You're in the right place to draw a radius in kilometers. Search an address or tap “use my location,” set the distance — 1, 5, 10, 50, or 100 km — and the circle appears instantly, showing everything within that many kilometers of the point. Drag the edge to resize it, or type an exact value. The tool above already defaults to kilometers, so there is nothing to switch.
People reach for a kilometer radius for everyday questions: what's within 10 km of my house, how far a 5 km run or ride reaches, the delivery or service zone around a shop, which suburbs sit inside a 15 km commute, or how close a rental is to a station. Kilometers are the natural unit for most of the world — and for runners, cyclists, and students anywhere — so this page keeps km as the default rather than an afterthought.
How to draw a 10 km radius
Search for your address (or use your current location), make sure the unit is set to km, and enter 10 for the radius. The 10 km circle is drawn from that point in every direction — a common size for “within 10 km of me” checks, catchment areas, and city-scale coverage. Swap in any value to draw a 1, 5, 10, 50, or 100 km circle.
What's within X km of my location
Tap the locate button to center the map on where you are, then set the distance to see what falls within that many kilometers — shops, stations, parks, or anywhere inside the circle. The location lookup happens in your browser; nothing is sent to our servers. For travel time instead of straight-line distance, see the drive-time map or walking radius map; prefer miles? Use the km/mi toggle — a 10 km circle becomes 6.2 mi and keeps its size.
To put kilometer distances in perspective, here's how long it takes to walk each distance at an average pace of 5 km/h (a comfortable walking speed):
Distance
Walking Time
Cycling Time (15 km/h)
Driving Time (City)
500 m
6 minutes
2 minutes
2 minutes
1 km
12 minutes
4 minutes
3 minutes
2 km
24 minutes
8 minutes
5 minutes
5 km
60 minutes
20 minutes
12 minutes
10 km
2 hours
40 minutes
20-30 minutes
Note: Actual travel times vary based on terrain, traffic, and route. For accurate travel time analysis, use our drive time map or walking radius map.
Converting KM to Miles
If you need to communicate distances with US or UK colleagues, multiply kilometers by 0.62 to get miles, or divide by 1.6.
1 km
≈ 0.62 mi
5 km
≈ 3.1 mi
10 km
≈ 6.2 mi
100 km
≈ 62 mi
Advanced & technical reference
The rest of this page is deeper reference material for regulatory, planning, and GIS work in kilometers — how metric jurisdictions define radii, worked examples from public policy, common measurement mistakes, and the coordinate standards for moving a radius into professional GIS. Most people can stop here; keep reading if you need the technical detail.
How regulatory radii are defined in metric systems
Metric-using jurisdictions tend to anchor regulatory radii on round numbers — 5, 10, 25, 50, 100 km — where US/UK regulations cluster on 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 miles. That difference matters in practice: a US planner reading a European emergency-response policy that mandates “10 km coverage” should not mentally convert it to 6.2 mi and stop there. The 10 km figure is chosen because it's the operational round number the regulation was written around, not because it's a precise maximum.
There's also a definitional gap worth flagging. “Within 10 km” in a regulation can mean any of three things:
Straight-line (Euclidean) distance — the great-circle distance a radius tool draws. Common for environmental, atmospheric, and emergency-broadcast rules.
Road network distance — distance along drivable roads. Common for tax, commuter-relief, and delivery regulations.
Travel time (sometimes phrased as “within 15 minutes”) — common for response-time SLAs and 15-minute-city analyses, computed as an isochrone rather than a circle.
The tool above draws Euclidean radii. For network-distance use cases, the distance calculator also returns road-distance via OSRM; for travel-time, see the isochrone tools linked above. Pick the right measurement type before you start sketching a regulatory polygon on the map.
Field guide: four worked examples
Concrete cases where a kilometer radius is the right tool — drawn from public regulation and planning documents. Each example notes the radius value, what defines it, and which gotchas to watch for when you sketch it on the tool above.
1. German Umweltzone: planning a Low Emission Zone
Germany's air-quality framework, implementing the EU Ambient Air Quality Directive (2008/50/EC), lets cities declare Umweltzonen — Low Emission Zones where older vehicles can't drive. The original Berlin Umweltzone, for example, sits inside the S-Bahn Ringbahn, roughly a 4 km radius from Alexanderplatz. When a smaller city designs a new zone, planners typically start by drawing a 3–5 km radius around the historic center, then refine to a polygon that follows actual ring roads.
