How far apart are Boston and Philadelphia?

The distance from Boston, Massachusetts to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is:

308 miles / 496 km driving271 miles / 436 km flying

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For a quick answer, use MileageCalc.com to get the Boston to Philadelphia distance.

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Distance from Boston, MA to Philadelphia, PA

The total driving distance from Boston, MA to Philadelphia, PA is 308 miles or 496 kilometers.

The total straight line flight distance from Boston, MA to Philadelphia, PA is 271 miles.

This is equivalent to 436 kilometers or 235 nautical miles.

Your trip begins in Boston, Massachusetts. It ends in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Your flight direction from Boston, MA to Philadelphia, PA is Southwest (-126 degrees from North).

The distance calculator helps you figure out how far it is to get from Boston, MA to Philadelphia, PA. It does this by computing the straight line flying distance ("as the crow flies") and the driving distance if the route is drivable. It uses all this data to compute the total travel mileage.

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Distance calculator

Travelmath helps you find distances based on actual road trip directions, or the straight line flight distance. You can get the distance between cities, airports, states, countries, or zip codes to figure out the best route to travel to your destination. Compare the results to the straight line distance to determine whether it's better to drive or fly. The database uses the latitude and longitude of each location to calculate distance using the great circle distance formula. The calculation is done using the Vincenty algorithm and the WGS84 ellipsoid model of the Earth, which is the same one used by most GPS receivers. This gives you the flying distance "as the crow flies." Find your flight distances quickly to estimate the number of frequent flyer miles you'll accumulate. Or ask how far is it between cities to solve your homework problems. You can lookup U.S. cities, or expand your search to get the world distance for international trips. You can also print out pages with a travel map.

Driving non-stop from Boston to Philadelphia

How far is Philadelphia from Boston? Here's the quick answer if you are able to make this entire trip by car without stopping.

Nonstop drive: 308 miles or 496 km

Driving time: 5 hours

Realistically, you'll probably want to add a buffer for rest stops, gas, or food along the way. To get a better idea of how long this trip would really be, scroll down to calculate how many hours it would take if you drive with stops.

Flying non-stop from Boston to Philadelphia

Now let's assume you have a private jet and you can fly in the fastest possible straight line between Boston, Massachusetts and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Because of the curvature of the Earth, the shortest distance is actually the "great circle" distance, or "as the crow flies" which is calculated using an iterative Vincenty formula.

Flight distance: 271 miles or 436 km

Flight time: 1 hour

The straight line flight distance is 37 miles less than driving on roads, which means the driving distance is roughly 1.1x of the flight distance.

Your plane flies much faster than a car, so the flight time is about 1/4th of the time it would take to drive.

This is a relatively short flight in a private plane, but you might be planning to book a commercial flight. In that case, your travel time would really need to include how many minutes to get to your local airport, wait for security, board and taxi on the runway, land at the other airport, and get to your destination. Scroll down to see a more realistic calculation that takes into account all these factors to get a more accurate estimate of your actual flight time.

Boston to Philadelphia road trip

Let's say you're actually planning a road trip to Philadelphia, and you want to stop along the way to rest. If it's a real road trip, you might want to check out interesting stops along the way, eat at great restaurants, and maybe even find a hotel to stay overnight. That's what Trippy is perfect for, helping you figure out travel plans in detail.

Based on the length of this trip, we think you could spread out this fun road trip over more than one day.

Road trip: 2 days of driving

With the full itinerary planned out, we can estimate your total travel time for this trip.

Travel time: 6.5 hours on the road with 1 overnight

Itinerary

Start in Boston.

Drive for about 52 minutes, then stop in Worcester and stay for about 1 hour. Next, drive for another 1 hour then stop in Hartford and stay for 1 hour. Drive for 42 minutes then stop in New Haven and stay for 1 hour. Drive for 47 minutes then stop in Stamford (Connecticut). Stay overnight.

The next day, drive for about 59 minutes, then stop in New York City and stay for about 4 hours. Next, drive for another 1.5 hours then stop in Princeton (New Jersey) and stay for 1 hour.

Finally, drive for about 58 minutes and arrive in Philadelphia.

To see all the details on this itinerary, including recommended restaurants, hotels, and things to do along the way, check out the full road trip planner:

Boston to Philadelphia airports and flights

In the quick calculation above, we assumed you had a private plane and just wanted to know the time in the air from city to city. But for most of us, we're going to be flying on a commercial airline (whether it's first class or coach). So that means we really need to account for all the extra travel time getting to the airport, waiting for our flight, and making it to the destination.

To give you a better estimate of real-life travel, we've put together a flight itinerary with actual airports. Eventually you'll be able to customize this plan, choosing your own airports and flights. But for now, here's an example we've selected to give you an idea of how traveling might work between airports.

Departure airport: Boston Logan International Airport (BOS)

Arrival airport: Philadelphia International Airport (PHL)

With the airports selected, we can estimate the travel time to and from the airport, based on how far the airport is from downtown.

Getting to the airport: 7 minutes

Getting to your destination: 22 minutes

Now finally, let's look at an actual flight from BOS to PHL on American Airlines and figure out how long it would take to fly including take-off and landing, and time to taxi on the runway.

Commercial flight time: 1 hour, 26 minutes

So now we can finally get an idea of the total travel time from Boston to Philadelphia including time spent getting to/from the airports, an estimated wait time of 2 hours at the airport for TSA security lines and waiting at the gate, and the actual flight itself.

Total travel time: 4 hours

To see the details on this flight plan, including recommended airports, airline, and route, check out the flight planner:

How far is it the other way?

The distance is the same either way if you're flying a straight line (or driving the same roads back and forth). But for a real trip, there can be plenty of differences so go ahead and check the reverse directions to get the distance from Philadelphia to Boston, or go to the main page to calculate the distance between cities.

If you happen to know Boston, don't forget to help other travelers and answer some questions about Boston!

How long is Philadelphia from Boston by car?

How far is Philadelphia from Boston by plane?

Is Philly close to Boston?

Is Boston a bigger city than Philadelphia?