Gaj to Square Feet — the plot unit, not the cloth unit
One gaj of land is one square yard: 9 ft² and 0.83612736 m², exact. The plot sizes people quote in gaj, and the 33-inch length gaj that is not this unit.
One gaj of land is one square yard: 9 ft² and 0.83612736 m², exact, with nothing rounded along the way. The gaj a shopkeeper measures cloth in is a length, and the gaj the old revenue rods were built from was 33 inches, so the word on its own does not tell you which.
Plots in Delhi, Gurugram, Ghaziabad, Noida and across the north are quoted in gaj, and the conversion is one multiplication. A gaj of land is a square yard, so 200 gaj is 1,800 ft² and 167.225472 m². That much is exact by definition and no source is needed for it.
The multiplication is not what goes wrong. The word is. Gaj is also a length: it is what cloth is sold by, and it is the rod the northern revenue ladders were laid out with. An area gaj and a length gaj are different quantities wearing one name, and squaring the wrong one is a 16% error before you have started.
So this page converts the area gaj, says where that is exact, and refuses to square a length. Under the conversion it puts gaj next to the units that share the same market: marla and kanal, which become exact the moment you name the karam, and bigha, which does not become exact at all.
| Gaj (square yards) | — |
|---|---|
| Square feet | — |
| Square metres | — |
| Acres · hectares | — |
| As a square plot | — |
| In the local unit | — |
| One of that unit | — |
| How good is that factor | — |
The land gaj is the square yard, and that part is a definition rather than a measurement. The international yard has been 0.9144 m exactly since the 1959 agreement between the English-speaking standards bodies, so a square yard is 0.83612736 m² exactly and, because a yard is three feet, 9 ft² exactly. Converting 200 gaj involves no estimate, no local factor and no rounding until the screen runs out of digits. What is not a definition is the step before it: that the gaj a broker quotes plots in is the square yard. Nothing makes that so by statute. It is where the usage settled, because the revenue surveys of northern India recorded area in square yards and the market kept the survey's unit while dropping its English name. In Telugu the same square yard is called gajam; it is one unit and two words, not two units.
The gaj the ladders were built from is 33 inches, not 36. Square it and you get 7.5625 ft², about 16% under the square yard, which is the size of the mistake waiting in the word. Both rods used in the northern revenue ladders are whole multiples of 33 inches: the karam of 66 inches is two of them and the shahjahani gatha of 99 inches is three. Four hundred square gatha make the pucca bigha, which is why that bigha comes out at exactly 3,025 square yards rather than at some awkward figure. The Ilahi gaz of the Mughal revenue administration and the Shahjahani gaz after it are usually given at 33 inches, and the two published rod lengths are consistent with that; this page claims no more than the arithmetic. Practical consequence: in an old settlement paper a gaj is a distance of 33 inches, in a listing it is an area of one square yard, and turning the first into the second by squaring it is wrong twice over.
The sizes people actually say, and why the deed number always looks arbitrary. 50 gaj is 450 ft² and 41.81 m². 100 gaj is 900 ft² and 83.61. 200 gaj is 1,800 ft² and 167.23. 500 gaj is 4,500 ft² and 418.06. The round number lives in gaj and never in metric, so a sale deed, a circle rate or a municipal assessment for one of these plots will always carry a figure with a tail on it. That is the convention across Delhi and the NCR: the plot is advertised, negotiated and remembered in gaj, and recorded in square metres. It is a convention and not a rule this page can cite to you. One more size worth knowing: 250 gaj is 209.03 m², and Haryana's HSVP sells plots at a clustered 209.00 m² under the name “10 Marla”, while ten revenue marla at the 66-inch karam is 252.93 m². The category on an allotment letter is a name, not a multiple of the ladder.
Against a marla the relation is exact; against a bigha there is no relation until someone names the measure. A marla is nine square karam, so a marla measured in gaj is the karam length in feet, squared: the 66-inch karam is 5.5 ft and gives 30.25 gaj, the 60-inch gives 25, the 57.5-inch gives 22.96 and the 54-inch gives 20.25. Name the karam and the answer is arithmetic; a kanal is twenty marla, 605 gaj at the standard karam. The bigha refuses to behave that way. It is 3,025 gaj on the Rajasthan 165 ft chain, 1,936 on the 132 ft chain, 1,600 in Bengal and Assam, 1,008.33 in the Delhi revenue records and 968 on the figure the Himachal market uses, so “how many gaj in a bigha” has no answer on its own. A biswa inherits the same trouble, being a twentieth of whichever bigha: 151.25 gaj under the pucca one and 50.42 under Delhi's. The bigha page carries the measures and marks which of them are written into a rule. One coincidence to hold lightly: the 225 ft² marla the Pakistani housing schemes use is exactly 25 gaj, which is also the 60-inch karam marla, and no source found says the one came from the other.
Numbers you will meet that are wrong. 1 gaj = 0.84 m² is a rounding, not a value: on a 500 gaj plot it reads 420 m² against the true 418.06, nearly two square metres of land that does not exist. 1 acre = 4,047 gaj is the acre in square metres with the label changed; an acre is 4,840 gaj exactly, and a hectare is 11,959.9. 1 hectare = 10,000 gaj is the same swap one unit further along. Reading a gaj as a square metre, which is easy to do when a listing says only “200”, overstates the plot by 19.6%. And 1 bigha = 3,025 gaj, printed flat with no measure attached, is true for the pucca bigha and for the Rajasthan 165 ft chain and wrong by up to three times anywhere else. When a converter gives you a bigha figure without first asking where the land is, it has guessed.
