Convert Liters to Gallons (L to gal)

This direction is for when you already have a volume in liters — a European car's fuel tank capacity, a recipe or brewing batch, a fuel consumption figure — and need it in US gallons to compare against a US spec sheet or follow a US recipe.

Fuel tanks are the clearest trigger: European cars list tank capacity in liters (a compact car might hold 45–50 L) and fuel consumption in liters per 100 km, while US cars list tank capacity in gallons and fuel economy in miles per gallon. A 50 L tank converts to about 13.2 US gal, useful when comparing spec sheets across markets.

Fuel economy comparisons get tricky across the Atlantic for a different reason: a UK car's advertised miles per gallon figure traditionally uses the imperial gallon (4.546 L), not the US gallon (3.785 L) this calculator computes, so a UK-spec 40 mpg and a US-spec 40 mpg describe different actual fuel efficiency — about 17% apart — even though the unit name looks identical.

Large liquid quantities in European recipes or home brewing also trigger this conversion: a 20 L batch of homebrew converts to about 5.28 US gal, useful when following a US-written recipe or comparing fermenter sizes typically sold in gallons in the US.

Tanks are sold in whole numbers of the local unit, so a metric size never lands on a US one. Aquariums in the US come as 10, 20, 29, 55 and 75 gallon models, which means a 100 L tank at 26.42 gal sits just above the 20 gallon size and well below the 29, and a 200 L tank at 52.83 gal is close to but not the same as a 55. Domestic water heaters repeat the pattern: the common US sizes of 40 and 50 gallons are 151.4 L and 189.3 L.