Radius map

This radius map draws a circle of any size around a place: type an address or click the map, enter the radius in kilometres, miles, metres or feet, and the circle appears with its area. Add as many circles as you need, give each a colour and a name, add rings at several distances, and download them as KML, GeoJSON, a zipped Shapefile or GPX, or as a PNG picture. The link in your address bar reopens the same circles.

Geodesic circles on the WGS 84 ellipsoid · KML, GeoJSON, Shapefile, GPX, PNG · runs in your browser · no account

1. Search an address, a town or a postcode, click anywhere on the map, or use your location. A circle appears with the radius in the box.
2. Type the radius and pick the unit: kilometres, miles, metres or feet. The circle and its area update as you type. Drag the white handle on its edge to resize it by hand, or its centre to move it.
3. Add more circles, each with its own colour and name, or add rings to one circle to show several distances around the same point, such as 5, 10 and 20 miles.
4. Download the circles as KML, GeoJSON, Shapefile or GPX, save a PNG picture, or copy the link to share the same map.

Everything inside the circle is within that straight-line distance of its centre, the distance a bird flies. Zoom in to read the towns, roads and postcodes inside it. Road distance is longer, often by 20 to 40%, because roads bend: a place 10 miles away as the crow flies is usually 12 to 14 miles by car. For the area you can reach in a given driving time, use a travel time map instead.

For scale: a 1 mile radius covers 3.14 square miles (8.1 km²), a 5 km radius 78.5 km², a 10 mile radius 314 square miles and a 50 km radius 7,854 km².

Google Maps has no radius tool. Draw the circle here, download it as KML, then: in Google My Maps, create a map and choose Import on a layer; in Google Earth on the web, open Projects, then New project and Import KML file from computer; in Google Earth Pro, use File, then Open. The circles keep their colours and names, and each centre comes in as a pin.

Download the GeoJSON or the Shapefile and drag it into QGIS: each ring is a polygon with its radius, unit, area and centre in the attribute table. To draw the circles in QGIS itself, use Vector, then Geoprocessing Tools, then Buffer on a point layer. Set the distance in metres and reproject the points first to a projected system such as the local UTM zone, since a buffer in EPSG:4326 is measured in degrees. Use about 64 segments for a smooth circle.

Every point of each circle here is the same distance from the centre along the Earth's surface, computed on the WGS 84 ellipsoid with Vincenty's formulas. Web maps use the Mercator projection, which stretches the map more towards the poles, so a true 500 km circle around Paris looks taller than wide, while a circle drawn with a flat map radius would be wrong by tens of kilometres. The area shown is measured on the ellipsoid too.

• Up to 20 circles, each with up to 8 rings, and a radius up to 5,000 km (3,100 miles).
• The distance is a straight line over the Earth, not a road or walking distance.
• Place search finds addresses, towns, postcodes and landmarks from OpenStreetMap data.
• Files are in WGS 84 (EPSG:4326). A circle that crosses the 180th meridian keeps longitudes past 180 so it stays in one piece.

Type the address in the search box, set the radius and the unit, and the circle is drawn around it. You can also click the map or use your location.

Yes. Choose mi for miles, km for kilometres, m for metres or ft for feet. Switching unit keeps the circle the same size and converts the number.

Yes, up to 20, each with its own centre, radius, colour and name. One circle can also hold up to 8 rings at different distances from the same centre.

Download the circles as KML and import that file into Google Earth or Google My Maps. Each circle keeps its colour and name.

Yes. Each circle is a geodesic circle on the WGS 84 ellipsoid, 256 points long, so it is the true distance on the ground at any size and latitude.

Copy the link: it holds every circle, colour and name, and opens the same map for anyone. Nothing is stored on our side.