Miles to Feet (mi to ft)

How to convert miles to feet

Multiply the miles by 5,280:

ft = mi × 5,280

2.5 mi × 5,280 = 13,200 ft. The factor is exact: the international mile is defined as 1,609.344 meters and the foot as 0.3048 meters, and 1,609.344 ÷ 0.3048 = 5,280. To go the other way, divide feet by 5,280 — see feet to miles.

For a rough figure in your head, a mile is a little over 5,000 feet: half a mile is about 2,600 ft and a tenth of a mile about 530 ft. A tenth of a mile is the distance a car odometer counts in, so 0.3 mi on the dashboard is 1,584 ft. Road signs that warn of an exit or a lane closure ahead often use quarter, half and one mile, which are 1,320, 2,640 and 5,280 feet; at 60 mph a car covers 88 feet every second, so a mile passes in one minute.

Miles to feet chart

Quarter miles, laps and races

A quarter mile, 1,320 feet, is the standard drag-racing distance and, roughly, one lap of a running track. A standard outdoor track is 400 meters around the inside lane, which is 1,312.34 feet, so four laps fall about 9.3 meters short of a mile — that is why the “metric mile” of 1,500 m and the 1,600 m race are run instead of an exact mile in many meets. A 5K is 3.11 miles, or 16,404 feet, and a marathon is 26.2 miles, or 138,336 feet.

Altitude and elevation

In the United States, flight altitudes and mountain heights are given in feet, so converting to miles gives a sense of scale: a jet cruising at 35,000 ft is about 6.6 miles up, and the summit of Denali, at 20,310 ft, is 3.85 miles above sea level. A “mile-high” city such as Denver sits at about 5,280 feet. For metric distances, use miles to km or miles to meters.

The survey foot

Until 2022, some U.S. land surveys used the survey foot, slightly longer than the international foot (1,200/3,937 m). NIST retired it for new work on January 1, 2023. The difference is 2 parts per million — about 1 cm in a mile — so it matters only for old property records and state plane coordinates, never for everyday distances.