InstaMaps
Straight line, road or walking

Distance from home to school for every student

Bus eligibility, walk zones and late-bus planning all start with one number per student: how far home is from school. Get it for a whole list at once, as straight-line miles on the web or by road and on foot in Google Sheets. Free.

Measure your list free →
Free · up to 100 addresses at once · no login
Built for

District transportation offices, school business managers, and charter and private schools that set walk zones, check bus eligibility or plan stops.

What the generic tools get wrong

Checking each family on Google Maps, one address at a time, takes days for a full roster.
Eligibility rules use a distance cutoff, and families near the cutoff will ask how it was measured.
Straight-line distance and the walk a child actually takes can differ a lot where roads curve or a river cuts through.

How you'd use it

  1. Quick check: paste the school address on the first line and up to 100 home addresses below it into the free distance calculator. You get the straight-line distance to each home in miles, ready to download as a CSV.
  2. By road in Google Sheets: =DISTANCE(A2, $B$1, "mi") gives the driving distance from each home to the school in B1. Fill it down the list.
  3. On foot: =TRAVEL_TIME(A2, $B$1, "walking") gives walking minutes, and =DISTANCE_MATRIX(A2:A26, $B$1, "walking", "mi") gives walking miles for 25 homes at a time.

Free tools for this job

Distance calculator →Straight-line miles from one address to up to 100 others.Distance matrix calculator →Road miles and drive times between up to 12 places.School district lookup →The district and county for each home.
For example, a transportation office sorts 600 homes by road distance to the school and flags every family within a quarter mile of its 2-mile cutoff for a closer look.

Questions

How do I find the distance from home to school for every student?

Paste the school address on the first line and the home addresses below it into the free distance calculator, up to 100 at a time. You get the straight-line distance from the school to each home in miles, and can download a CSV. For road or walking distance, use the InstaMaps formulas in Google Sheets.

Is it straight-line or road distance?

The web calculator gives straight-line distance, as the crow flies, which is quick for sorting and first checks. Road distance is longer. In Google Sheets, =DISTANCE(home, school, "mi") gives road miles by car, =TRAVEL_TIME(home, school, "walking") gives walking minutes, and =DISTANCE_MATRIX(homes, school, "walking", "mi") gives walking miles for up to 25 homes per formula.

Can I use this to decide bus eligibility?

Use it to sort the list and find the families near your cutoff, then check those against the way your policy measures distance, which is often the shortest walking route. If no road route is found, =DISTANCE falls back to straight-line distance, so double-check any result that looks too short.

How many students can I check?

The web calculator takes 100 addresses per run. In Google Sheets the formulas fill down a whole roster, within a free daily allowance per sheet, and =DISTANCE_MATRIX takes 25 homes per formula.

What should I paste?

Only addresses, with city and state. Leave student names and IDs out of what you paste, and keep them in your own sheet next to the results.

Distance from home to school for every student

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