Land Area Calculator

Land changes hands in units that have almost nothing to do with each other. A rural estate is priced in acres or hectares, a building plot is priced in marla or kanal in South Asia, and a mortgage or survey document will want square feet or square metres. This calculator takes one measurement and puts the answer in all of them at once, so you can check a listing against a title deed without converting by hand.

Enter the dimensions if you have them, or pick “I already know the area” and type in a figure from a survey, a deed or a listing. The tool also accepts a per-marla and a per-acre price so you can see whether two listings quoted in different units are actually the same price.

What an acre and a hectare actually are

An acre is 43,560 square feet — historically the area a team of oxen could plough in a day. It is 4,046.8564 square metres, roughly 208 feet square, and it is still the working unit for rural and development land in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland and across the Commonwealth.

A hectare is 10,000 square metres — a square 100 metres on each side. It replaced the acre in most of the world because it fits the metric system cleanly, and it is what agricultural, forestry and planning documents use in Europe, Latin America, Africa and most of Asia. One hectare is 2.471054 acres.

Because both are large, buying a hectare when you meant an acre is an expensive misunderstanding: the hectare is nearly two and a half times bigger.

Marla, kanal and the South Asian plot market

A kanal is fixed at 20 marla and, traditionally, 605 square yards — 5,445 square feet. Eight kanal make an acre, and one kanal is one eighth of an acre. That relationship holds only because the traditional marla is 272.25 square feet.

A marla is the variable unit. Traditional revenue records and older city schemes use 272.25 square feet. Many modern housing societies round it to 250 square feet. Some regions and older schemes use 225. The same advertised “10 marla” plot can therefore be 2,722, 2,500 or 2,250 square feet — a difference of up to 21% in what you actually get. Always ask which standard the price is quoted against, and put it in writing.

Worked example

A plot measures 90 feet by 60 feet. That is 5,400 square feet, 600 square yards, 501.68 square metres, 19.83 marla at the traditional standard, 0.992 kanal and 0.124 acres. The calculator shows 21.6 marla at the 250 square foot standard — the same physical plot, described two different ways.

Suppose the seller is asking a price per marla. Enter it and the total land value appears; enter a price per acre instead and you get the other total. If both prices are quoted, comparing the two totals against the same plot is the quickest way to see which listing is genuinely cheaper.

Converting a surveyed area

Survey documents rarely give you a neat rectangle. They give a boundary description, a plan drawing, or an area already calculated by a licensed surveyor. If you have that final figure, use the “I already know the area” option and pick the unit the document uses — the calculator converts from there. If you only have a plan drawing with irregular boundaries, the practical approach is to divide the plot into triangles and trapezoids on paper, work out each one here, and add them up.