How to Find the Bearing Between Two Points on a Map

Bearing — the compass direction from one point to another — is a genuinely different question from distance, and the two are commonly needed together for navigation, surveying, or plotting a course between two known coordinates.

What bearing actually measures

Bearing is expressed as an angle from 0° to 360°, measured clockwise from true north. A bearing of 0° (or equivalently 360°) points due north. 90° points due east. 180° points due south. 270° points due west. Anything in between describes a direction somewhere along the compass rose — a bearing of 45° points northeast, 135° points southeast, and so on, with the specific angle pinpointing the exact direction rather than just a broad compass quadrant.

Two worked examples

From London (51.5074°N, 0.1278°W) to Paris (48.8566°N, 2.3522°E), the initial bearing works out to about 148.1° — placing Paris to the southeast of London, which matches intuition for anyone familiar with the two cities’ relative positions on a map, and the precise 148.1° figure narrows that general “southeast” down to an exact compass heading.

From New York City (40.7128°N, 74.0060°W) to Los Angeles (34.0522°N, 118.2437°W), the initial bearing is about 273.7° — almost due west (270°), tilted slightly south, reflecting that Los Angeles sits both west of and somewhat south of New York.

Why it’s called “initial” bearing

Bearing calculated between two points on the Earth’s curved surface is technically called the initial bearing (or forward azimuth) for a specific, important reason: because the Earth is a sphere (or more precisely, an oblate spheroid), the compass direction you’d need to actually maintain while traveling along the shortest path (the great-circle route) between two points continuously changes over the course of the journey, except in a few special cases like traveling due north-south along a meridian or due east-west along the equator. The “initial bearing” is specifically the direction you’d need to be heading at the very start of the journey — useful and well-defined, but not a single fixed compass heading you’d maintain unchanged for the entire route on a genuinely long-distance path.

For most everyday, relatively short-distance uses (local surveying, plotting a nearby waypoint, orienteering), this subtlety barely matters — the bearing is close enough to constant over a short distance that treating it as a single fixed heading works fine in practice. For a genuinely long intercontinental route, though, a ship or aircraft following a great-circle path is actually continuously adjusting its compass heading throughout the journey, not holding the initial bearing constant the entire way — which is exactly why long-haul flight paths, viewed on a flat map projection, often look like a curved arc rather than a straight line, even though they’re following the shortest possible path on the Earth’s actual curved surface.

Bearing vs heading vs course

These three terms are sometimes used loosely as if interchangeable, but they describe subtly different things worth distinguishing in precise navigation contexts. Bearing is the direction from your current position to a specific target point — exactly what’s calculated here. Heading is the direction your vehicle or vessel is actually physically pointed at a given moment, which can differ from bearing due to wind, current, or other drift forces being actively corrected for. Course (or course over ground) is the actual path being traveled across the ground or sea, which can again differ from both bearing and heading when external forces are in play. For straightforward point-to-point calculation without wind or current corrections, bearing is the relevant figure, and it’s what the calculation covered here computes.

Term	What it describes
Bearing	Direction from current position to a specific target point
Heading	Direction the vehicle or vessel is actually physically pointed
Course	The actual path traveled across the ground or sea

Calculating it directly

The Bearing Calculator on this site computes initial bearing directly from two latitude/longitude coordinate pairs, using the same great-circle math referenced above. Since bearing and distance are commonly needed together for a complete point-to-point navigation picture, the Haversine Distance Calculator and Midpoint Calculator on this site cover the distance and halfway-point calculations that pair naturally with a bearing figure, and the GPS Coordinates and Distance guide covers the broader coordinate-based distance math this bearing calculation builds on.