Knots to km/h Converter

How the knots to kmh conversion works

One knot is 1.852 kilometres per hour, exactly: km/h = knots × 1.852, and knots = km/h ÷ 1.852. The knot is defined as one nautical mile per hour, and a nautical mile is exactly 1,852 metres — originally one minute of latitude, now fixed by international agreement — so the factor is exact, not approximate.

Who still talks in knots: everyone on the water and in the air. A sailing yacht making 8 knots is doing 8 × 1.852 = 14.82 km/h — brisk for a yacht, walking pace for a car, which is why the numbers feel small to landlubbers. A commercial jet cruising at 450 knots is at 833.4 km/h. Wind forecasts for sailors are also given in knots, so a “20-knot wind” is a 37.04 km/h wind — strong enough to reef a sail, and the same wind a road forecast would call a fresh breeze.

Not the same as mph: this page is the metric pair. If your audience thinks in miles per hour — American sailing magazines, for example — use our knots to mph converter instead, where 1 knot = 1.15078 mph. The two pages exist because the two audiences search differently, and mixing them up understates a yacht's speed by more than a third.

Handy benchmarks: 5 kn = 9.26 km/h, 10 kn = 18.52 km/h, 20 kn = 37.04 km/h, 30 kn = 55.56 km/h and 100 kn = 185.2 km/h. Remember that a knot is a speed (nautical miles per hour), not a distance — “knots per hour” is a phrase that means nothing, however often it appears in films.