coordinate system - How to Get QGIS to calculate Area in Layer's Units?

I have a Polygon Shapefile in a custom CRS which has feet as units. The Qgis Map is also set to the same CRS.

When I open the field Calculator, and enter $area, I see that the proper area is calculated:

But when I save it in the Attribute table, some other value gets saved:

The ratio between the values seems to suggest that it is doing some conversion from sqFeet to SqMeters.

I was under the impression that the Field calculator would calculate areas in the units of Layer, but here it seems to be doing something else.

Instead of manually converting, is there a way to get QGIS to calculate areas in Layer's Units?

Answer

After reading this comment: How to read the area column in QGIS?

I found that there is a setting in Project>>Properties which you need to set.

By default it is set to Sq Meters, and that is why Field Calculator was calculating area in Sq Meters, and not Sq feet as I expected. Once I set this property to Sq Feet, the calculation gave me the area in expected values.