Land area units in India: every unit, every conversion

India has no single land area unit. Square feet, square metres, acres and hectares are fixed everywhere. Local units such as guntha, cent, ground, kanal, marla, gaj and ankanam are also fixed, each with one exact value. But bigha, katha and marla sizes differ by state and sometimes by district, so a bigha figure is meaningless without naming the region.

What are the land area units used in India?

Three systems sit on top of each other. The metric system is what revenue departments now use for official record-keeping: hectare, are and square metre. The imperial system survives in the market: square feet for flats and plots, acres for land deals, square yards for plotted layouts in the north and in Telangana. Underneath both sit traditional units that predate the nineteenth-century survey settlements, and these are still what a farmer, a broker or a village-level revenue official will say out loud.

The traditional units split into two groups. The first is fixed. Guntha, cent, decimal, ground, ankanam, kanal, marla and sarsai each have one value, derived from the acre, and that value does not change between Pune and Bengaluru or between Ludhiana and Ambala. A guntha is always one-fortieth of an acre because the settlement surveys defined it so; a cent is always one-hundredth. These are safe to convert without asking where the land is.

The second group is not fixed. Bigha, katha, biswa and dhur were local measures that the colonial revenue administration recorded rather than standardised, so they survive with different values in different districts. A field's worth of land in the Doab was never a field's worth in lower Bengal. Anyone quoting a bigha rate without saying which district is quoting nothing.

A short description of each unit, and where you will meet it:

• Acre — 43,560 sq ft. Used nationally for agricultural and large land deals. In Punjab and Haryana it is often called a killa.
• Hectare — 10,000 sq m. The official unit in most state revenue records and in all central agricultural statistics.
• Are — 100 sq m, one-hundredth of a hectare. Appears as the middle column in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu records.
• Guntha — 1,089 sq ft. Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat and parts of Andhra Pradesh. Farm records read as "2 acre 15 guntha".
• Cent — 435.6 sq ft. Kerala, Tamil Nadu and parts of Karnataka. House plots in Kerala are sold almost entirely in cents.
• Decimal (dismil) — 435.6 sq ft, arithmetically identical to a cent but used in Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal.
• Ground — 2,400 sq ft. Chennai and the rest of Tamil Nadu for urban plots. An old Chennai independent house is quoted in grounds.
• Ankanam — 72 sq ft. Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and parts of Karnataka, mostly in older town plots.
• Gaj — the square yard, 9 sq ft exactly. Delhi NCR, western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana and Telangana plot sales.
• Kanal — 5,445 sq ft. Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir. Eight kanal make an acre.
• Marla — 272.25 sq ft under the Indian convention, one-twentieth of a kanal. Pakistani usage fixes it at 225 sq ft, which is why web converters disagree.
• Sarsai — 30.25 sq ft, one-ninth of a marla. The smallest unit in a Punjab or Haryana jamabandi.
• Bigha — variable. Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.
• Katha (kottah) — variable, usually one-twentieth of the local bigha. 720 sq ft in West Bengal; a different figure in Bihar and Assam.
• Chatak — 45 sq ft, one-sixteenth of a West Bengal katha.
• Lecha — 144 sq ft, one-twentieth of an Assam katha.
• Biswa and biswansi — twenty biswa to a bigha, twenty biswansi to a biswa, so both vary with the local bigha.

How do I convert between Indian land units?

Every fixed unit converts through the square foot. The base figures to hold on to are that one square foot is 0.09290304 sq m, and one square metre is 10.7639 sq ft. Everything below follows from those two numbers and from the definition of the acre.

Two sanity checks catch most arithmetic slips. An acre is 40 guntha, 100 cents, 8 kanal, 160 marla, 605 ankanam and 18.15 grounds. A hectare is almost exactly two and a half acres, so if a conversion gives three acres to the hectare, something is wrong.

Why does one bigha differ from state to state?

Before the survey settlements, land in much of northern and eastern India was assessed by the labour or seed needed to work it rather than by a geometric area. A bigha was a customary plot size, and that followed soil, rainfall and the length of the local measuring rod. When the revenue administration began recording holdings, it mostly recorded the local bigha as it found it instead of imposing one value across provinces. In several districts two parallel conventions were recognised: a larger pucca bigha for settled, irrigated land and a smaller kachha bigha roughly a third of its size.

So a bigha rate carries no information on its own. The same figure per bigha in Jaipur and in Kolkata is not the same price, because the Rajasthan kachha bigha is 17,424 sq ft and the Bengal bigha is 14,400 sq ft. Katha inherits the problem, being one-twentieth of the local bigha in most places but one-fifth in Assam.

What is one bigha in my state?

The table below gives the conventions that are widely and consistently used. It is not exhaustive, and for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and the hill districts the local value can differ from one tehsil to the next. Treat the figures as a starting point and verify with the tehsil, circle or taluk office that holds the record.

Where a state's records use a fixed unit alongside bigha, use the fixed unit. A Punjab jamabandi showing "3 kanal 8 marla" is unambiguous: 3 × 5,445 + 8 × 272.25 = 18,513 sq ft. A seller's conversion of the same holding into bigha is not.

