A bigha is a traditional Indian unit of land area with no fixed size. It ranges from about 6,806 square feet in the Uttarakhand hills to 27,225 square feet in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — a fourfold difference for the same word.
If you have ever looked at a land listing in India and seen an area quoted in bigha, your first instinct was probably to convert it into something familiar — acres, or square feet. That instinct is right. The problem is that the conversion depends entirely on where the land is, and almost nobody tells you that up front.
This guide explains what a bigha actually is, where it came from, how it is subdivided, and what it is worth in each major state. If you already know your state and just want the number, use the acre to bigha calculator instead — it does the arithmetic and shows the local caveats alongside.
What a bigha is — and what it is not
A bigha is a customary unit of land area used across northern, eastern and western India, as well as in Nepal and Bangladesh. It measures area, like an acre or a hectare, and it is used almost exclusively for land rather than for buildings.
What separates it from the acre is standardisation. An acre is defined internationally as exactly 43,560 square feet, or 4,046.86 square metres, and that figure is the same in Punjab, Texas and Queensland. A bigha has no such definition. There is no Indian statute that fixes its size nationally, no bureau of standards that publishes it, and no single conversion factor that is correct everywhere.
This is not a gap in the record. The bigha is a customary unit rather than a statutory one: it describes what a particular local revenue system historically counted as a bigha, and different systems counted differently. Both statements below are true at the same time, in the same country:
- One bigha in Himachal Pradesh is 8,712 square feet, so five bigha make an acre exactly.
- One bigha in Bihar is 27,225 square feet, so 1.6 bigha make an acre.
The practical consequence
Any sentence of the form 'one acre equals X bigha' is incomplete unless it names a state. If a source gives you a single national number, it has quietly picked one region's convention and applied it to the whole country.Where the bigha comes from
The bigha predates the metric system, British rule and India's current state boundaries. It grew out of revenue administration: to tax agricultural land, you first have to measure it, and to measure it you need a rod, a rope or a chain of some agreed length.
Those lengths were local. A survey in one district worked from a rod of a certain number of hands or feet; the next district over used a different one. The area enclosed by a standard number of rod-lengths was a bigha — and because the rods differed, so did the bigha. When these conventions were written down in settlement records, they were frozen in place rather than harmonised.
The result is that state boundaries drawn in the twentieth century sit on top of measurement conventions established centuries earlier, which is why the pattern looks arbitrary today. The history of the bigha covers that lineage in more detail, including why the metric changeover never displaced it in everyday speech.
How a bigha is divided
A bigha is rarely the smallest unit in play. It sits at the top of a local hierarchy, and the sub-units cause at least as much confusion as the bigha itself — sometimes more, because people assume a katha is a katha everywhere.
| Sub-unit | Region | Relationship |
|---|---|---|
| Biswa | Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana | 20 biswa = 1 pucca bigha in eastern UP |
| Katha | Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal | 20 katha = 1 bigha |
| Katha | Assam | 5 katha = 1 bigha — the same word, four times the size |
| Guntha | Gujarat, Maharashtra | 16 or 20 guntha = 1 vigha; 40 guntha = 1 acre |
| Kanal / marla | Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh | 4 kanal = 1 bigha; 8 kanal = 1 acre |
The Assam and Bihar katha are worth dwelling on. Both states use a unit called a katha, both are in eastern India, and the two differ by a factor of four. A price quoted per katha in Guwahati and a price quoted per katha in Patna are not comparable numbers, even though nothing in the words suggests otherwise.
Pucca and kaccha bigha
In several states the same district runs two bigha at once. The pucca — literally 'firm' or 'solid' — bigha is the larger, officially-recorded measure. The kaccha bigha is a smaller working measure, typically a half or a third of the pucca, used informally between neighbours and in older family arrangements.
Rajasthan is the clearest case: a pucca bigha is 27,225 square feet and a kaccha bigha is 17,424, a gap of more than fifty per cent. On a ten-bigha purchase that is over two acres of land. The Rajasthan pucca versus kaccha guide works through what that means for a buyer in practice.
What a bigha is worth in each state
Here are the commonly-cited figures for the states where the bigha is in active use. Each is the primary convention for that state; several states run additional local variants alongside.
| State | 1 bigha (sq ft) | Bigha per acre |
|---|---|---|
| Uttarakhand (hills) | 6,806.25 | 6.4 |
| Himachal Pradesh | 8,712 | 5 |
| Madhya Pradesh | 12,000 | 3.63 |
| West Bengal | 14,400 | 3.025 |
| Assam | 14,400 | 3.025 |
| Gujarat | 17,424 | 2.5 |
| Punjab | 21,780 | 2 |
| Haryana | 21,780 | 2 |
| Uttar Pradesh (pucca) | 27,225 | 1.6 |
| Bihar | 27,225 | 1.6 |
| Rajasthan (pucca) | 27,225 | 1.6 |
These are commonly-cited approximations, not legal standards. The full state comparison table carries every state along with its local variants and the traditional definition each figure is derived from.
What to do with this before a transaction
- Establish the state and the district. Not the state alone — Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand both vary internally by a factor of two or more.
- Ask the seller directly whether they mean pucca or kaccha, and get the answer in writing alongside the area.
- Ask for the area in square feet or square metres as well as bigha. Any genuine seller can provide it, and it removes the ambiguity entirely.
- Check the figure against the record. The area in the land revenue record is the one that will govern registration, whatever the listing says.
The verification guide sets out which office to approach and which document states the recorded area. If you are further along and comparing prices across listings, how agents price land in bigha and acre covers normalising quotes before you compare them.