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Trip Planner

How to Use the Trip Planner

1

Search and add your stops

Type a city or address and pick it from the results. Add at least 2 stops, up to 12.

2

Reorder or remove stops

Use the up/down arrows to reorder your route, or remove a stop you no longer need.

3

Review the route and map

Driving distance and duration are computed automatically for each leg of the trip.

4

Browse fuel, food, lodging, and attractions

Toggle POI categories to see what's near your route, plotted directly on the map.

5

Enter your vehicle's MPG

Your fuel cost is priced per leg using real regional gas prices — not one flat number for the whole trip.

6

Save or share your trip

Save it to your device to reload later, or generate a link to share it — no account required.

Why Leg-by-Leg Fuel Pricing

Gas prices can swing 30–40% from state to state. Most trip calculators ignore that and make you guess a single price for the whole drive. This planner prices every leg using the real (or best-available regional) price of the state it starts in, and surfaces a fill-up advisory when you're about to cross into noticeably pricier territory.

Leg

The segment of your trip between two consecutive stops. Each leg gets its own distance, duration, and fuel price.

Smart Fuel Pricing

Instead of one flat gas price for the entire trip, each leg is priced using the real (or best-available regional) gas price of the state it starts in.

Fill-up advisor

A callout that appears when a leg crosses into a state with meaningfully higher gas prices, suggesting you fill up before you cross.

Estimated route

When live routing data isn't available, distances fall back to a straight-line estimate — always clearly labeled, never presented as a real route.

Blended cost per mile

Total fuel cost divided by total trip miles — one headline rate even though the price varies leg by leg.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from a normal road trip cost calculator?
Most road trip calculators make you type in a single gas price for the entire trip. This planner prices each leg using the real regional gas price of the state it starts in, and flags when you should fill up before crossing into a pricier state — so multi-state trips get a much more realistic estimate.
Is the per-leg gas price always the exact price for that state?
It's the best available data: the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports a direct weekly price for 9 states, and the other 41 are backfilled from 7 regional averages. Each leg in the cost table is labeled with its actual source so you know which kind of price you're seeing.
What does 'estimated' mean next to my route?
It means live driving-direction data wasn't available for that route, so distance is approximated as a straight line between stops (adjusted for typical road winding) rather than a real routed path. It's always clearly labeled, never presented as exact.
How many stops can I add?
A trip supports between 2 and 12 stops.
Do I need an account to save a trip?
No. Trips are saved directly in your browser's local storage — no account, no server-side database. They stay on this device until you delete them.
What happens if I share a trip link?
Your stops, MPG, and gas price are encoded directly into the link, so anyone who opens it sees the same trip reconstructed — with no extra lookups and without needing an account on their end either.
Why do I see fuel, food, lodging, and attraction markers on the map?
Toggle any of those four categories to discover points of interest near your route, sourced from OpenStreetMap. If that data source is temporarily unavailable, the rest of the trip planner keeps working normally.
Can I use this for a commute or a one-state trip?
Yes — Smart Fuel Pricing still works with 2 stops in the same state, it just won't trigger the cross-state fill-up advisor since there's no price gap to flag.
What's the what-if price slider for?
It lets you override the live regional pricing with a single flat price per gallon, so you can see how your total trip cost would change if gas prices rose or fell.

Related Tools

Road Trip Cost CalculatorGas Prices by StateGas Cost CalculatorCheapest States for Gas