How far is Mercury from Earth right now?
Distance over the next three years
Distance between the centers of Earth and Mercury. Hover or tap the chart to read any date.
Why the distance changes
Mercury orbits the Sun inside Earth's orbit, so its distance from us depends mostly on which side of the Sun it is on. It comes closest when it passes between Earth and the Sun, and is farthest when it is on the far side of the Sun. That cycle repeats about every 116 days, faster than for any other planet.
Between 2000 and 2050, Mercury is closest on May 31, 2015, at 82.1 million km (51.0 million miles), and farthest on December 3, 2034, at 217.1 million km (134.9 million miles).
Surprisingly, when you average over time, Mercury is the closest planet to Earth, closer on average than Venus. Venus comes much nearer at its closest, but it also spends long stretches on the far side of the Sun, while Mercury never strays far from the Sun, and so never gets very far from us either.
How this is calculated
Your browser calculates the position of Mercury for the current moment from your device's clock, using the Astronomy Engine library, which is based on the VSOP87 planetary theory. We checked its Earth distances against NASA JPL data (via Astropy) for dates from 1950 to 2045: they agree to better than 0.02%. Distances are measured center to center.