Halfway Between Two Places

What your result means

Halfway point

The orange pin. For two people it is the point on the shortest path over the globe that is the same distance from both. For more people it is the geographic center of everyone's starting point. The name above the coordinates is the place OpenStreetMap has at that spot.

Distance to the midpoint

Each person's straight-line ("as the crow flies") distance in miles and kilometers. The drive is longer: roads curve, and rivers and mountains force detours.

Fairest point (3+ people)

The purple diamond: the point where the person who travels farthest travels as little as possible. See three to five people.

Elevation

Ground height at the midpoint, from USGS in the US and Terrain Tiles elsewhere. The link opens our elevation tool on the same point.

Find places to meet

Plain links to Google Maps searches for restaurants, coffee shops and parks around the midpoint. We don't rank or vet the places Google lists.

Nearest towns

The five closest US incorporated places of 1,000 or more people (10,255 towns in all), with population, distance and direction from the midpoint. Towns with a page on this site link to it. Outside the US, use the place name and the map.

How the halfway point is calculated

A flat map distorts long distances, so the tool works on the globe. Each starting point at latitude φ and longitude λ becomes a point in 3D: x = cos φ cos λ, y = cos φ sin λ, z = sin φ. The tool averages those vectors and turns the average back into a latitude and longitude:

φ_mid = atan2(z̄, √(x̄² + ȳ²))  ·  λ_mid = atan2(ȳ, x̄)

For two places, this is exactly the midpoint of the great circle between them. Distances use the haversine formula on a sphere with the mean Earth radius R = 6,371.0088 km (3,958.76 mi):

a = sin²(Δφ/2) + cos φ₁ · cos φ₂ · sin²(Δλ/2)  ·  d = 2R · asin(√a)

1. Each starting point comes from a place search (OpenStreetMap Nominatim, then the US Census geocoder for US street addresses), your device's GPS, typed coordinates or a map click.
2. The midpoint, every distance and the fairest point are calculated in your browser.
3. The nearest towns come from a file of 10,255 US towns built from the Census Gazetteer and population estimates.
4. Our server looks up the place name and the elevation at the midpoint.
5. The page address keeps every starting point, so a shared link opens the same result.

Three to five people: midpoint or fairest point?

With more than two people, "halfway" can mean two things. The geographic midpoint is the average position. If three friends live in one city and a fourth lives 300 miles away, the midpoint sits close to the three, and the fourth does most of the driving.

The fairest point looks only at the longest trip and makes it as short as possible: it is the center of the smallest circle that contains every starting point. The tool finds it with the Bădoiu–Clarkson method (step toward the farthest person by a shrinking amount, thousands of times). It is usually the better choice when no one wants to drive much farther than anyone else.

Example: for Boston, Albany and Philadelphia, the geographic midpoint is closest to Litchfield, CT, and the fairest point is closest to Bridgeport, CT, where no one is more than 135 miles away in a straight line.

Straight line vs driving: why there is no driving midpoint

The point where two drives take the same time is often not the straight-line midpoint. Between Denver and Salt Lake City, the interstate swings north through Wyoming, so the straight-line midpoint (Rangely, CO is the nearest town) is well south of the road most people would drive.

Finding the equal-time point along a real route needs a routing service. We checked the free ones before building this page: the public OSRM demo server is limited to non-commercial use, and the free plans of openrouteservice and GraphHopper do not allow commercial use either. Because this site carries ads, it doesn't use them, so this tool does not calculate a driving midpoint or driving times. Instead, the result gives each person a Google Maps directions link to the midpoint, so you can compare the actual drives.

Picking a place to meet

• Move to the nearest real town. A midpoint can fall in a field, a lake or a national forest. The nearest-towns list and the map show where there are services.
• Check each drive. Open the directions links. If one drive is much longer, pick a town from the list on that person's side, or drop pins at two candidate towns in the distance tool to compare.
• Search around the point. The restaurant, coffee shop and park buttons search Google Maps around the midpoint; zoom out there if nothing is close.
• Mind time zones. A midpoint can be in a different time zone from both of you. Check it with the time zone finder.
• Prefer public places such as a busy restaurant or a store parking lot for sales and exchanges with people you don't know.

Accuracy and limitations

• Sphere, not ellipsoid. The formulas treat Earth as a sphere. Geodesic distances on the WGS 84 ellipsoid differ by up to about 0.5%, so a 200-mile trip can be off by a mile or less.
• City searches use the center. A search for a city returns OpenStreetMap's point for it, usually downtown or city hall. For a precise answer, type addresses or drop pins.
• No roads or traffic. The tool doesn't know about ferries, mountain passes, closed roads or rush hour.
• Towns are US only. The nearest-towns list covers incorporated US places of 1,000+ people; unincorporated communities and places outside the US are not listed.
• Points on opposite sides of the Earth have no single midpoint; the tool says so.