Elevation Converter

Elevation conversion between feet and meters.

The conversion:

• 1 foot = 0.3048 meters (exact)
• 1 meter = 3.28084 feet

Notable peaks and elevations:

• Mount Everest: 29,032 ft (8,849 m): Nepal/China
• K2: 28,251 ft (8,611 m): Pakistan/China
• Denali (McKinley): 20,310 ft (6,190 m): United States
• Mont Blanc: 15,774 ft (4,808 m): France/Italy
• Mount Kilimanjaro: 19,341 ft (5,895 m): Tanzania
• Mount Fuji: 12,389 ft (3,776 m): Japan

Other notable elevations:

• Denver, Colorado: 5,280 ft (1,609 m): “Mile High City”
• Dead Sea: -1,412 ft (-430 m): lowest land point on Earth
• Commercial airplane cruising: 35,000 ft (10,668 m)

Elevation is simply height above sea level, so the conversion is plain feet-to-meters, but the reason it matters is rarely academic. Air thins as you climb, which changes how engines breathe, how water boils, and how the body copes.

Water boils about 2°F lower for every 1,000 feet (1°C per 300 m), so at 5,000 feet it boils at 203°F rather than 212°F, and on the summit of Everest at roughly 71°C. That is why packaged cake mixes print separate high-altitude instructions and why food takes longer to cook up there: the water is not as hot, whatever the pot is doing. A common rule of thumb halves that figure and puts it at 1°F per 1,000 feet, which is off by a factor of two. Check it against any published boiling-point table and the 2°F version is the one that fits.

For the arithmetic behind cooking times, pressure, and thin air, three other pages go further than this one: the boiling point at altitude calculator, the altitude converter for aviation flight levels and pressure altitude, and the oxygen level converter.

One subtlety the numbers hide: “sea level” is a defined reference, not a fixed physical line, because tides and local variations in gravity leave the real ocean surface slightly uneven. Surveyors work from an agreed model rather than the actual water. For everyday use none of that matters, and the conversion is exact, since the foot is defined as precisely 0.3048 meters, so switching between feet and meters never introduces rounding.