🌐Distance Between Coordinates

About this tool

Enter two points as decimal degrees, such as 51.5074, -0.1278, or as degrees, minutes and seconds, or pick a city from the list. The calculator shows the distance in kilometres, miles and nautical miles, the initial compass bearing from the first point to the second, the geographic midpoint, and both the ellipsoidal and spherical distances.

How the distance between coordinates is calculated

The shortest route between two points on the Earth's surface is a great circle, the path long-haul flights roughly follow. The simplest method, the haversine formula, treats the Earth as a sphere with a mean radius of 6,371 km. Because the Earth is slightly flattened at the poles, that can be off by up to about 0.5%. Vincenty's formula works on the WGS-84 ellipsoid used by GPS and is accurate to within millimetres, so it's used for the headline figure here. London to New York is about 5,585 km, or 3,470 miles, on the ellipsoid and 5,570 km on the sphere. The initial bearing from London is about 288°, roughly west-north-west, even though New York is further south: on a great circle the bearing changes along the way, which is why flight paths look curved on flat maps. The midpoint is the halfway point along that route, here over the North Atlantic. Honest limits: these are straight-line surface distances, not driving or actual flight distances, and they ignore elevation. Vincenty's method can fail to converge for points almost exactly opposite each other on the globe, in which case the haversine figure is shown. The coordinate converter converts formats and the speed, distance and time calculator turns distance into travel time.

Frequently asked questions