,609.344 metres with nothing left to measure.
The number descends from the furlong. Eight furlongs make a mile, forty rods make a furlong, and a rod is 16.5 feet, so the product is 5,280. Every link in that chain is a small whole number; only the end-to-end factor looks strange, which is generally how inherited unit systems behave.
5,280
Feet in a statute mile
8 furlongs of 660 ft
6,076.12
Feet in a nautical mile
exactly 1,852 m
1,609.344
Metres in a statute mile
exactly
Which mile you mean is the one genuine ambiguity. The statute mile is used on land in the United States and the United Kingdom. The nautical mile, defined to approximate one minute of latitude and now fixed at exactly 1,852 metres, is used at sea and in the air, where a knot is one nautical mile per hour.
The other famous case is usually told wrong too. Air Canada Flight 143 ran out of fuel in 1983 not because pounds were loaded instead of kilograms as such, but because a density figure of 1.77 pounds per litre was used as though it were kilograms per litre. The correct density was about 0.803 kg per litre, and the aircraft received roughly a quarter of the fuel it needed.
- 0.25 mi
- 1,320 ft, two furlongs
- 0.5 mi
- 2,640 ft
- 1 mi
- 5,280 ft
- 3 mi
- 15,840 ft
- 5 mi
- 26,400 ft
- 26.2188 mi
- 138,435 ft, a marathon
The marathon row uses the exact mile equivalent of 42.195 km. The familiar 26.2 is a rounding that loses about 100 feet.
Convert the same distance into meters
For the metric figure, that page runs the exact thousand-to-one shift and covers the square-kilometre trap that catches area conversions.
Open the km to m converter →Miles converted to feet at the exact 5,280 factor, with the metric figure alongside.
| Miles | Feet | In kilometres |
|---|---|---|
| 0.25 mi | 1,320 ft | 0.402 km |
| 0.5 mi | 2,640 ft | 0.805 km |
| 1 mi | 5,280 ft | 1.609 km |
| 2 mi | 10,560 ft | 3.219 km |
| 3 mi | 15,840 ft | 4.828 km |
| 5 mi | 26,400 ft | 8.047 km |
| 10 mi | 52,800 ft | 16.093 km |
| 13.1094 mi | 69,218 ft | 21.098 km |
| 26.2188 mi | 138,435 ft | 42.195 km |
| 50 mi | 264,000 ft | 80.467 km |
| 100 mi | 528,000 ft | 160.934 km |
| 500 mi | 2,640,000 ft | 804.672 km |
Three miles, one word
The statute mile and the nautical mile are the two that matter today, and they are far enough apart that confusing them changes an answer materially rather than marginally. A nautical mile is about fifteen percent longer, so a hundred nautical miles is about 115 statute miles.
- Statute mile
- 5,280 ft = 1,609.344 m exactly
- Nautical mile
- 1,852 m exactly = about 6,076.12 ft
- US survey mile
- deprecated at the end of 2022
- A knot
- one nautical mile per hour
The nautical mile was designed to approximate one minute of latitude, which is why it belongs to navigation. It is now a fixed metric quantity rather than an astronomical one.
The US survey mile was based on the slightly longer survey foot and ran about 3.2 millimetres longer per mile. It was deprecated along with the survey foot at the end of 2022, so for anything measured since then there is one statute mile, and survey-based values are a legacy-data concern rather than a live choice.
What the famous unit failures actually were
Both stories are told as parables about imperial versus metric, and both are more specific and more useful than that. Neither was a failure to know a conversion factor. Both were failures to keep a unit attached to a number as it crossed a boundary between systems, teams or documents.
- Mars Climate Orbiter, 1999
- lbf-seconds supplied where N-seconds were specified
- The factor
- 4.45, applied to thruster impulse data
- Flight 143, 1983
- 1.77 lb/L used as though it were kg/L
- The correct density
- about 0.803 kg/L
- Common cause
- a number that lost its unit
In the Mars case the spacecraft software was correct and a ground file violated its own interface specification. In the aircraft case the arithmetic on the dripstick readings was right and the density factor was wrong. In both, review processes did not catch a plausible-looking number.
Do
- Carry the unit with the number at every handoff
- State which mile a distance refers to
- Treat 5,280 and 1,609.344 as exact rather than approximate
- Check a density or interface spec before trusting a factor
Don't
- Assume a bare number is in the unit you expect
- Use 1.6 km as a mile in anything recorded
- Mix statute and nautical miles in one calculation
- Apply the old survey mile to a new measurement
Every miles value, worked out
127 common miles figures each get their own page, with the answer, the arithmetic, what rounding costs, and the nearest real-world reference point on the scale.
1 to 9 mi
10 to 99 mi
Questions people ask
Sources
Where the constants and formulas on this page come from. Each line names the figure it backs.
The statute mile is exactly 5,280 feet and exactly 1,609.344 metres, following from the international foot.
US Survey Foot — Revised Unit Conversion Factors — National Institute of Standards and Technology
The nautical mile is exactly 1,852 metres, and a knot is one nautical mile per hour.
What is the difference between a nautical mile and a knot? — US National Ocean Service, NOAA
The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost after ground software supplied impulse data in pound-force seconds where the interface specification required newton-seconds.
Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board, Phase I Report — National Aeronautics and Space Administration
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