Find the price per square foot instantly. Enter the total price and the square footage — for a home, rental, or commercial space — and see the price per sq ft so you can compare properties fairly.
Estimate for comparison only — price per square foot ignores condition, location, lot size, and finishes, which also drive value.
Divide the total price by the finished square footage. A $300,000 home with 2,000 sq ft is $300,000 ÷ 2,000 = $150 per square foot.
Price per sq ft = total price ÷ square feet
It's the fairest quick way to compare properties of different sizes — but it's only a starting point, since condition, location, and finishes matter too.
Price per square foot takes one number you can see on a listing and divides it by another, producing a size-neutral figure you can hold against a different property. That is its entire job, and it does it well: a $300,000 house and a $420,000 house are not comparable until you know one is 2,000 square feet and the other is 2,800. What the ratio cannot do is tell you what either house is worth. It has no term for the condition of the roof, the age of the furnace, whether the kitchen was redone last year or in 1994, how big the lot is, or which side of the school catchment line the property sits on. Two houses on the same street can carry the same price per square foot and be worth twenty thousand dollars apart.
The calculator opens with a total price of $300,000 and 2,000 finished square feet. Divide: $300,000 ÷ 2,000 = $150.00 per square foot. The metric conversion is the same arithmetic against a different unit — 2,000 sq ft is 2,000 × 0.09290304 = 185.81 square metres, so $300,000 ÷ 185.81 = $1,614.59 per square metre. Now put a second property beside it: a 1,400 sq ft home listed at $240,000 works out at $171.43 per square foot. The smaller house is cheaper in absolute terms and more expensive per foot, which is the ordinary shape of the market — the fixed costs of a dwelling (kitchen, bathrooms, mechanicals, the land itself) are spread over fewer feet. That is a real effect, not a mispricing, and it is the first thing to hold in mind before concluding the bigger house is the better buy.
Use price per square foot to shortlist, never to conclude. As a rule of thumb, compare only within a tight band: same neighbourhood or immediately adjacent ones, same property type, same rough age and size class, and sales from roughly the last six months. Once you widen any of those, the comparison quietly stops meaning anything — a 3,000 sq ft new build and a 1,100 sq ft century cottage two miles away will differ by more than their size. A figure meaningfully below local comparable sales is a question, not a bargain: ask what the discount is buying you, because in most cases it is deferred maintenance, a difficult layout, or a location issue the listing photographs do not show. What counts as a normal spread varies enormously by market, so build your own band from recent local sales rather than importing a number from an article.
The biggest one is treating the square footage as a fact. It is a measurement, and different parties measure it differently: a tax assessor, a listing agent and a builder can each produce a defensible number for the same house. Finished basements are the usual flashpoint — sometimes counted, sometimes counted at a discount, often excluded entirely — and including one on one property and not on another silently breaks the whole comparison. Ask which measurement standard each number came from before you divide. The second mistake is applying the ratio to rent without saying which period: commercial space is usually quoted per square foot per year, residential rent per month, and mixing them produces a twelve-fold error that looks plausible on a spreadsheet. The third is using the ratio on a property whose value is mostly land — a teardown, a large lot in an expensive area — where dividing by the floor area of a building nobody intends to keep is arithmetic without meaning.
One division is all this needs, and a calculator is the right tool for it. The moment you are comparing more than about three properties, or you are buying to rent rather than to live in, the useful question changes from "what is it per foot" to "what does it return". At that point you want each candidate on its own row with price, size, rent, taxes, insurance and expected maintenance side by side, so the shortlist sorts itself on cash flow rather than on a single ratio. That is what our Landlord Command Center is built to do, and it is the point at which a spreadsheet genuinely earns its keep over a single-purpose calculator.
Divide the price by the square footage. For rent, use monthly (or annual) rent ÷ square feet to compare spaces on the same basis.
Not always — it ignores condition, location, lot size, and quality of finishes. Use it to shortlist and compare, then look at the whole picture.
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Yes. The Price Per Square Foot Calculator is completely free, runs in your browser, and never asks for a signup, email, or download. Enter your numbers and the result updates instantly.
It uses standard formulas and recalculates the moment you change a value, so the math is exact for the inputs you enter. Treat the result as a reliable planning estimate; for decisions with legal or tax consequences, confirm the figures with a qualified professional.
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Last reviewed: September 2026. Free to use, no signup — Price Per Square Foot Calculator by ToolWise Digital.
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