Kanal and Marla in Haryana and Punjab — Conversion Guide

What Kanal and Marla Actually Are

Kanal (कनाल) and Marla (मरला) are the dominant everyday and revenue-record land units across Haryana and Punjab — the words a local broker uses when quoting a price, and the units a jamabandi extract or khatauni entry records a field's area in, long before anyone converts that figure to acres or hectares for a sale deed or a ceiling-law calculation. Both states share this system because it predates their 1966 split under the Punjab Reorganisation Act: the undivided Punjab revenue administration standardised one conversion chain, and both successor states carried it forward unchanged.

The whole system is built from a single linear base unit, the Karam, historically fixed at 5.5 feet. Squaring one Karam gives a Sarsahi (also called a square Karam) — 30.25 square feet. Nine Sarsahi make one Marla, and from there the chain runs cleanly up to the acre:

• 1 Karam = 5.5 feet (the base linear unit)
• 1 Sarsahi (1 square Karam) = 30.25 square feet ≈ 3.36 square yards
• 1 Marla = 9 Sarsahi = 272.25 square feet ≈ 30.25 square yards (Gaj)
• 1 Kanal = 20 Marla = 5,445 square feet ≈ 605 square yards
• 1 Acre = 8 Kanal = 160 Marla = 43,560 square feet ≈ 4,840 square yards

Because every figure in that chain is a clean multiple of the one before it, Kanal-Marla is one of the few traditional units in this corridor you can convert with real confidence without a local confirmation call — a privilege the Bigha system, covered in our companion guide Bigha to Square Yard, Acre and Hectare, doesn't offer. That said, "confident" isn't the same as "universal": before the post-independence standardisation, individual Punjab districts measured the Karam itself at different lengths — Amritsar and Ferozepur-area settlements once used a 60-inch Karam (giving a roughly 500-square-yard Kanal), while Hoshiarpur and Jalandhar used a 57.5-inch Karam (a roughly 459-square-yard Kanal), and Kapurthala used a shorter 54-inch Karam still. Those older district-specific figures occasionally surface in pre-1957 revenue documents, but current-day usage across Haryana and Punjab runs on the single standardised 5.5-foot Karam chain above, with no meaningful district-level exception reported in present practice.

Master Conversion Table: Marla, Kanal and Acre

The table below gives the full conversion grid for the units you'll actually encounter on a Haryana or Punjab land document, with every figure expressed in square feet, square yards, acres and hectares.

A quick way to hold this chain in your head: one Kanal is exactly one-eighth of an acre, and one Marla is exactly one-twentieth of a Kanal — so a 4-Kanal farmhouse plot is always precisely half an acre, and a 10-Marla residential plot is always precisely half a Kanal, regardless of which Haryana or Punjab district the parcel sits in.

How This Differs from the Bigha System Used Elsewhere

Everywhere else in Farmland India's corridor — Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh — the dominant traditional unit is the Bigha (बीघा), and as our companion guide Bigha to Square Yard, Acre and Hectare covers in detail, the Bigha's actual size varies by state and often by district, with no single reliable national or even state-wide figure. Haryana and Punjab are the exception to that pattern, and the reason is structural: Kanal-Marla was fixed by one unified pre-partition Punjab revenue administration using a single Karam standard, whereas the Bigha in most other states grew out of many separate, village-level settlement surveys that never shared a common base unit.

The practical consequence for a buyer is significant. If you're comparing a Haryana farmhouse plot quoted in Kanal against a Rajasthan plot quoted in Bigha, you're comparing a precisely standardised unit against one that genuinely needs local confirmation before you trust it — the Kanal figure does not carry the same risk of a four-times misread that a Bigha figure can in Uttar Pradesh. That said, the Bigha does still appear occasionally in Haryana and Punjab — mostly in older documents or casual local speech rather than in current jamabandi entries — and our research for this guide found genuine disagreement among secondary sources on what a Haryana or Punjab Bigha actually measures in those cases: some sources put it near 8,712 square feet, while others describe a larger "Pukhta" Bigha closer to 27,225 square feet, and a separate reference specific to Punjab revenue practice places a Punjab Bigha at roughly half an acre (2,420 square yards). We haven't been able to resolve this to one confident figure, which is exactly why Kanal-Marla, not Bigha, is this belt's reliable reference unit — if you ever see "Bigha" on a Haryana or Punjab document, treat it as a flag to confirm directly with the local Patwari rather than assume any of the figures above.

