One metre is 1.0936132983 yards. These two units are unusually close — a metre is only about nine per cent longer than a yard — which makes them easy to confuse and easy to substitute for each other when precision does not matter.
About the units
The yard is the anchor unit of the imperial and US customary systems: the foot, the inch and the mile are all defined from it rather than the reverse. Since the International Yard and Pound Agreement of 1959 it has been exactly 0.9144 metres. Its origin story is unusually contested. The frequently repeated tale that Henry I defined it as the distance from his nose to his outstretched thumb has no contemporary evidence behind it; the more likely origin is the double cubit or a standard cloth-measuring rod. What is documented is that English yard standards existed as physical bars from the twelfth century onward, and that they disagreed with each other by amounts large enough to matter in trade.
The exact factor
One yard is exactly 0.9144 m, so metres to yards is 1 ÷ 0.9144 = 1.09361329833770778..., repeating. The near-equality is worth internalising: adding nine per cent converts metres to yards closely enough for most practical purposes, and for distances under about ten metres the difference is smaller than the error in pacing it out. Note that 0.9144 is exactly 0.3048 × 3, since a yard is three feet — the definitions are all built from the same base number.
Where you meet this conversion
American football is the most visible user, with a field of 100 yards between goal lines, or 91.44 metres. Cricket uses a pitch of 22 yards, a distance inherited from the chain used in land surveying. Fabric and carpet are sold by the yard in the United States and by the metre almost everywhere else, which is exactly where the nine per cent difference becomes money. Golf course distances are in yards in English-speaking countries and metres elsewhere, so a course description can be misread by a full club length.