A square foot or sq ft is an imperial unit of area that is widely used in the United States, Canada, China, and the United Kingdom. Its symbol is a simple square with a vertical line bisecting it (⏍), commonly used in many branches, such as architecture, real estate, and interior space plans. It may also be occasionally written as a square with a slash through it. Its abbreviation is commonly written as sqft or sq ft

As a unit of area, it has a magnitude equivalent to the area of a square with sides of 1 foot. This size makes it helpful to talk about the area of everyday objects such as a house (typically 500-1000 sq ft), a room (~100 sq ft) and even an A4 piece of paper (0.65 sq ft) without having to use either very big or very small numbers. There exist, obviously, other units of area that can express the same magnitude as the sq ft and might even be more suitable for very small objects (like the square inch), very big objects (like the acre), or to simply to communicate with the rest of the world by using the standardized SI/Metric units (whose default unit of area is the square meter).

You will see soon how to convert from square meters to square feet, from square inches to square feet, etc... But for now, let's talk about some situations in which you might want to calculate the square footage of something using a simple square footage formula. These situations include selling, leasing, renting, or buying a house or a room; building a shed or a garage for your car; or maybe even when painting a room. In all these situations, our square footage calculator will help you. Although, for the last three, we recommend looking at our paint calculator.