Radius used: 3–5 km Euclidean from center, refined to polygon. Gotcha: the regulation is enforced on a polygon, but the radius is the planning shortcut. Don't conflate them.
2. Carlos Moreno's 15-minute city as a 1.2 km screen
The 15-minute city framework — adopted by Paris, Melbourne, Portland, and others — measures whether daily essentials are reachable within a 15-minute walk. The rigorous version uses pedestrian isochrones; the screening version uses a straight-line radius of roughly 1.2 km (15 min × 5 km/h walking speed). For city-wide audits, planners start with the radius approximation to identify candidate “15-minute neighborhoods,” then drill in with isochrone analysis on the candidates that pass screening.
Radius used: 1.2 km Euclidean (screening) → walking isochrone (refinement). Gotcha: the radius will over-count in cities with rivers, freeways, or steep grade — fine for screening, wrong for delivery of services.
3. Japanese station-walking radius for property listings
Japanese real-estate listings universally quote “駅徒歩X分” (X-minute walk to station) at a regulated 80 m/min pace — so 5 minutes is 400 m, 10 minutes is 800 m. The 500 m station-walking radius is the de-facto property-listing catchment in Tokyo, Osaka, and most major cities. If you're calibrating a real-estate analysis for the Japanese market, the 500 m / 800 m radii are the only ones that actually drive consumer decisions.
Radius used: 500–800 m around each station. Gotcha: 80 m/min is the regulated pace, not a realistic average — actual walking speed in Tokyo is closer to 75 m/min on flat ground, slower in hilly Yokohama or Kobe. The listing radius overstates accessibility.
4. EU short-haul flight threshold debate
France banned short-haul domestic flights where a train alternative under 2.5 hours exists (2022 law); the broader EU debate proposes a 500–1,500 km threshold for similar restrictions. These distances are measured as great-circle (straight-line) between airport pairs — which is precisely the Haversine formula the tool above uses. The straight-line distance always understates the actual flight track, so a regulation written at 500 km great-circle effectively covers flights with ~550 km flight paths.
Radius used: 500–1,500 km great-circle between airport pairs. Gotcha: the regulatory distance is great-circle; the operational flight distance is longer. If you're modelling which routes fall inside a proposed threshold, use the straight-line measurement, not the airline's published kilometers.
Common kilometer-radius mistakes
Six failure modes we see repeatedly when teams sketch metric radii for the first time:
Confusing km with km². A 10 km radius covers 314 km² (π·r²), not 10 km². When a regulation says “within a 10 km area,” check whether it means a 10 km radius (the common reading) or a 10 km² area (a much smaller circle of radius ≈ 1.78 km).
Confusing radius with diameter. “A 10 km zone” in informal speech often means a 10 km diameter (5 km radius), especially in evacuation or quarantine contexts. Always check whether the source value is center-to-edge or edge-to-edge.
Straight-line vs road distance. A 10 km radius in Manhattan covers walkable Manhattan; a 10 km road distance from Times Square may end up in New Jersey because of the Hudson crossings. For regulations that measure accessibility, road distance and Euclidean radius can disagree by 2× or more in coastal cities.
Latitude distortion on Web Mercator. The map tiles use the Web Mercator projection, which stretches features near the poles. A 50 km circle in Stockholm looks much larger on screen than a 50 km circle in Nairobi, even though they cover the same ground. The radius value is correct; the visual size is not a reliable comparison.
Earth oblateness for long ranges. Haversine assumes a perfectly spherical Earth. For radii under ~200 km the error is below 0.1%; at 1,000 km it can reach 0.3%. For aviation, maritime, or geodetic work, switch to a true ellipsoidal formula (Vincenty's).
Edge-case rounding. If a regulation says “within 5 km,” is 5.0001 km inside or outside? Most regulations are inclusive at the boundary but it's worth confirming with the source document before deciding a marginal case.
GIS standards: WGS 84, EPSG codes, and INSPIRE
Three standards govern how kilometer-radius work moves between consumer tools and professional GIS pipelines:
WGS 84 (EPSG:4326) — the geodetic datum used by GPS, OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, and all major consumer mapping. Latitudes and longitudes you copy out of any consumer tool, including this one, are in WGS 84 unless explicitly stated otherwise. Almost all global radius work uses this.
ETRS89 (EPSG:4258) — the European Terrestrial Reference System, used by EU national mapping agencies and INSPIRE-compliant data. For consumer purposes ETRS89 and WGS 84 are interchangeable; the divergence is millimetric per year. Surveying-grade work needs to track which datum each layer is in.
