Bearing Calculator
Great-circle initial and reverse bearings between two points.
By Aryan Khan, Founder & Editor · Updated October 2026
For example, New York to London starts on a bearing of approx. 51.4° — northeast, not east — while the return trip starts at 287.9°, because a great circle is not a two-way straight line on the map.
How to use Bearing Calculator
A bearing is a promise about direction that only spherical geometry can keep. Two steps:
The Bearing Calculator works out the direction between two points on the Earth: the initial great-circle bearing you set off on, the reverse bearing for the way back, and the distance between them in miles and kilometres. Set two places and read the three numbers from one spherical calculation.
- 1Set start and end.
- 2Read bearing and distance.
What people use Bearing Calculator for
1. Hiking and outdoor navigation
A compass course between two waypoints starts as a calculated bearing. Get it here, then correct it for magnetic declination before trusting the needle — the Magnetic Declination tool handles that step.
2. Radio and antenna pointing
Amateur radio operators and dish installers aim along great-circle bearings: the short path to a distant station is the bearing this page computes, not the direction a flat map suggests.
3. Sailing and flight planning study
The initial bearing is the first heading of a great-circle passage. Watching how it differs from the reverse bearing is the fastest way to understand why ocean routes are planned as a sequence of waypoints.
4. Surveying and GIS checks
When a dataset gives you two coordinates and a claimed direction, this calculator is the independent check — same formula, no shared code path with your GIS.
Worked examples
New York → Chicago: distance approx. 711.0 miles (1,144.3 km). Miami → New York starts at approx. 18.4° — just east of north — which matches the coastal shape of the route even though the journey feels purely “up the coast”.
London Heathrow → New York JFK starts at approx. 287.9° — west-northwest — while the outward JFK → Heathrow leg starts at 51.4°. The pair is the cleanest classroom demonstration that great-circle bearings are not mirror images.
Reference bearings between major airports
Initial bearings computed with the standard spherical formula from published coordinates — approx. values you can reproduce for any pair in the tool.
| From → To | Initial bearing | Reverse initial | Distance (mi) |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York JFK → London Heathrow | 51.4° | 287.9° | 3,442.4 |
| New York JFK → Los Angeles LAX | 273.8° | 65.9° | 2,469.5 |
| Miami → New York JFK | 18.4° | 202.0° | 1,091.7 |
| San Francisco → Chicago O'Hare | 69.7° | 272.2° | 1,841.8 |
| London Heathrow → Paris CDG | 140.9° | 323.2° | 215.6 |
| London Heathrow → Frankfurt | 100.6° | 287.6° | 406.1 |
| Paris CDG → Frankfurt | 73.0° | 257.5° | 278.9 |
| Los Angeles LAX → San Francisco | 319.9° | 137.6° | 337.8 |
Reverse initial means the bearing you start on for the return journey — not the outward bearing plus 180°, a difference that grows with distance and latitude.
A bearing gives direction from one point to another
A bearing is the initial direction of travel from one coordinate toward another, measured clockwise from true north. It is useful for navigation concepts, GIS checks, field orientation and comparing how two locations sit relative to each other. On long great-circle routes, the bearing can change as you travel even though the destination stays the same.
Do not mix true bearing with magnetic compass heading without applying local magnetic declination. MapBench reports geographic bearing based on coordinates; a physical compass may point differently depending on location and date.
How to interpret the result
The most common errors come from using a correct result to answer the wrong geographic question. Keep these points in mind for Bearing Calculator:
- Always confirm which distance you need before quoting one: straight-line for physical questions, road distance for driving, and network time for schedules. The three can differ by half again in mountainous or island geography, and quoting the wrong one is the most common distance mistake in reports.
- Remember that bearings are true-north by default. If you are transferring a bearing to a magnetic compass, add (or subtract) your local declination — it exceeds 10° in many inhabited regions and flips hemispheres of behaviour.
Limits & appropriate use
The honest limits here are about category, not quality: great-circle math is near-exact, but it answers 'how far over the surface', not 'how far as driven, flown or walked'. Airline distances follow airways and winds; odometers follow detours; hikers follow switchbacks. Quoting a straight-line number into a fuel budget is the classic misuse, which is why the tools keep the ladder visible — crow-flies, road, time — and label each rung. A second limit is definitional: 'city to city' means mapped centre to mapped centre, and a suburb-to-airport question is a different measurement wearing the same sentence.
Within those bounds the numbers are durable: reproducible from coordinates alone, stable across tools that use the same radius convention, and accurate to a fraction of a percent of geodetic truth. The escalation path is short and rarely needed — ellipsoidal libraries (Karney's algorithms) for survey-grade millimetres, the routing engine for network truth, and the airline's schedule for invoice truth. Knowing which authority owns which number is the entire craft of distance literacy.
