How far is Dublin from Belfast? Here's the quick answer if you drive this relatively short distance without making any stops.
Nonstop drive: 106 miles or 171 km
Driving time: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Even though you can drive this distance straight through, it might be more interesting to stop along the way. You can scroll down to calculate how many hours it would take if you drive with stops.
Now let's assume you have a private jet and you can fly in the fastest possible straight line between Belfast, United Kingdom and Dublin, Ireland. Because of the curvature of the Earth, the shortest distance is actually the "great circle" distance, or "as the crow flies" which is calculated using an iterative Vincenty formula.
Flight distance: 87 miles or 141 km
Flight time: 40 minutes
The straight line flight distance is 19 miles less than driving on roads, which means the driving distance is roughly 1.2x of the flight distance.
Your plane flies much faster than a car, so the flight time is about 1/3th of the time it would take to drive.
This is a relatively short flight in a private plane, but you might be planning to book a commercial flight. In that case, your travel time would really need to include how many minutes to get to your local airport, wait for security, board and taxi on the runway, land at the other airport, and get to your destination. Scroll down to see a more realistic calculation that takes into account all these factors to get a more accurate estimate of your actual flight time.
Let's say you're actually planning a road trip to Dublin, and you want to stop on the way to explore. If it's a real road trip, you might want to check out interesting places along the way, or maybe eat at a great restaurant. That's what Trippy is perfect for, helping you figure out travel plans in detail.
Road trip: 1 day of driving
With the full itinerary planned out, we can estimate your total travel time for this trip.
Travel time: 2.5 hours on the road
Itinerary
Start in Belfast.
Drive for about 57 minutes, then stop in Carlingford and stay for about 1 hour.
Next, drive for another 30 minutes then stop in The Burren and stay for 1 hour.
Drive for 48 minutes then stop at Temple Bar and stay for 1 hour.
Finally, drive for about 5 minutes and arrive in Dublin.
To see all the details on this itinerary, including recommended restaurants, hotels, and things to do along the way, check out the full road trip planner:
In the quick calculation above, we assumed you had a private plane and just wanted to know the time in the air from city to city. But for most of us, we're going to be flying on a commercial airline (whether it's first class or coach). So that means we really need to account for all the extra travel time getting to the airport, waiting for our flight, and making it to the destination.
To give you a better estimate of real-life travel, we've put together a flight itinerary with actual airports. Eventually you'll be able to customize this plan, choosing your own airports and flights. But for now, here's an example we've selected to give you an idea of how traveling might work between airports.
Departure airport: George Best Belfast City Airport (BHD)
Arrival airport: Dublin Airport (DUB)
With the airports selected, we can estimate the travel time to and from the airport, based on how far the airport is from downtown.
Getting to the airport: 11 minutes
Getting to your destination: 19 minutes
Now finally, let's look at an actual flight from BHD connecting through EXT and arriving at DUB flying on Flybe. We can figure out how long it would take to fly including take-off and landing, time to taxi on the runways, and an average layover time of about 2 hours.
Initial flight time: 1 hour, 5 minutes
Connecting airport: Exeter International Airport (EXT)
Connection flight time: 57 minutes
So now we can finally get an idea of the total travel time from Belfast to Dublin including time spent getting to and from the airports, roughly 2 hours at the departure airport for TSA security lines and waiting at the gate, plus the connecting flight with a 2-hour layover.
Total travel time: 7 hours
To see the details on this flight plan, including recommended airports, airline, and route, check out the flight planner:
Trippy has a ton of information that can help you plan your trip to Dublin, Ireland. Start by reading the Trippy page on where to stay in Dublin. If you're looking for a place to stay, you might want to check out O'Donoghue's Pub. A great place to eat might be The Palace Bar. Trippy members can suggest things to do in Dublin like Guinness Storehouse. Check out some of the questions people have asked about Dublin like Is Dublin a nice place to live for a foreign student?. Click the button below to explore Dublin in detail.
The distance is the same either way if you're flying a straight line (or driving the same roads back and forth). But for a real trip, there can be plenty of differences so go ahead and check the reverse directions to get the distance from Dublin to Belfast, or go to the main page to calculate the distance between cities.
If you happen to know Belfast, don't forget to help other travelers and answer some questions about Belfast!
More info on this route:
drive from Belfast to Dublin
road conditions
alternate routes
Google driving directions