Distance Between Cities
Pick any two cities worldwide for the straight-line distance, initial bearing, halfway point — and the true curved great-circle route drawn on the map.
By Aryan Khan, Founder & Editor · Updated October 2026
For example, New York to Boston is approx. 190.2 miles (306.1 km) with an initial bearing of 52.3° — and their halfway point falls at 41.546, −72.551 in Connecticut.
How to use Distance Between Cities
Pick two cities; the geometry — including the parts a bare number hides — comes with it:
Distance Between Cities measures the straight-line separation between any two cities in the world and shows more than the number: the distance in miles and kilometres, the initial bearing, the halfway point, and the curved great-circle route drawn on the map, so you can see why the shortest path bends.
- 1Search the From and To cities.
- 2Read distance, bearing and midpoint.
- 3Follow the curved great-circle route on the map.
What people use Distance Between Cities for
1. Trip and relocation planning
Comparing two candidate cities against home starts with honest separations. The midpoint marker answers the follow-up — where would we stop, or meet — without a second tool.
2. Logistics first passes
Before routing software earns its fee, a city-pair distance screens the absurd options out. Validate the surviving pair by road in the Driving Distance Calculator.
3. Teaching scale
Students grasp continental scale from pairs they know: the curved route to a 'nearby' European capital teaches more geography than a chapter of definitions.
4. Content and research fact-checks
Writers and researchers quoting a city separation need a reproducible figure with its method attached — this page shows its working on the map.
Worked examples
New York ↔ Boston: approx. 306.1 km (190.2 mi), initial bearing 52.3°, reverse 234.2°, midpoint at 41.546, −72.551. A familiar pair, and still the bearing surprises: you set off northeast, not east.
London ↔ Berlin: approx. 931.6 km (578.8 mi). On the map the great-circle route arcs gently north of the straight ruler line — the same effect, at European scale, that bends transatlantic routes toward Iceland.
Popular city pairs
Straight-line distances and initial bearings from published city-centre coordinates on the site model — approx. figures, reproducible in the tool.
| Pair | Miles | Kilometres | Initial bearing |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York ↔ Boston | 190.2 | 306.1 | 52.3° |
| New York ↔ Chicago | 711.0 | 1,144.3 | 281.0° |
| Chicago ↔ Dallas | 804.6 | 1,295.0 | 221.6° |
| Houston ↔ Seattle | 1,889.3 | 3,040.5 | 318.3° |
| London ↔ Paris | 213.5 | 343.5 | 148.1° |
| Paris ↔ Berlin | 545.2 | 877.5 | 58.2° |
| London ↔ Berlin | 578.8 | 931.6 | 77.8° |
| Madrid ↔ Barcelona | 313.6 | 504.7 | 75.8° |
Bearings are the initial great-circle heading from the first city; the tool reports it for every pair you enter.
Measuring city-to-city distances correctly
How far apart are two cities? Type both names and this tool geocodes each to its mapped centre — typically the historic core or civic centre — then measures the great-circle distance between those points with the haversine formula on the WGS84 sphere. You get the distance in every common unit, the initial compass bearing, and both cities pinned on one map so the scale of the journey is instantly visible. It is the fastest way to compare candidate destinations, sanity-check a itinerary, or answer the classic quiz-night question with a defensible number.
Two honest caveats keep the number trustworthy. First, centre-to-centre straight-line distance is deliberately not driving distance: roads bend around coastlines, mountains and borders, so a road trip is usually 20–60% longer — the driving distance calculator shows that counterpart figure. Second, a city is an area, not a point, so airport-to-airport or suburb-to-suburb figures will differ slightly; for door-to-door precision paste exact addresses or coordinates instead. Within those well-labelled limits, the tool is ideal for education, logistics estimates, sales territory planning and travel curiosity — free, instant and shareable.
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 Distance Between Cities:
- 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.
- Use the midpoint tool instead of averaging coordinates when splitting journeys: latitude/longitude averages distort over long legs and fail across the date line, while the spherical midpoint follows the actual path the distance was measured along.
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
Two selected city coordinates are used to calculate spherical great-circle distance, initial bearing and midpoint. Geocoding ambiguity and straight-line routing affect interpretation.
For source details, licences and model limitations, see Data Sources and Methodology.
Key terms worth knowing
- Initial bearing
- Compass angle from true north at departure along a great circle.
- Geodesic
- The ellipsoid-true shortest path; haversine approximates it within ~0.3%.
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
- Two selected city coordinates are used to calculate spherical great-circle distance, initial bearing and midpoint. Geocoding ambiguity and straight-line routing affect interpretation.
- 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.
Is this driving distance?
No — straight-line (great-circle) distance. It is the shortest path over the planet's surface.
Why is the route line curved?
Great circles look curved on flat maps — that arc is the true shortest path, which is why long flights bend toward the poles.
What is the initial bearing?
The compass direction you would start heading from the first city along the shortest path.
How do I find the halfway point?
The 'M' pin marks the great-circle midpoint — handy for meeting-point planning.
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.
Which point in each city is used?
The city's published centre coordinate — the same point the search resolves to. For sprawling cities, centre-to-centre is the comparable convention; two suburbs of the same pair of cities can differ by tens of miles.
Why does the tool also show a midpoint?
Because the next question after 'how far' is usually 'where is halfway'. The midpoint is computed on the same great-circle path, ready for the Halfway Between Two Places calculator to explore.
Are the cities limited to the US and Europe?
No — the search is worldwide. This page's examples use US and European cities, but the geometry does not stop at their borders.
Can I measure between a city and a non-city place?
Yes, by setting the other point by search or coordinates — or switch to Distance Between Two Places, which is built for arbitrary points.
Why is my result different from a flight time estimate?
Flight times include routing, winds and procedures on top of the surface distance this page measures. The distance is the stable ingredient; the time is the variable one.
Does it show driving distance too?
No — this page is the straight-line instrument. The driving figure lives in the Driving Distance Calculator, and comparing the two is often the insight.
How do I share a pair I measured?
The measured pair is encoded in the page, so the link you copy reopens the same two cities for whoever receives it.
Related tools and resources
For arbitrary points rather than named cities, use Distance Between Two Places; for the everyday phrase with the same geometry, As the Crow Flies Distance; and for postal codes instead of cities, Distance Between ZIP Codes.
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 distance calculators hub
Distance Between Cities sits in the distance calculators cluster, alongside 28 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 Calculate Distance Between Two Coordinates — The haversine formula explained step by step, with worked examples in kilometres, miles and nautical miles — and the cases where the spherical answer is not good enough.