Square Feet and Cents Converter

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Using the Square Feet to Cents Converter

This converter allows you to convert between two very commonly used units of area, that you might mainly encounter when discussing purchases or overviews of properties and land, which are square feet and cents.

In order to use our converter, first select whether you want to work with the British or the American spelling of certain units that might appear on the site.

Once you made this choice, move towards the ‘CONVERT FROM’ section, where you decide on the unit of your input value. The choice is between square feet (ft2) and cents (ct).

Afterward, select your output unit in the ‘CONVERT TO’ section out of the same two choices as before.

Alternatively, you can work with the preselected units or swap them by clicking on the icon with two arrows in opposite directions.

Write your input as a decimal number into the ‘VALUE TO CONVERT’ section, select the number of decimal places you want your result rounded toward, and click on ‘CONVERT’.

Your result will appear below the converter as a decimal number rounded to the desired number of decimal places.

You can also conveniently copy and paste the result by clicking the large ‘COPY’ icon next to it.

Converting Square Feet and Cents Manually

The conversion between these two units of measurement is determined by the conversion rate between them, a value you might see next to your result when using our converter.

The rate is given based on the definition of the two units.

A square foot is a unit of area that is represented as a square with a side length of 1 foot.

A cent is defined as a hundredth of an acre (the hint is in the name, as ‘centi’ is a Latin prefix meaning ‘a hundredth’).

An acre is a unit of area used commonly to describe larger stretches of area, such as properties or areas of small towns. An acre is an equivalent of 1/640 a square mile. Throughout history, the definition of an acre (and therefore the cent as well) changed or was referenced by units that are no longer used, which we will discuss later on in the text.

What is important for the sake of manual conversions is the relationship between cents and square feet, which can be described in the following ways.

UnitEquivalent
1 square foot0.0023 cents
1 cent435.6 square feet

This leads to 2 formulae that can help us with converting between the units manually.

ct = ft^2 * 0.0023
ft^2 = ct*435.6

The best way to apply the formulae is to choose the one that has your output value as the subject. Hence, if we are trying to find out how many cents a certain number of square feet is equal to, the first formula would be a better choice. For the opposite situation, we would use the second formula. Swapping the formulae is not an issue, but choosing based on the output value yields smoother and easier calculations. Let’s have a look at an example of how each formula can be used in practice.

EXAMPLE 1: An apartment has an area of exactly 1,000 ft2. Find the equivalent value of this apartment in cents.

Since our input is ft2 and our output is ct, we will use the first formula, where we substitute 1,000 for square feet.

ct = ft^2 * 0.0023 \\= 1,000 * 0.0023 \\= 2.3 ct.

EXAMPLE 2: Kevin is looking into buying a property so he can build a farm. He requires a property that has at least 3,000 ft2 in area. A real estate agent found a property with an area of 6 cents for him. Will this property be suitable for Kevin?

The solution to this problem lies in converting 6 cents into square feet and then comparing the result with 3,000 ft2.

Since our output will be ft2 and our input will be ct, we will use the second formula. We substitute 6 for ct and solve as follows.

ft^2 = ct * 435.6 \\= 6 * 435.6 \\= 2,613.6 ft^2.

Since the result is smaller than the minimum area Kevin requires, it is clear that this property will not be sufficiently large for his farm.

The Mystery of the Cent

The cent is a fairly unusual unit of area, that is currently used as a preference in very few places in the world, namely in some parts of India (mostly the Tamil region).

The name of the unit is derived from the Latin word “centum” which means “hundred” or “hundredth”, depending on the context.

Some sources report on the origin of this unit being from the USA, but these claims seem to have very little evidence to prove them. It is true that the unit is derived from, the acre, an originally US-based unit of area, derived from now archaic units of lengths such as chains and furlongs.

The connection between the US baseline unit and the Indian usage of the unit gets stranger when we consider that acres and cents are typical units of the imperial system, while most of India actually uses the metric system.

Resources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_(area)
https://www.digitkerala.com/archives/5730/how-much-is-one-cent-land-how-to-calculate-one-cent-land