Four circles are on the map already, centred on 36.175, -115.1372. That’s where GeoNames puts Las Vegas, close enough to the middle of town for most of what people bring here. The rings step out at 5, 10, 25 and 50 miles. Every figure in the tables below was measured from that one point, so if your centre belongs somewhere else, drag it and read the map instead of the table.
Inside the full 50 mi circle, GeoNames counts 11 towns and cities holding about 2,004,432 people, Las Vegas included. The closest is North Las Vegas, 2 mi north-east. Past the 25 mi mark things thin out noticeably, which the ring populations further down make obvious.
If you want one landmark to calibrate against, use Paradise. It’s 5.4 mi south of the centre, so it sits almost exactly on the inner circle. At the other end, Pahrump is 47.3 mi out to the west, near enough the edge of the 50 mi ring. Everything in between scales from those two.
One caution before you lean on the table. A GeoNames centre is a single point, usually somewhere near the historic core, and a city isn’t a point. North Las Vegas is listed at 2 mi because that’s the gap between two reference points. Its nearer edge is closer than that, probably by a good margin.
3 places inside 5 mi, 452,157 people, 79 mi² of ground.
| Place | Distance | Bearing | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| North Las Vegas | 2 mi | NE 34° | 234,807 |
| Winchester | 3.3 mi | SSE 162° | 27,978 |
| Sunrise Manor | 4.4 mi | NE 55° | 189,372 |
3 places between 5 and 10 mi, 440,147 people, 236 mi² of ground.
| Place | Distance | Bearing | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paradise | 5.4 mi | S 186° | 223,167 |
| Spring Valley | 7.6 mi | SW 232° | 178,395 |
| Whitney | 7.7 mi | SE 133° | 38,585 |
4 places between 10 and 25 mi, 433,784 people, 1,649 mi² of ground.
| Place | Distance | Bearing | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| Summerlin South | 11.5 mi | WSW 250° | 24,085 |
| Enterprise | 11.9 mi | SSW 210° | 108,481 |
| Henderson | 12.7 mi | SE 137° | 285,667 |
| Boulder City | 21.8 mi | SE 128° | 15,551 |
1 place between 25 and 50 mi, 36,441 people, 5,890 mi² of ground.
| Place | Distance | Bearing | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pahrump | 47.3 mi | W 273° | 36,441 |
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 | 3 | 452,157 |
| 10 mi (16.09 km) | 314 | 236 | 3 | 440,147 |
| 25 mi (40.23 km) | 1,963 | 1,649 | 4 | 433,784 |
| 50 mi (80.47 km) | 7,854 | 5,890 | 1 | 36,441 |
Put the two tables together and you get a crude density. Inside the 25 mi circle there are about 1,967,991 listed people spread over 1,963 mi², so roughly 1,003 per mi². Crude is the right word. It counts GeoNames settlements only, so villages and open country vanish, and it treats a harbour or a reservoir as populated ground.
Straight line, not drive time, and the difference bites hardest on the big ring. Los Angeles comes out at 228.8 mi from here as the crow flies, and nobody has ever driven it in a straight line. Use the circle as an outer bound. Treat anything sitting near the edge as optimistic, because real travel distance beats the radius every time and the gap grows with whatever the terrain throws in.
Plenty of sites draw a plain circle, label it drive time and leave it there. Those are worth ignoring. A proper isochrone needs a road graph, turn restrictions and some idea of traffic, and it changes shape by the hour. What a circle gives you instead is a bound that doesn’t move: nothing outside the 25 mi ring is within 25 miles of Las Vegas, whatever the roads do.
Two things about the method. Distance is measured over the curve of the Earth, not across the flat map image, which is where a surprising number of simpler tools quietly go wrong. And the Earth gets treated as a sphere when it’s really a bit squashed, costing a fraction of a per cent. Fine for a catchment. No use for settling a boundary, so don’t try.
One oddity you’ll notice if you compare pages. Population counts come from GeoNames, which records what the national statistics office last published, so some are a few years old and a couple are more. They’re good for ranking and for rough sizing. The figure carried for Las Vegas is 641,903, which for some cities means the municipality and for others the whole urban area, so compare it with care.
What people actually use these rings for, roughly in order of how often it comes up: delivery and service areas, finding somewhere to live within a sensible distance of work, sizing a catchment for a shop or a clinic, checking how far an event’s noise and traffic will carry. Straight-line distance is the right first pass for all of them.
The five closest cities with their own page are listed below, measured from this same centre. Los Angeles is nearest at 228.8 mi south-west, which means its 50 mi ring never comes anywhere near this one.