Radius Map Tool: Draw a Circle on Any Map

What is a radius map?

A radius map, or map with radius, is a map with a circle drawn at a set distance around a point. Everything inside the circle is within that straight-line distance of the center. This radius map tool draws the circle in miles, kilometers, meters, feet or air miles, on any location in the world, and then tells you what is inside it: US residents, housing, towns, ZIP codes and counties, plus the highest and lowest ground anywhere.

How to draw a radius on a map

1. Set the center. Search an address, city, ZIP code or coordinates, tap "Near me" to use your location, or tap the map.
2. Set the distance. Type a number, tap a preset or move the slider. Choose miles, kilometers, meters, feet or air miles. You can also drag the white handle on the circle's edge.
3. Read what is inside. The cards under the map update as you go. Open the lists for the towns, ZIP codes, counties and mountains in the circle.
4. Add more or share. Add circles or rings to compare areas, then copy a link, download a PNG, KML, GeoJSON or CSV, or embed the map on your site.

To draw a circle around a point you already have as coordinates, paste them into the search box in almost any format, such as 39.7392, -104.9847or 39°44'21"N 104°59'05"W. Paste a whole list under "Paste many locations" to map dozens of stores or service sites in one go.

What the numbers inside the radius mean

Est. residents

People counted at home in the 2020 Census, estimated from census tracts. A tract fully inside counts in full; a tract on the edge counts by the share of its land area inside the circle. Shown to three significant figures, because that is about as far as an estimate like this can be trusted.

Housing units

Houses, apartments and other separate living quarters, occupied or vacant, from the same tracts. It helps when you are sizing a mailing, a service area or a real-estate market.

Cities and towns

Incorporated places and census-designated places whose center point falls inside the circle. A large city can lie partly inside yet not be counted, so use the county list as a cross-check when a circle clips a big city's edge.

ZIP code areas

ZIP Code Tabulation Areas, the Census Bureau's mapped approximation of USPS ZIP codes, with their center inside the circle. Mail routes change, so check the USPS before printing a mailing list.

Area and circumference

Measured on the sphere, so they stay right on very large circles. Area is also given in acres, which is handy for small radii.

Highest and lowest ground

The top and bottom samples from an elevation grid across the circle, marked ▲ and ▼ on the map, with the relief (the difference between them) and the average. Water below sea level counts as sea level, so the sea floor is never reported as ground.

A mile radius from your current location

Tap "Near me" at the top of the tool and allow location access. The circle centers on your device's position, and you can then pick 1, 5 or 10 miles, or type any distance. If you think in metric, switch the unit and tap 5 km to see 5 km from your location.

The position comes from your browser and is used on this page only. It leaves your device only if you copy the share link or the embed code, because those contain the circle's coordinates. To check how close a particular place is, type it into "Is a place inside the radius?" under the map; the answer gives the straight-line distance from the center in miles and kilometers.

How to draw a radius on Google Maps

There is no Google Maps radius tool, and My Maps draws lines and shapes without a circle option or a distance setting. The practical way is to make the circle here and bring it in as a file:

1. Draw your circles above, then tap KML under "Share and export".
2. Open Google My Maps and create a new map.
3. On the first layer, choose Import and select the file.
4. Each circle arrives as a named shape you can recolor and share with a Google Maps link.

Google lists folders and multi-part geometry among the KML features My Maps does not import, so our files use neither: one plain shape for each circle. The same file opens in Google Earth. A circle in KML is really a polygon, and ours has 128 sides, so it looks round at any normal zoom.

What people use a radius map for

Delivery and service areas

Put a circle on each depot or store to see where you already reach and where the gaps are. The comparison table shows how many residents each circle holds and the combined reach, with overlaps counted once. Paste your site list to map every location at once, then download the ZIP codes for your service-area pages or ad targeting.

Picking a store or office location

Site reports often describe a location by the people within 1, 3 and 5 miles. Draw those rings around two candidate sites and compare their residents and housing units. For a final decision you will want income and traffic data too, which this tool does not have.

House hunting and commutes

Circle your workplace and your children's school. Where they overlap is the part of town that is close to both, in a straight line. Then check real routes in a navigation app, because rivers and rail lines can make a nearby spot slow to reach.

Truck drivers and the 150 air-mile radius

Federal hours-of-service rules include a short-haul exception for drivers within a 150 air-mile radius of their normal work reporting location, which the rule itself puts at 172.6 statute miles. An air mile is a nautical mile of 6,076 feet. Choose "Air miles (nmi)" and tap 150 to see it. This is a map aid, not compliance advice; the conditions in the rule go beyond distance.

Hiking, terrain and radio coverage

This is where an elevation site earns its keep. Switch to the Topo style, set a radius around a trailhead or campsite, and the tool marks the highest and lowest ground inside. A 10-mile circle around a mountain town can show several thousand feet of relief, while the same circle on the plains shows a few hundred. To see the climb along a particular line, use the elevation profile; for any single spot, the elevation map.