Which unit conversions do buyers search for most?

These are the pairs people actually look up, with the exact multiplier and a worked example. Multiply the quantity you have by the figure in the third column.

Chained conversions are safest through square feet. Guntha to cents, for example: 15 guntha × 1,089 = 16,335 sq ft, then 16,335 ÷ 435.6 = 37.5 cents. Working from a single remembered ratio is how errors creep in. The PropIQ tools page collects the calculators we maintain.

Which land units appear in which state land records?

The unit a seller speaks and the unit the government writes are frequently different. For any due diligence, the written one wins.

How do I read an extent off a land record?

Most Indian land records state extent as a compound figure, not a single number, and the compound reads largest unit first. A Maharashtra 7/12 entry of "0.81.50" is 0 hectare, 81 are and 50 square metres, which is 8,150 sq m, or 2.014 acres. A Karnataka RTC entry of "1-27" is one acre and 27 guntha, which is 43,560 + 27 × 1,089 = 72,963 sq ft, or 1.675 acres. A Punjab jamabandi entry of "2-11-6" is 2 kanal, 11 marla and 6 sarsai: 10,890 + 2,994.75 + 181.5 = 14,066.25 sq ft.

Three things to check while you are at it. The record gives the extent of the whole survey number, and your share may be a fraction of it or a separately numbered subdivision. Where the record and the physical boundary differ, the physical boundary is what you will own and what a court will argue about, so a fresh measurement by a licensed surveyor against the departmental sketch is worth its fee. And extent is not title: see our notes on checking a project's RERA registration for the project-level side of the same problem.

Government valuation works off the same extents. Guideline value, circle rate or ready reckoner rate is published per unit of area, and the unit differs by state, so the published rate for a Tamil Nadu street may be per square foot while a Maharashtra rate is per square metre. The circle rate calculator handles the conversion, and stamp duty is then charged on the higher of the agreement value and that valuation. Getting the unit wrong here changes the duty payable by an order of magnitude, which registrars see more often than you would expect.

How much of my plot can I actually build on?

A land extent is not a building entitlement. Converting one into the other involves three reductions and one multiplication, in that order.

First, deduct what is not yours to build on. Land affected by a proposed road widening, a nala or drain alignment, a high-tension line corridor, a canal bund or a reserved public purpose in the master plan comes out of the plot before anything else. These show up in the town planning sanction, not in the revenue record, so the sale deed extent and the sanctioned plot extent can legitimately differ. Ask for the plot's extent as recorded in the building sanction.

Second, apply setbacks. Local building rules prescribe a minimum open space on each side, scaled to plot size, road width and the height you intend to build. What is left inside the setbacks is the footprint you may cover, and ground coverage is usually also capped as a percentage of the plot.

Third, apply the floor space index. FSI, or FAR, is the ratio of permissible built-up area to plot area. An FSI of 2 on a 3,000 sq ft plot permits 6,000 sq ft of built-up area, over as many floors as the height rules allow. FSI is set by the local authority — GHMC and HMDA in Hyderabad, BBMP and BDA in Bengaluru, the development control rules in Mumbai, DDA's building bye-laws in Delhi — and it varies by zone, by road width and by whether premium FSI has been bought. It also changes when rules are revised. Take it from the authority or from a licensed architect who has read the current rules for that zone, not from any website, including this one.

Fourth, built-up is not carpet. Walls, shafts, staircases and service areas sit inside built-up area. Under the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, an apartment must be sold on carpet area — the net usable floor area within the walls, excluding external walls, service shafts, balcony and open terrace, with balcony and terrace disclosed separately. The old super built-up figure, which loaded a share of the common areas onto your flat, survives in marketing but has no statutory basis for pricing.

If the numbers are driving a buy decision rather than a build decision, the rent versus buy comparison works on carpet and built-up figures, so convert first and feed it clean inputs.

What mistakes cost buyers money on area conversion?

The expensive errors are not exotic. Five of them account for most of the damage.

Using a marla of 225 sq ft in India. Converter sites built for Pakistani users apply the 225 sq ft marla and the 4,500 sq ft kanal. In Indian Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, a marla is 272.25 sq ft. On a 10-marla plot the difference is 472.5 sq ft.

Accepting a national bigha figure. There is none. If a listing converts bigha to square feet without naming the district, assume it is wrong until the record proves otherwise.

Confusing cent with per cent, and decimal with decimetre. A cent is one-hundredth of an acre, not one per cent of a holding, and a decimal is the same 435.6 sq ft.

Comparing rates computed on different area definitions. A rate on carpet area and a rate on super built-up area can differ by a quarter for the same flat at the same price. Ask which area the rate is divided by before comparing two of our project pages.

Rounding too early. Convert at full precision and round once, at the end. Rounding 4,046.86 to 4,000 sq m per acre understates a 50-acre parcel by about 2,343 sq m, which is more than half an acre.

Where a number matters legally — a sale deed, a stamp duty computation, a partition, a mutation application — write the extent in the unit the record uses and give the conversion in brackets. Registrars, revenue officials and courts work from the recorded unit.