Litres to Gallons

How to use Liters to Gallons Converter

1. 1
   Enter the value. Decimals are fine.
2. 2
   Read the conversion. Both systems are shown, so you can see which one your source meant.

About converting litres to gallons

The gallon is the clearest case in everyday measurement of one word meaning two things. The imperial gallon was fixed in 1824 as the volume of ten pounds of water at a defined temperature, giving 4.54609 litres. The United States, having declared independence a few decades earlier, kept the older English wine gallon of 231 cubic inches, which is 3.785411784 litres. Neither is wrong; they are simply different units that share a name, and the twenty percent gap between them is large enough to matter in every context where gallons are used. Fuel economy is where this bites hardest. A car achieving identical consumption is rated around twenty percent higher in the UK than in the US purely because of the unit, which makes cross-Atlantic comparisons of miles per gallon meaningless without conversion. Metric countries sidestep the whole problem by quoting litres per hundred kilometres, which also inverts the relationship — a lower number is better, where a higher mpg is better, and confusing the two produces conclusions that are exactly backwards. Recipes have the same trouble in miniature, since a cup, a pint and a quart are all fractions of a gallon and therefore all differ between the two systems.

Frequently asked questions