Yards to Metres

How to use Yards to Meters Converter

1. 1
   Enter the distance in yards. Decimals are fine.
2. 2
   Read the metres. Feet and kilometres are shown alongside.

About converting yards to metres

The yard and the metre are close enough that people treat them as equivalent and far enough apart that doing so accumulates a visible error. A yard is exactly 0.9144 metres, making the metre about nine and a half percent longer. Over a single stride that is a few centimetres and irrelevant; over a hundred yards it is more than eight metres, which is the difference between two genuinely different races. This is why athletics record books have a discontinuity in them. Track and field ran imperial distances well into the twentieth century, and the switch to metric means a 100-yard dash time cannot be compared directly to a 100-metre time — the older race was shorter by 8.56 metres, roughly a second of running. The conversion factor itself is exact rather than approximate, which is unusual. The 1959 international yard and pound agreement defined the yard as precisely 0.9144 metres, harmonising several national yards that had drifted apart by small amounts. The motivation was practical: interchangeable manufactured parts across countries need the underlying units to agree to more decimal places than the old definitions provided. Yards survive today in a handful of specific places rather than as a general unit — American football, golf, the length of a cricket pitch, and fabric sold by the yard in the United States. Almost everywhere else the metre has replaced it entirely.

Frequently asked questions