Last updated: November 18, 2025
Feet-and-inches conversion explained
Sports rosters, CAD drawings, and jobsite notes often list heights as "5 ft 10 in" rather than pure inches or meters. Our Feet and Inches Calculator keeps both components, normalizes them into meters, then reports decimal feet, total inches, centimeters, or millimeters so everyone can speak the same dimensional language.
How the conversion works
The calculator first expresses the composite measurement purely in inches (). Because (exact) and , we convert the total into meters and then scale into any output unit.
Units and conversions
| Unit | Relation |
|---|---|
| Foot (ft) | |
| Inch (in) | |
| Centimeter | |
| Millimeter |
Worked examples
- Height measurement
Convert 5 ft 10 in to centimeters.
Result: log 177.8 cm on international forms.
- Metric roster to ft+in
An athlete lists 183 cm. Convert to feet and inches.
Result: roughly 6 ft 0.6 in (6'0 5/8").
Tips and pitfalls
- Distinguish between decimal feet and feet+inches when entering values; 5.5 ft equals 5 ft 6 in, not 5 ft 5 in.
- Keep millimeter precision for carpentry or manufacturing drawings; convert back to ft+in only for field communication.
- Remember that survey feet (1200/3937 m) existed historically; our calculator uses the current international foot (0.3048 m) adopted across the U.S. in 2023.
- For heights in rosters, maintain two decimal places of centimeters so rounding doesn’t change an athlete’s listed height.