Feet per Second to Meters per Second

American engineering tables, physics textbooks and ballistics data quote speeds in feet per second, while SI and most of the world work in meters per second. A second is a second on both sides, so only the length unit changes — and a foot is exactly 0.3048 meters. The factor is therefore exact, not a rounded figure.

How it is calculated

m/s = ft/s × 0.3048

Since 1959 the foot has been defined as exactly 0.3048 meters, so this is the same exact factor as for feet to meters. The reverse direction is the one that gets rounded: 1 m/s is 3.28084 ft/s, because 1 divided by 0.3048 never terminates.

Source: NIST SP 811 (2008), Appendix B.8 — foot per second (ft / s) to meter per second (m / s) = 3.048 E−01

Common values

Questions people ask

What is 60 mph in feet per second?

Exactly 88 ft/s, which is 26.8224 m/s. A mile is 5280 feet and an hour is 3600 seconds, so one mile per hour is 22/15 of a foot per second, and sixty of them come out to a whole number.

Is fps the same as frames per second?

Only the letters are shared. In video and games fps counts frames, which has nothing to do with distance. This page converts feet per second, which NIST writes as ft/s — the safer symbol when the context could be read either way.

Which foot does this use?

The international foot of exactly 0.3048 meters, which is what NIST conversion factors assume unless they say otherwise. The U.S. survey foot, 1200/3937 meters, differs by two parts in a million and belongs to land survey records, not to speeds.

Can I use this for ft/s²?

Not as a speed. Feet per second squared is acceleration — how fast a speed changes. NIST lists it as a separate unit, and it happens to share the factor 0.3048, because only the foot needs converting; the seconds are the same in both systems.

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