Kilograms to Pounds Converter

Enter a mass in kilograms and read it back in pounds. Body weight, luggage allowances, shipping weights and gym plates are the four places this conversion comes up most.

One international avoirdupois pound is defined as exactly 0.45359237 kg, fixed by the same 1959 agreement that fixed the inch. Dividing by it gives roughly 2.20462 pounds per kilogram.

In your head: double it and add ten percent. 80 kg becomes 160 + 16 = 176 lb, against a true 176.4 lb. The approximation is good to about a quarter of a percent, which is better than most bathroom scales.

British body weight is quoted in stones and pounds, where one stone is 14 lb. 70 kg is 154.3 lb, which is 11 stone 0.3 lb — written 11 st 0 lb.

Airline limits, which are where most people meet this conversion in a hurry:

• 23 kg = 50.7 lb — the standard checked bag on most long-haul tickets
• 32 kg = 70.5 lb — the usual absolute maximum a handler will lift
• 7 kg = 15.4 lb — a common cabin-bag limit
• 10 kg = 22.0 lb

Mass is not weight. A kilogram is a mass and stays the same on the Moon; a pound is used as a mass in commerce but as a force in engineering, where it is written pound-force. If you are converting a force rather than a load on a scale, the newton page is the one you want.

Conversions are powered by the extremely fast and precise open-source convert.js library. The table above is generated from that same library at build time, so it cannot disagree with the tool.