Where You'll See Kanal-Marla in Practice

• Jamabandi and fard extracts. The area column in a Punjab or Haryana jamabandi record is typically stated directly in Kanal-Marla (for example, "2K-6M" meaning 2 Kanal 6 Marla), not in acres — see our companion guide, Jamabandi and Fard Explained, for how to read the rest of that record.
• Local broker price quotes. A per-Marla or per-Kanal asking price is the standard way land and farmhouse plots are quoted across this belt — far more common in everyday conversation than a per-acre or per-square-foot figure, especially for smaller residential-sized parcels under a few Kanal.
• Farmhouse and plotted development listings. Many farmhouse plots in Haryana's NCR-adjacent belt are explicitly sized in round Kanal figures (1 Kanal, 2 Kanal, 4 Kanal) rather than acres, because Kanal sits at a human-scale size that matches typical farmhouse plot demand.
• Sale deeds and mutation records. Even where a deed also states an acre or hectare equivalent for registration purposes, the Kanal-Marla figure usually appears as the primary descriptive area, carried forward from the underlying revenue record.
• Agricultural land ceiling calculations. As with every unit covered in this corridor, Haryana's ceiling limits under its land laws are ultimately expressed in acres or hectares, not Kanal — see our guide to Agricultural Land Rules in Haryana for how those limits are applied, and always convert a Kanal-Marla holding to acres before checking it against a stated ceiling.

Converting a Sale Deed or Jamabandi Figure

Most Kanal-Marla figures on a real document are written as a combined figure — "3 Kanal 11 Marla," for instance — rather than as a single round number, so the conversion needs one extra step before you reach a final acre or square-foot figure. Here's the method, worked through a real example.

Example: Converting "3 Kanal 11 Marla" to square feet and acres.

1. Convert the Kanal portion first: 3 Kanal × 5,445 square feet = 16,335 square feet.
2. Convert the Marla portion separately: 11 Marla × 272.25 square feet = 2,994.75 square feet.
3. Add the two: 16,335 + 2,994.75 = 19,329.75 square feet total.
4. Convert to acres by dividing by 43,560: 19,329.75 ÷ 43,560 ≈ 0.4438 acre.
5. Convert to hectares if needed: 0.4438 × 0.4047 ≈ 0.1796 hectare.

A second worked example: comparing two price quotes. Suppose a Haryana seller quotes ₹35 lakh per Kanal for a plot, and a Punjab seller quotes ₹1.8 lakh per Marla for a comparable plot elsewhere. Converting both to a common acre basis: ₹35 lakh ÷ 0.125 acre = ₹2.8 crore per acre for the Haryana plot, while ₹1.8 lakh ÷ 0.00625 acre = ₹2.88 crore per acre for the Punjab plot. The two quotes look very different stated per-unit, but land directly against each other once converted to the same reference measure — exactly the kind of comparison that's only possible once both figures are standardised to the same base unit.

A few practical notes worth carrying into any transaction:

• Always convert the Kanal and Marla portions separately before adding them — multiplying a combined "3.11 Kanal" as a decimal will silently give you the wrong answer, since Marla isn't a decimal subdivision of Kanal in base-10 (it's base-20).
• Cross-check the converted figure against the square-yard or square-metre figure already stated on the sale deed itself, where one exists — Haryana and Punjab registration documents frequently state both the traditional and metric figures side by side specifically to avoid this kind of arithmetic error.
• For a multi-parcel holding being checked against a ceiling limit, convert each parcel precisely and sum the acre or hectare totals — don't round each Kanal-Marla figure to a whole acre first and then add, since that compounds rounding error across parcels.
• If you're assembling a larger block and the term "Killa" comes up alongside Kanal and Marla, that's a Punjab-specific term for a full acre, not a separate unit of a different size — our deep-dive, Marla, Kanal and Killa in Punjab, covers exactly how that term is used in Punjab's own revenue records.

Frequently Asked Questions