Picturing a distance

"Within 50 miles" is hard to imagine until you see it. A circle shows which towns and roads fall inside, in every direction, which is why it suits school catchments, event reach, rules that set a distance from a location, and "how far is 10 miles from me?".

Radius or drive time?

A radius is straight-line distance, sometimes called "as the crow flies". It suits questions about distance itself: legal limits, broadcast range, simple service boundaries and first looks at a market. It is the same on every side and needs no road data, so it is fast and easy to explain to anyone.

A drive-time map, or isochrone, answers "how far can I get in 20 minutes?". It follows roads and speed limits, so it stretches along highways and pinches at rivers. Use one when actual travel is what matters, such as ambulance response or a delivery promise. This tool draws radius circles only. It is worth keeping the difference in mind whenever someone quotes a distance: on a map with a river or mountain range through the middle, two points inside the same circle may be a long drive apart.

How this compares with other radius tools

There are good tools for this. Here is what each offers, from their own pages as of November 2026, so you can pick the right one:

• Map With Radius: free, on OpenStreetMap, with multiple circles, PNG and KML export, an embed option, and a population estimate built from ZIP code areas. Our residents estimate uses smaller census tracts, and we add housing units, counties, terrain, rings and GeoJSON.
• Map Developers: a free circle tool on a Google map, with multiple circles and a link to return to your map. It is a good choice if you specifically want the Google base map. It does not list what is inside a circle.
• Free Map Tools: free, with a CSV upload for many circles, KML output and area figures for the last circle drawn. Handy for bulk work; there is no count of residents or places.
• Smappen: a territory-mapping product with distance and drive-time areas, demographics and reports. Its free plan is limited to 10 areas, with more on paid plans. The better fit if you need drive times or managed sales territories.
• Atlist: a general map builder for Google Maps with a free tool for personal use. Sharing and embedding maps start at a paid plan of $15 a month. The better fit if a branded, embedded store map is the real goal.

Use this radius map tool when you want a quick, free circle and a straight answer about what is inside it, with no account.

How it works and its limits

• The circle. Each of the 128 points on the edge is calculated at the exact great-circle distance from the center on a sphere with the Earth's mean radius, 6,371,008.8 m. On a web map, which stretches the land near the poles, a true circle looks slightly egg-shaped at very large sizes. That is the map's distortion, not an error.
• Residents and housing. We hold the 2020 count for all 85,528 census tracts. Tracts typically hold 1,200 to 8,000 people, so they are much smaller than most ZIP code areas. A tract's outline is not in our file, so each is treated as a disc of equal land area around its internal point, and the part overlapping your circle decides its share. We tested this against a finer count, summing all 242,747 Census block groups by their internal points, at 31 places from New York to rural Kansas. The median difference was 8% at 1 mile, 1.4% at 3 miles, 1.1% at 5, 0.5% at 10 and 0.2% at 25. It is weakest for small circles in thinly settled country, where one tract can be larger than the circle and its people are not spread evenly.
• Towns and ZIP codes. A town or ZIP Code Tabulation Area is listed when its center point is inside the circle. ZCTAs approximate USPS ZIP codes and leave out ZIP codes with no area, such as PO-box-only ones.
• Terrain. The scan samples Terrain Tiles on AWS, a blend of elevation models, at a spacing that depends on circle size. It can miss a narrow peak between samples, and the larger the circle, the coarser the grid. The tiles contain some bad patches and tall buildings, so isolated spikes are filtered out, and in flat areas the top and bottom 0.1% of samples are ignored. Checked against USGS at the marked points, results near Denver, New York and Stone Mountain, Georgia came within about 15 feet on high ground; in dense flat cities treat the figure as approximate. Summit figures on our mountain pages are more reliable for any named peak.
• Search and privacy. Counting runs in your browser from static files, and your circles are not stored on our server. Text you type in the search box goes to Photon for suggestions, and full US street addresses to the Census Geocoder through our server. Map images load from OpenStreetMap or USGS. See our privacy policy.
• Dates. Population and housing are from April 1, 2020, the Census reference date, so fast-growing areas have since gained people. More on sources is on our methodology page.

Glossary

Radius:

the distance from the center of a circle to its edge. The diameter, edge to edge through the center, is twice that.

Great-circle distance:

the shortest distance between two points over the Earth's surface; "as the crow flies".

Air mile (nautical mile):

1,852 m, or about 6,076 feet. One statute mile is 5,280 feet.

Census tract:

a small area drawn by the Census Bureau for reporting statistics, typically 1,200 to 8,000 people.

ZCTA:

ZIP Code Tabulation Area, the Census Bureau's mapped approximation of a ZIP code.

Relief:

the height difference between the highest and lowest ground in an area.

KML:

a map file format used by Google Earth and My Maps.

GeoJSON:

an open map file format used by GIS and web mapping software.

Isochrone:

a line joining points reachable in the same travel time, the shape on a drive-time map.