Square Feet to Linear Feet Calculator

Square feet measure area, linear feet measure length — you cannot convert between them without the width of the material. Enter the width in inches, the way flooring and trim are sold, and the result is the running length you need to buy.

Square feet measure an area and linear feet measure a length, so no fixed factor turns one into the other. What connects them is the width of the material, and supplying that missing dimension is what this page does: given an area to cover and the width of the board or roll covering it, it returns the running length — the unit flooring, trim and rolled goods are actually sold in. The arithmetic is a single division with one trap inside it. Widths are quoted in the small unit, inches or centimetres, while areas are quoted in the large one, so the calculator converts before dividing. On the values the page starts with, 50 square metres of material 20 cm wide comes to 250 running metres. Switch the units above and the same division runs imperially: 500 square feet at 5 inches wide is 1,200 linear feet. What the result does not contain is waste. It is the exact running length and nothing else — cutting, pattern matching and offcuts come on top, and that allowance is yours to add. The unit of the width is what most often goes wrong, and it fails silently: a width entered in feet rather than inches puts the answer out by exactly twelve, in metres rather than centimetres by exactly a hundred. Check against a case you know — 100 square feet of material one foot wide is exactly 100 linear feet.