Miles to Feet Converter

How many feet are in a mile?

There are exactly 5,280 feet in a statute mile. The number looks arbitrary, but it comes from the old English system of surveying, where a mile was eight furlongs, each furlong was 10 chains, and each chain measured 66 feet: 8 × 10 × 66 = 5,280. Counted in yards, the same mile is 1,760.

feet = miles × 5,280

How to convert miles to feet

1. Type the distance in miles into the first box. Fractions of a mile should be entered as decimals.
2. Read the length in feet from the second box.
3. If you only need a rough figure, multiply by 5,000 and add 5.6% to it.

Examples: 2.5 miles × 5,280 = 13,200 feet. A tenth of a mile is 528 feet, which is why trail markers set at 0.1 mile are spaced a little over 500 feet apart. The full marathon, 26 miles and 385 yards (26.21875 miles), is 138,435 feet.

Miles to feet conversion table

A short history of the mile

The word goes back to the Roman mille passus, a thousand double paces. The English statute mile was fixed at 5,280 feet by an act of Parliament in 1593, which made it exactly eight furlongs (a furlong being the traditional length of a furrow in a plowed field). Today the mile is tied to the metric system: since 1959 the international foot is exactly 0.3048 m, which makes one mile exactly 1,609.344 m.

Elevation shows the unit at work. The city of Denver is called the Mile High City because it stands at about 5,280 feet above sea level.

Common mistakes

• Using 5,000 as a rounded factor. It understates the answer by about 5.3%.
• Confusing the statute mile with the nautical mile, which is about 6,076 feet long.
• Forgetting the US survey mile. It is defined with the survey foot and is longer than the international mile by about 3 mm, which does not matter for ordinary work; US agencies retired the survey foot at the end of 2022.

To convert feet back into miles use the feet to miles converter. You may also like miles to yards, miles to meters and miles to kilometers.