Exact by definition, and needing no source beyond the definitions themselves:
1 yd = 0.9144 m exactly (International Yard and Pound Agreement, 1 July 1959; the SI equivalents and
the retirement of the U.S. survey foot are in NIST Handbook 44, Appendix C, and 85 FR 62698), so
1 gaj = 1 yd² = 0.83612736 m²; 1 yd = 3 ft, so 1 gaj = 9 ft²; 1 acre =
4,840 yd² = 43,560 ft²; 1 hectare = 10,000 m². Every figure this page prints
for a plain area, and the square-plot side length, follows from those four and nothing else.
That the plot unit called gaj is the square yard is market convention, stated here as convention.
No statute defines it, and this page found none that does. The same applies to the Delhi and NCR practice
of advertising in gaj while the deed, the circle rate and the municipal record are in square metres: it
is described because it is what happens, not because a regulation says it must.
Marla, kanal and karam: Office of the Chief Town Planner, Punjab, Memo No.
1050‑67‑CTP(Pb)/SP‑135, 6 March 1986, which lists the four officially recognised karams
of 66, 60, 57.5 and 54 inches; ladder relations (1 marla = 9 square karam, 1 kanal = 20 marla) are
definitional; corroborated by J. M. Douie, Punjab Settlement Manual (1930) para 243,
“The kadams in use vary from 54 to 66 inches… The variations have been reduced, but not
abolished”, and by the Punjab Land Records Manual, 3rd ed. 2004. The HSVP plot areas are from
that authority's own e‑auction list of 1 January 2023. These are the sources of this site's
marla and kanal page, where they are set out in full.
Bigha and biswa: Rajasthan is statutory, from the Rajasthan Land Revenue (Land Records) Rules,
1957, rule 70 and Appendix I, whose note reads “One chain x One chain is equal to one Bigha”.
Delhi is a government document but not a statute: Land Acquisition Award No. 03/2010‑11, Village
Mandoli, footnoting 1 biswa = 42.153375 sq mtrs, which is 50.415 gaj against the 50.4167 the
9,075 ft² bigha gives, the gap being rounding in the award's own metric column. Bengal and
Assam come from the Manual of Mensuration and Surveying for Mandals and Patwaris in Assam, Shillong 1900,
section 30(b). The pucca or shahjahani bigha of 3,025 square yards is a historic survey standard, H. H.
Wilson, A Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms (1855), and is not statutory anywhere. The Himachal
figure of one fifth of an acre is commonly quoted with no primary source found, and is labelled that way
on the widget. All of these are the sources of this site's bigha page; that page grades each measure
and lists the regions where it declines to give a number at all.
The 33‑inch gaj: what this page asserts is arithmetic on two published rod lengths, the
66‑inch karam of the Punjab memo and the 99‑inch shahjahani gatha of the Punjab Land Records
Manual, both of which are whole multiples of 33 inches. The attribution of that length to the Ilahi gaz
and the Shahjahani gaz is how the standard histories render it and is offered as background, not as a
measurement this page verified. The cloth gaj is not converted here at all: it is a length, it is
commonly the yard and in some shops the metre, and no authority fixes it.
Worked example
A listing in Delhi says 200 gaj. How many square feet is that, and what will the deed say?
- Gaj is the square yard, so the conversion is exact and needs no local factor: 200 × 9 = 1,800 ft², and 200 × 0.83612736 = 167.225472 m². Nothing in that chain is rounded.
- As a square plot that is 42.43 ft on a side, 12.93 m. The round number is in gaj, which is why the metric figure carries a tail and the deed will read something like 167.23.
- In the Delhi revenue records a bigha is 9,075 ft², which is 1,008.33 gaj, so the plot is 0.1983 bigha. That figure comes from one acquisition award and not from a statute, and the 27,225 ft² bigha some converters print for Delhi is three times too big.
1,800 ft², 167.23 m², a little under a fifth of a Delhi bigha. The advertisement is in gaj and the deed, the circle rate and the municipal record are in square metres, so a deed reading 167 m² is the same plot with 0.23 m² of rounding in it rather than a shortfall. Note which gaj this is: an area. The gaj the 66-inch karam and the 99-inch gatha are built from is a length of 33 inches, and squaring that one gives 7.5625 ft² instead of 9.
12 values on this page were driven in a browser and compared with independently derived figures on 2026-09-08 (2035 values across 162 calculators site-wide).
Questions
How many square feet is 1 gaj?
Nine, exactly. A gaj of land is a square yard, a yard is three feet, and three squared is nine. In metric it is 0.83612736 m² exactly, because the international yard has been 0.9144 m since 1959. So 100 gaj is 900 ft², 200 gaj is 1,800 ft² and 500 gaj is 4,500 ft², with no rounding anywhere in the chain.
Is a gaj the same as a square yard or a yard?
Both, depending on what is being measured, and that is the trap. Land quoted in gaj is an area and the gaj is the square yard. Cloth sold in gaj is a length and the gaj is the yard. The gaj the old revenue rods were built from was a length of 33 inches, not 36: squaring that one gives 7.5625 ft², about 16% under the square yard.
How many gaj are in a bigha, a marla or an acre?
An acre is 4,840 gaj and a hectare is 11,959.9, both exact. A marla is the karam length in feet squared, so 30.25 gaj at the 66-inch karam and 20.25 at the 54-inch one, and a kanal is twenty of those. A bigha has no single answer: 3,025 gaj on the Rajasthan 165 ft chain, 1,600 in Bengal, 1,008.33 in the Delhi revenue records. Name the measure first.