Price per square foot or per square metre? Both, and how to convert

British property lives in two unit systems at once. Listings and agents talk in square feet, because the numbers are bigger and the habit is old. The measured record is metric: every Energy Performance Certificate states its floor area in square metres, and so does every dataset built on them, including this one. Neither unit is wrong. You just need to move between them without losing the plot, and one number does it.

What does a square-foot rate look like in metres?

Agents quote asking rates in round pounds per square foot, so the crosswalk worth memorising runs in that direction. Every row is the same relation; only the label changes:

What do the benchmarks look like?

Medians from the 12 months of HM Land Registry sold prices to August 2026, matched to EPC floor areas. The metre column is the stored figure, because metres are the unit the record is kept in; the foot column is the same number restated through the conversion above, so the two can never disagree:

Every figure on RealScout switches between the two units with the m²/ft² toggle on the page, converted from the same underlying number. Open the North East, or any district, and the whole page restates itself in feet, so you never need to do the arithmetic unless a listing forces it on you.

Where do conversions go wrong?

Three traps account for most unit confusion in listings. First, the seductive size of square-foot numbers: “750 square feet” sounds generous and is 70 m², an ordinary two-bed flat. Second, mixed sources: a brochure’s square footage often comes from a marketing floorplan measured to different rules than the EPC (floorplans love including every alcove; the EPC excludes garages and low ceilings), so check which document a number came from before dividing by it. Third, rounding both the price and the area and then comparing to the pound: a converted figure inherits the roughness of its inputs, which is one reason this site publishes to three significant figures and no more.

How do you check a listing’s own arithmetic?

The same three steps every time. Take the asking price and the floor area, from the EPC rather than the floorplan if the two disagree. Divide, and note which unit the area was in: pounds over square metres gives £/m², pounds over square feet gives £/ft², and mislabelling the result is the single commonest error in listing copy. Then compare the result to the district’s median in the same unit, with the middle 60% band around it, on the district’s own page. A listing that quotes a rate without stating the floor area it was computed from cannot be checked at all, which is itself worth knowing.

Which should you think in?

Whichever you can hold benchmarks in. The practical argument for metres: the measured data is metric, so there is one conversion fewer between you and the record. The practical argument for feet: most agents will quote you feet, and negotiation is easier when you are not translating live. The wrong answer is switching between them mid-comparison. Pick one, set the toggle, and read every area the same way: M1 at £3,510/m² and BS1 at £4,780/m² stand in exactly the same ratio in feet as they do in metres, and it is only reading one of them in metres and the other in feet that makes Bristol look an order of magnitude dearer than Manchester. That error is always the same size: a factor of 10.7639.

Look up any area in either unit, or start with what counts as a good price per square metre. All figures: the August 2026 dataset, rebuilt monthly.