Houston sits at 29.7633, -95.3633, and the four circles above start from there. 5, 10, 25 and 50 miles. They’re live shapes, not a picture of some. Click one and you can pull it to a different size, drop another on top of it, or shift the whole set onto the exact street corner you had in mind.
31 places fall inside the outer ring, worth roughly 3,884,483 people together. The band carrying the most is the one ending at 25 mi, which has 21 of them in it. Closest to the centre: Pasadena, 10.5 mi east-south-east. The biggest name anywhere in the disc is Cypress, at 200,839 people.
A quick anchor for the scale. Ten miles from the centre reaches roughly to Pasadena, 10.5 mi east-south-east. The furthest name in these tables is Galveston, 46.6 mi away to the south-east, and it still sits inside the outer circle. People underestimate that big ring every time, which is most of why this page exists.
Read the distances as point to point. GeoNames gives every settlement one coordinate, roughly central, and these figures are the gaps between those coordinates. A sprawling suburb whose centre lands at 10 mi might well start at half that. Where the boundary actually matters, draw the circle and look at where the line crosses.
No entries. This band covers 79 mi² and nothing in it clears the 15,000 floor.
Empty band. Between 5 and 10 mi there’s no place big enough for the dataset to carry.
21 places between 10 and 25 mi, 1,183,179 people, 1,649 mi² of ground. The 12 largest are in the table; 9 smaller ones aren’t.
| Place | Distance | Bearing | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pasadena | 10.5 mi | ESE 118° | 153,784 |
| Missouri City | 14.5 mi | SW 226° | 74,139 |
| Pearland | 14.6 mi | SSE 161° | 108,821 |
| Channelview | 14.9 mi | E 87° | 38,289 |
| Mission Bend | 18.7 mi | WSW 255° | 36,501 |
| Friendswood | 18.9 mi | SSE 149° | 38,800 |
| Sugar Land | 19.1 mi | WSW 239° | 88,156 |
| La Porte | 21.7 mi | ESE 108° | 35,148 |
| Spring | 22.1 mi | N 352° | 54,298 |
| Baytown | 23.2 mi | E 95° | 76,335 |
| League City | 23.9 mi | SE 138° | 98,312 |
| Cypress | 24.5 mi | NW 305° | 200,839 |
10 places between 25 and 50 mi, 387,147 people, 5,890 mi² of ground.
| Place | Distance | Bearing | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| Katy | 27.7 mi | W 273° | 16,158 |
| Dickinson | 28.1 mi | SE 138° | 19,895 |
| The Woodlands | 28.3 mi | NNW 345° | 93,847 |
| New Caney | 28.6 mi | NNE 19° | 20,000 |
| Rosenberg | 30.3 mi | WSW 242° | 35,510 |
| La Marque | 36 mi | SE 139° | 15,908 |
| Texas City | 38.1 mi | SE 133° | 47,618 |
| Conroe | 38.3 mi | N 352° | 68,602 |
| Angleton | 41.2 mi | S 186° | 19,429 |
| Galveston | 46.6 mi | SE 133° | 50,180 |
Place names, coordinates and populations come from GeoNames, which the site uses under CC BY 4.0.
Worth pausing on the areas. 79 mi² inside 5 mi. 314 inside 10. 7,854 by the time you reach 50. Each step looks modest on screen and is anything but on the ground, because the maths squares the radius while your eye just reads a line that got a bit wider.
| Radius | Area inside (mi²) | This band only (mi²) | Places in band | People in band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 mi (8.05 km) | 79 | 79 | 0 | 0 |
| 10 mi (16.09 km) | 314 | 236 | 0 | 0 |
| 25 mi (40.23 km) | 1,963 | 1,649 | 21 | 1,183,179 |
| 50 mi (80.47 km) | 7,854 | 5,890 | 10 | 387,147 |
Cross the two tables and something useful falls out. The 25 mi disc holds 3,497,336 listed people across 1,963 mi², about 1,782 per mi². Push out to 50 and you buy 5,890 mi² more for only 387,147 extra people. Most of that last band is empty, which is what you’d expect and still surprises people when they see it drawn.
Every circle here is a straight-line radius, measured crow-flies. Galveston shows up at 46.6 mi south-east, and the road out there will be longer. Always is. In a town laid out on a grid, reckon on 20 to 40 per cent more actual travel than the radius says. Put a river, a harbour or a decent hill in the way and that rule of thumb stops meaning much at all.
If travel time is genuinely what you need, use these rings to narrow the field first and check the survivors properly afterwards. The circle is cheap, instant, and honest about what it measures. It also can’t tell you that the 10 mi to the north crosses water while the same 10 mi to the south is dual carriageway the whole way.
On the arithmetic. Distances are great-circle distances on a sphere of radius 6,371.0088 km, worked out with the haversine formula, and each bearing is the initial heading you’d take leaving Houston. Areas use the spherical cap rather than πr², which shaves a hair off the flat answer. About one part in seventy thousand at 50 miles. Invisible, and true anyway.
All of it was computed when the site was built, then written into a file that ships with the page. Nothing here is fetched while you read. That’s why the tables are in the HTML the server sends rather than appearing a second later, and it’s why the figures can’t drift: rerun the build and every number on all fifty of these pages is recalculated from the same dump.
Most of the traffic to a page like this is practical. Somebody wants to know which towns near Houston fall inside a service area, or how many people live within 25 miles of a site they’re weighing up. The table answers the first one outright. For the second, take the ring populations as a floor, since everything under 15,000 people is missing from them.
The five closest cities with their own page are listed below, measured from this same centre. Austin is nearest at 146.6 mi west-north-west, which means its 50 mi ring never comes anywhere near this one.