High Jump and Pole Vault: Meters to Feet Chart

September 1, 2026 · 8 min read

A 6' 0" high jump bar is 1.83 m, and a 16' 0" pole vault bar is 4.88 m. Vertical jump conversions are plain arithmetic, unlike the long jump and the throws, because a bar is set to a height before the jump instead of measured after it. The charts below give the nearest quarter inch and the nearest centimeter, and explain the 3 mm that separates a bar set in inches from a bar set in centimeters.

Why a bar set in inches is not quite the metric bar

Rounding down is a rule for measured distances: World Athletics Technical Rule 29.8 takes a horizontal jump down to the centimeter below, and NFHS takes it down to the quarter inch below. A high jump or pole vault bar is not measured after the fact. It is set, in whatever unit the meet uses, and the clearance is whatever height the bar was at.

That leaves a small gap between the two systems. A bar set at 6' 0" stands at 1.8288 m. The nearest whole centimeter is 1.83 m, which is what a results database shows, but a bar set at 1.83 m stands 3 mm higher than the 6' 0" bar. In the pole vault a 16' 0" bar is 4.8768 m, shown as 4.88 m, again 3 mm below the metric bar of the same name. Three millimeters decides nothing in a recruiting conversation; it does explain why a jumper who clears 1.83 m at a college meet and 6' 0" at a high school meet has cleared two slightly different bars.

Bar moves also come in different steps. The officials' cross-code comparison lists jump-off moves of 1 inch or 2 cm in the high jump and 3 inches or 5 cm in the pole vault, which is why high school progressions run 5' 10", 5' 11", 6' 0" and college progressions run 1.78, 1.80, 1.82. Neither ladder lands exactly on the other, so a clearance at one meet rarely has an exact twin at the next.

The high jump standards and pole vault standards pages are in meters, matching what college coaches read, and what marks get you recruited explains how a coach weighs a bar height against the rest of a profile. The charts below turn a feet-and-inches bar into the metric figure a coach will compare against those ranges. A sheet that shows NH instead of a height means the opening bar was never cleared; track meet abbreviations has the rest of those codes.

High jump, meters to feet and inches

High jump, feet and inches to meters

Pole vault, meters to feet and inches

Pole vault, feet and inches to meters

A bar that is not on the chart

The meters to feet and inches converter and the feet and inches to meters converter take any height. The girls' high jump standards and girls' pole vault standards use the same scale in a different range.

One thing the chart does not do is make a high school pole vault mark and a college one interchangeable. The bar heights convert, but the standards that hold the bar, the run-up and the pole choice are set by different rule codes, and a coach reading a vault mark wants to know the pole, the grip and the takeoff mark as much as the number.

Sources

• World Athletics Technical Rules, Book C2.1, Rule 29.8, for the contrast with measured horizontal jumps.
• 2025-2026 Track and Field Rule Codes Comparison, vertical jumps section, for the jump-off bar increments of 1 inch (2 cm) in the high jump and 3 inches or 5 cm in the pole vault.

I transcribed the rules from those documents and generated the charts with 1 foot = 0.3048 m exactly. Metric-to-imperial cells are rounded to the nearest quarter inch and imperial-to-metric cells to the nearest centimeter, because a bar height is a set value, not a measured one, and the rounding-down rules for measured marks do not apply.