Land size converter

Why land in Uganda is measured five different ways

A single piece of land can be described in acres by the seller, in decimals on the title, in square metres by the surveyor, and as a number of plots by the broker. None of them are wrong. They are different units for the same ground, and the confusion they cause is why buyers routinely pay for one size and receive another.

The imperial units came with the colonial survey system and stayed in the land registry. The metric units came later and are what a modern surveyor works in. The plot is not a survey unit at all, it is a market convention. So a conversation about one piece of land can move between three different measurement systems in a single sentence.

What each unit means

Acre

The unit most land outside the city is priced in. If someone is selling a farm, a plantation or land in a growing trading centre, the price they quote is almost always per acre.

Decimal

A fraction of an acre, and the unit you will most often see written on a Ugandan land title for a residential piece. Decimals are what makes small urban land legible: a size that would be an awkward fraction in acres is a whole number in decimals. One acre is exactly 100 decimals, so a decimal is one hundredth of an acre. It is not a statutory unit, but it is an unambiguous market convention anchored to one.

Plot

Not a legal unit, a market one. When someone advertises a plot they usually mean a rectangular residential piece of a customary size, but that customary size is not the same in every district. The commonest size around Kampala is 50 ft by 100 ft. That is 5,000 square feet, about 11.48 decimals, roughly one eighth of an acre and not the quarter acre it is often quoted as. A 100 ft by 100 ft plot is also sold as “a plot” and is exactly twice that. Ask for the size in decimals or square metres before you agree a price, and check it against the title rather than the advert.

Hectare

The metric unit for larger areas. It appears on survey documents, in agricultural records, and in anything produced by a government department working in metric.

Square metre and square foot

The units that matter once there is a building involved rather than bare land. Construction quotes, floor areas and commercial rent are all quoted per square metre or per square foot, so this is the conversion you need when you are working out whether a rent is reasonable for the space.

Checking a size before you pay for it

Convert the size the seller quoted into the unit written on the title, and see whether the two agree. If they do not, the gap is the thing to resolve before any money moves. A search at the land registry will give you the registered size, and a surveyor will give you the size on the ground. Those two numbers agreeing with the advert is the point at which the size is settled.

For rented property, the same conversion tells you whether the rent is fair. Divide the monthly rent by the floor area in square metres and you have a figure you can compare directly against another property, which headline rent alone will never let you do. The rent per square metre calculator does that division for you.

Sharing a result

Every conversion you do is written into the address of this page, so the link in your address bar always reopens exactly what is on screen. Send it on WhatsApp and whoever opens it sees the same figures, which is usually faster than retyping them into a chat and getting one digit wrong.