Quick Steps
- Open Google Maps on a PC or smartphone
- Choose a starting location and place a pin
- Click on the pin and choose Measure distance
- Place a path of points to measure the distance between various locations
Google Maps is an incredibly useful tool; it can warn you about toll road charges, provide live updates about the area around you, and even measure the distance between places for you.
That last tool is a little tricky to find though, so you'd be excused for not realizing Google Maps was capable of it.
We're here to show you how to measure the distance between places using Google Maps, whether you're using a PC or a smartphone. It's super easy to do once you know how; you'll be measuring away in just a few minutes.
Tools and requirements
- Google Maps on a PC or smartphone
Steps
- If you’re on a PC, you’ll first need to open up Google Maps web page and use the search bar to look for your starting location. Once you’ve found the right place, right-click on it and a drop-down menu should appear.
At the bottom of this menu, you’ll see an option for Measure distance. Select it and then choose another point on the map you want to measure the distance to. A small box should appear at the bottom of your screen. In our case, it tells us there’s 3.71km, or 2.31 miles, between our London office and the British Museum if you travel between them in a straight line.
If you want to readjust the points you’re measuring, click and hold the white dot on either end of the line and drag it to a new location. Alternatively, you can click on another point and create a path that travels between multiple locations. Here we’ve measured the distance between our London, New York, and Sydney offices.
- On an iPhone or Android smartphone, open the Google Maps app (or download it from the App Store or Play Store if you don’t have it installed). Touch and hold on any point that isn’t a place name or location icon and a red pin will appear named “Dropped pin”. Tap on it and a menu should appear with Measure distance near the top.
An icon and a dotted blue line will appear. By dragging the map around you can place this icon at a second location to find out the distance between the two points on your map. Much like on a PC you can add more points on your journey to create a path that measures the distance between multiple locations.
To remove an erroneously placed point tap the Undo button. Pressing the three vertical dots to bring up the More menu and choosing Clear will get rid of all the points you've placed.
Final thoughts
Unless you can phase through walls or take to the skies like Kitty Pryde and Angel from the X-Men, then measuring the direct distance between locations likely won’t tell you how far you’ll actually have to travel.
Case in point, traveling between our London office and the Britsh Museum would actually be a 2.7-mile (4.35km) journey on foot according to Google, rather than the 2.3 miles it gave us for the direct distance between them.
If you’re planning to walk or drive between the locations then the Google Maps directions tool on PC and smartphones is a much better choice for seeing how far you’ll have to travel. Much like the regular distance tool you can easily add locations to travel between and can add several destinations to create a route with multiple stops.
Plus, you can view options for different modes of transport to see how long Google estimates your journey will take. However, for some options (like public transport) you can only measure between two locations at a time.