- Survey-grade millimetres → ellipsoidal geodesic libraries, not sphere math.
- Fuel and schedule planning → road routing plus your congestion buffer.
- Airline invoicing → carrier distance tables (airways ≠ great circles).
Data & methodology
The workspace computes initial and reverse spherical bearings from two points, clockwise from true north; bearings are undefined for coincident or antipodal points.
For source details, licences and model limitations, see Data Sources and Methodology.
Key terms worth knowing
- Haversine
- The standard stable formula for great-circle distance on a sphere.
- Initial bearing
- Compass angle from true north at departure along a great circle.
Editorial guidance: MapBench explains the method and limitations so the tool can be used as a transparent reference, not as a black-box answer. For legal boundaries, safety-critical routing, surveying, engineering, regulated decisions or official statistics, verify the result with the responsible authority or a qualified professional.
Category: Distance & Bearing. Results are intended for everyday analysis and planning unless a page explicitly states otherwise.
Method, assumptions & limits
- This tool’s method
- The workspace computes initial and reverse spherical bearings from two points, clockwise from true north; bearings are undefined for coincident or antipodal points.
- Before relying on the answer
- Keep the endpoints and measurement mode fixed when comparing results. A surface separation, a compass bearing and a road distance are different outputs.
- What the result cannot establish
- A rounded coordinate or a city-centre search changes the endpoints. Do not interpret displayed decimal places as survey accuracy.
Coverage: Worldwide. Search, basemap and external data requests may use third-party services; browser-based does not mean every operation is offline. Read the source and licence notes, calculation methodology and privacy policy. If a result looks inconsistent, report a correction with the inputs and mode used.
Frequently asked questions
Clear answers about the calculation, accuracy and appropriate use.
True or magnetic?
True north from the great-circle path.
How accurate is this distance?
The geometric calculation is suitable for planning and comparison, but the answer is only as accurate as the coordinates you provide. Road, terrain and legal distances can differ.
Can I use coordinates instead of place names?
Yes. Where the tool accepts locations, you can paste latitude and longitude directly for a more explicit input.
Why can this differ from Google Maps or a road route?
Straight-line and geodesic tools measure geometry on Earth, while road-routing tools follow an actual transport network. They answer different questions.
True bearing or magnetic bearing — which is this?
True. Bearings here are measured from true (geographic) north on the sphere. A compass reads magnetic north; the difference at your location is its magnetic declination, which you must apply before walking the bearing.
Why does the bearing change along the route?
A great circle crosses each meridian at a different angle. Only the initial bearing is a single number; a long route is a continuously changing heading, which is why navigators break it into waypoint legs.
What is the reverse bearing used for?
Planning the return: it is the heading you start on when travelling back. Because the sphere curves, it is not simply the outward bearing plus or minus 180°.
How is the bearing measured?
Clockwise from true north, 0° to 360°: 0° north, 90° east, 180° south, 270° west. The formula uses the two points' latitudes and the longitude difference on the sphere.
Can I use it for short distances, like across a town?
Yes — at short range the great-circle and flat-map answers converge. The same calculation serves a 2 km hike and a 5,000 km flight; only the map's distortion changes.
What if both points are on the equator or a meridian?
Those are the tidy cases: along the equator due east or west stays 90°/270°, and along a meridian the bearing is a constant 0° or 180° all the way.
Does the calculator give a rhumb-line bearing instead?
No — this is the great-circle (shortest path) bearing. A rhumb line holds one constant bearing but travels further; for that model use the rhumb-line tools in the coordinates section.
Related tools and resources
See the same geometry drawn, in the Compass Bearing Visualizer; take the dedicated starting-azimuth version in the Initial Great Circle Bearing Calculator; and correct any bearing for the compass with Magnetic Declination.
More free tools
Sources, methodology & editorial trust
- ✓ Browser-first processing where supported
- ✓ External sources are documented
- ✓ No account required for public tools
- ✓ Review data sources
Calculations are documented with their assumptions, limitations and source context rather than presented as unexplained answers.
Reviewed and maintained by Aryan Khan, Founder & Editor of MapBench.
Part of our bearing & midpoint hub
Bearing Calculator sits in the bearing & midpoint cluster, alongside 17 other tools that answer neighbouring questions with different methods or datasets.
You may also need
When this answer is only part of the job, these clusters cover the next step.
Read the guide behind this tool
How to Find the Halfway Point Between Two Cities — Why averaging two coordinates gives the wrong midpoint, how the spherical midpoint is actually calculated, and how to pick a fair meeting point for more than two people.