Marla, Kanal and Square Feet: A Practical Conversion Guide
Pakistani real estate still runs on marla and kanal, but modern listings mix in square feet and square yards. Here's how to convert confidently between all four.
Marla and kanal remain the dominant units for describing residential plots and houses across Pakistan, while commercial space and apartments are more often quoted in square feet. Confusion between the two systems is one of the most common sources of buyer mistakes, especially for overseas Pakistanis used to working in square metres or acres.
The modern, most widely used standard treats 1 marla as 225 square feet, and 1 kanal as 20 marla, or 4,500 square feet. This is sometimes called the "25x9" standard because a typical marla plot's frontage-to-depth ratio works out close to that. A 5 marla house, on this standard, sits on roughly 1,125 square feet of land — smaller than many first-time buyers expect when they hear the word "house".
An older standard, still referenced in some legacy land records, uses 272.25 square feet per marla instead of 225. The difference — about 21% — matters when you're comparing a decades-old registry document against a modern listing, or when a seller's advertised area doesn't match what a fresh survey shows. If numbers don't reconcile, ask which standard the original mutation or registry used.
Square yards appear occasionally in older Rawalpindi cantonment-area documents and in some southern Punjab listings; 1 square yard equals 9 square feet, so a 1,000 square yard commercial plot works out to roughly 40 marla under the modern standard.
When comparing listings across different unit types — say, a 10 marla plot against a 2,000 square foot apartment — always convert to a single common unit first (square feet is usually easiest) before comparing price. A price-per-marla figure quoted for a house is not directly comparable to a price-per-square-foot figure quoted for an apartment without this conversion step.
As a quick reference: 5 marla = 1,125 sq ft, 10 marla = 2,250 sq ft, 1 kanal = 4,500 sq ft, 2 kanal = 9,000 sq ft. Keeping these anchor figures in mind makes it much faster to sanity-check a listing's area against its advertised dimensions.
