Convert feet to centimeters

One foot equals exactly 30.48 centimeters, or twelve inches. For height, convert the whole measurement to inches first and then multiply by 2.54 — it is fewer steps than converting feet and inches separately. Someone who is 5'10" is 70 inches, or 177.8 cm.

From feet. The Greeks and Romans both used one, and the Roman pes measured about 29.57 cm — close to today's value but not the same. Medieval Europe fractured into hundreds of local feet, and the 1959 international agreement finally set one: exactly 0.3048 meters.

Exactly 182.88 cm. Few numbers carry more cultural weight for something so arbitrary — it is the height threshold quoted in dating profiles, basketball rosters, and casting calls, and it exists only because six is a round number of an old unit. The metric equivalent has no such landmark, which is why 183 cm reads as a measurement while 6 feet reads as a category.

Writing 5.10 for five feet ten inches. It looks like a decimal but it is not: 5.10 feet is 155.4 cm, while 5 feet 10 inches is 177.8 cm. That is a 22 cm error, and it appears constantly in spreadsheets and clinical records where the field accepts a decimal and the person types a height. The reverse direction, converting a metric height into feet and inches, has the same two-step problem — see cm to inches.

The foot is 12 inches, and since 1959 that makes it exactly 30.48 cm — the value in NIST Special Publication 811, the US guide to the SI. Until recently the United States kept a second, older foot for land surveying; NIST and the National Geodetic Survey retired that US survey foot at the end of 2022, so the 30.48 cm foot is now the standard, with the survey foot kept only for legacy data.