How many centimeters are in a kilometer?

There are 100,000 centimeters in a kilometer. Both the centimeter and the kilometer are units of measurement scaled from the base unit of the meter, the namesake of the metric system of measurement, which is used widely throughout the world.

The centimeter is one-hundredth of a meter. The kilometer is exactly a thousand meters. There are many prefixes attached to meter, such as pico-, nano-, micro-, centi-, deci-, milli-, to denote different factors of the meter. They can be used to describe a billion or more meters, but can also be used to describe a billionth (or even smaller) of a meter.