INSPIRE Directive (2007/2/EC) — requires EU member state agencies to publish spatial data in interoperable formats. KML and GeoJSON exports from this tool are INSPIRE-compatible when paired with the right metadata; the coordinates themselves are already in the right datum.
Country-specific national grids — UK Ordnance Survey (OSGB36 / EPSG:27700), French Lambert-93 (EPSG:2154), German Gauß-Krüger (EPSG:31466–31469), Japan Plane Rectangular (EPSG:6669–6687). These are projected coordinate systems used for national cartography. Convert between them and WGS 84 in QGIS or proj4 before doing radius calculations on data that arrived in a national grid.
In practice: the radii you draw here can be exported as KML and dropped directly into QGIS, ArcGIS, Google Earth, or any tool that reads WGS 84. If your data arrives in a national grid, transform it to WGS 84 first; the radius math doesn't care about the projection but the visual overlay does.
Methodology and sources
The radius values cited on this page come from public regulation and statistics sources. Where a figure is jurisdictional (an Umweltzone size, a commute average), the underlying source is named below so you can verify against the primary document rather than relying on this page's summary.
EU Ambient Air Quality Directive 2008/50/EC — underlying framework for German Umweltzonen and similar national Low Emission Zones.
French Climate and Resilience Law (loi 2021-1104) — short-haul flight ban for routes with train alternatives under 2.5 hours.
Japanese Real Estate Fair Trade Council guidelines — the 80 m/min walking-pace regulation used in 駅徒歩 listings.
Carlos Moreno, “The 15-Minute City” (2016) — original framework for the walking-isochrone planning standard.
IOGP / EPSG Geodetic Parameter Registry — authoritative source for coordinate reference system codes used in the GIS standards section.
All radius calculations on this site use the Haversine formula on a spherical Earth approximation. For exact ellipsoidal calculations (Vincenty's formulae), a dedicated GIS pipeline like QGIS or proj is required.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I embed this tool in a European website? Is it GDPR compliant?
Yes — embed via the /embed endpoint, which loads no analytics or advertising scripts. Map tiles come from OpenStreetMap (not Google Maps), so no user data reaches Google when the embedded map loads. URL-encoded coordinates and radius let you point users at specific map configurations. The main mapwithradius.com site runs Google Analytics 4 and display advertising served through Raptive; in the EEA/UK/Switzerland, Google Consent Mode v2 keeps non-essential cookies default-denied until consent — and the /embed view does not inherit any of these scripts.
Does address search work outside the US?
Yes. The search is powered by OpenStreetMap's Nominatim, which supports addresses worldwide in any language. You can search in German, Japanese, Arabic, or any other language — the system will find the location.
How accurate is a kilometer radius over long distances?
The Haversine formula is highly accurate for typical radius sizes; the spherical-Earth approximation introduces sub-percent error only at continental distances. For larger radii (500 km or more), the visual shape will look oval on Web Mercator projection, but the underlying distance calculation remains correct. If you need true geodesic accuracy for aviation or maritime planning, consult a specialized GIS tool.
Can I use this for COVID lockdown radius checks?
Yes. This tool was heavily used during 2020-2021 lockdowns when many countries imposed 5 km or 10 km travel limits. The radius shows straight-line (“as the crow flies”) distance, which is typically how these regulations were defined.
Does the tool work in countries with slow internet or mobile data?
The map loads progressively — the tile requests are small (around 10 KB each) and the app works on 3G connections common in rural EU and developing markets. Once the map has loaded, drawing and adjusting the radius happens entirely in your browser with zero server round-trips, so a weak connection doesn't slow down the interaction.
Can I export the circle for use in local GIS software?
Yes. The KML export works with Google Earth, QGIS (popular in EU academic and municipal GIS), ArcGIS, and Mapbox Studio. The PNG export is a flat image suitable for reports or presentations. Coordinates in the exported KML are in standard WGS84 — the same datum used by OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, and most national mapping agencies in Europe (including INSPIRE-compliant data).
Can I switch between km and miles without losing my circle?
Yes. Changing the unit converts the radius value automatically — a 10 km circle becomes 6.2 miles when you toggle to imperial, and the visible circle on the map stays the same size. This is handy for sharing maps with US or UK colleagues without recreating the search.
Why does my circle look oval-shaped when I zoom out?
This is due to the Web Mercator map projection, which distorts shapes and sizes increasingly as you move away from the equator. The circle is actually accurate on Earth's surface — it just appears distorted on the flat map. This effect is most noticeable for very large radii or at high latitudes.
