Nautical Miles to Kilometers

Nautical miles to kilometers, miles and feet

Type a distance and choose its unit: the converter shows it in nautical miles, kilometers, statute miles, meters and feet at once. It starts at 100 nautical miles, which is 185.2 km or 115.1 statute miles.

The nautical mile is the unit of distance at sea and in the air. It is exactly 1,852 meters, a length agreed internationally in 1929 by what is now the International Hydrographic Organization; the United States adopted it in 1954 and the United Kingdom in 1970. The statute mile, the land mile, is exactly 1,609.344 meters and the foot exactly 0.3048 meters, so:

• 1 nautical mile = 1.852 km, exactly
• 1 nautical mile = 1.15078 statute miles
• 1 nautical mile = 6,076.12 feet
• 1 km = 0.53996 nautical miles; 1 statute mile = 0.86898 nautical miles

Common distances

Quick conversions in your head

• Nautical miles to kilometers: multiply by 1.85, or double and take off 7.5%. 40 nautical miles is about 74 km.
• Kilometers to nautical miles: multiply by 0.54, a little over half. 300 km is about 162 nautical miles.
• Nautical miles to statute miles: add 15%. 80 nautical miles is about 92 miles.
• Statute miles to nautical miles: take off 13%. 200 miles is about 174 nautical miles.

Why navigators use nautical miles

A nautical mile fits the latitude and longitude grid that charts are drawn on: NOAA describes it as one minute of latitude, which makes distances far easier to measure on a chart. A degree of latitude is therefore about 60 nautical miles. Speeds follow the same unit: a knot is one nautical mile per hour, so at 120 knots an airplane covers 2 nautical miles a minute. The knots to mph converter handles speeds the same way, and the ground speed calculator turns a distance and a speed into time en route.

Pilots meet statute miles too. In the United States, visibility in a METAR is reported in statute miles, as in 10SM, while the distances on the same flight's sectional chart and nav log are nautical. Keep the two apart when comparing a visibility with a distance.

On the E6B

A flight computer converts distances with the NAUT, STAT and KM arrows on its calculator side: put the distance under the NAUT arrow and read statute miles under STAT and kilometers under KM, or start from any of the three. The E6B simulator has the same arrows to practice on, and the VFR nav log adds up the legs of a whole flight in nautical miles.

Checked against NIST Special Publication 811, Appendix B.8 (conversion factors: nautical mile 1,852 m, mile 1,609.344 m) and NOAA, "What is the difference between a nautical mile and a knot?" (updated September 23, 2026).