UTM to lat long converter

UTM coordinates turn up on survey drawings, GPS units set to metric grids, drone flight logs, mining and forestry maps and in almost every GIS. To put such a point on a normal map, or to send it to someone with a phone, you need latitude and longitude. Paste one point per line – zone, then easting and northing in metres – and each line is shown as decimal degrees, degrees-minutes-seconds, degrees and decimal minutes and MGRS, with the point on the map and its zone shaded. The page reads the ways people really write UTM: 33U 347093 6172711 with the band letter, 18N or 33 south with the hemisphere, labels such as E and N or mE and mN, thousands separators and a comma between the two numbers. A line without a zone uses the zone you choose, so a column of plain easting and northing values from a spreadsheet works as well. The other direction gives the zone, the EPSG code ready for QGIS or ArcGIS, the easting, the northing and the scale factor for any latitude and longitude, in the zone the point lies in or in one fixed zone for the whole project.

How to use it

1. Paste UTM coordinates, one point per line, for example 33U 347093 6172711, or open a CSV file with a zone column.
2. Read latitude and longitude in decimal degrees and degrees-minutes-seconds under each line, and check any note about the zone or band.
3. For a list without zones, choose the zone under "UTM zone"; for the other direction, choose "Latitude/longitude → UTM".
4. Copy single values, copy the share link, or download every line as CSV.

How accurate is it?

How exact the conversion is

UTM is a transverse Mercator projection of the WGS84 ellipsoid with a scale of 0.9996 on the central meridian, a false easting of 500,000 m and, south of the equator, a false northing of 10,000,000 m. The page uses Krüger's series in the form Karney published in 2011, the same method PROJ uses. Tested against PROJ at 300 random points from 79° S to 83° N, positions agree to better than a millimetre in both directions, and converting to UTM and back returns the original latitude and longitude to the seventh decimal. Results are shown with two decimals of a metre and six decimals of a degree, about 11 cm.

The datum is part of the coordinate

This page reads and writes UTM on WGS84, EPSG:32601 to 32660 north and 32701 to 32760 south. ETRS89 UTM in Europe, NAD83 UTM in North America and GDA2020 MGA in Australia use the same zones and formulas but a datum fixed to one continental plate, so the same numbers lie up to about a metre apart in 2026. For maps, GPS and most GIS work that does not matter. Older grids such as ED50 or NAD27 differ by 100 to 200 m; convert those with their EPSG code in the coordinate converter, which applies the published datum shift.

Good to know

Band letter or hemisphere?

After the zone number, GPS units and MGRS write a latitude band letter from C to X, while EPSG names and many programs write N or S for the hemisphere. The two clash for S: band S runs from 32° to 40° N, but "S" can also mean south. The page decides from the northing, reads 18S near New York as the band (one letter off, really 18T) and 56S near Sydney as south, and says which reading it used. Write "north" or "south" in full when in doubt.

Easting first, northing second

The easting is the distance from a line 500 km west of the zone's central meridian and lies between about 160,000 and 840,000 m; the northing is the distance from the equator and has six or seven digits. When the first number is clearly the northing, the page swaps the two and tells you. A point that lands far from where you expect usually has a wrong zone: the same numbers in zone 32 and zone 33 lie about 400 km apart.

Points outside their own zone

Projects that cross a zone boundary often keep one zone for everything, as Denmark does with zone 32 for Bornholm, which lies in zone 33. Such coordinates are valid, but the scale error grows quickly: at Bornholm in zone 32 a kilometre on the grid is 1.3 m longer than on the ground. The page shows the scale factor and notes when a point lies outside the zone it is written in.