How far apart are Des Moines and Minneapolis?

The driving distance from Des Moines, Iowa to Minneapolis, Minnesota is:

244 miles / 393 km

Plan your road trip at  

Map of driving directions from Des Moines, IA to Minneapolis, MN

View a map with driving directions using your preferred map provider: Google Maps, Bing Maps, or MapQuest. You can use DriveDistance.com to get the full driving distance from Des Moines to Minneapolis with directions.

More trip calculations

The total driving distance from Des Moines, IA to Minneapolis, MN is 244 miles or 393 kilometers.

Your trip begins in Des Moines, Iowa. It ends in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

If you are planning a road trip, you might also want to calculate the total driving time from Des Moines, IA to Minneapolis, MN so you can see when you'll arrive at your destination.

You can also calculate the cost of driving from Des Moines, IA to Minneapolis, MN based on current local fuel prices and an estimate of your car's best gas mileage.

If you're meeting a friend, you might be interested in finding the city that is halfway between Des Moines, IA and Minneapolis, MN.

Planning to fly a plane instead? You might be more interested in calculating the straight line distance to fly from Des Moines, IA to Minneapolis, MN.

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Driving distance calculator

Travelmath helps you find driving distances based on actual directions for your road trip. You can get the distance between cities, airports, states, countries, or zip codes to figure out the best route to travel to your destination. Combine this information with the fuel cost tool to find out how much it will cost you to drive the distance, or compare the results to the straight line distance to determine whether it's better to drive or fly. You can print out pages with a travel map.

Driving non-stop from Des Moines to Minneapolis

How far is Minneapolis from Des Moines? Here's the quick answer if you are able to make this entire trip by car without stopping.

Nonstop drive: 244 miles or 393 km

Driving time: 3 hours, 36 minutes

Realistically, you'll probably want to add a buffer for rest stops, gas, or food along the way. To get a better idea of how long this trip would really be, scroll down to calculate how many hours it would take if you drive with stops.

Flying non-stop from Des Moines to Minneapolis

Now let's assume you have a private jet and you can fly in the fastest possible straight line between Des Moines, Iowa and Minneapolis, Minnesota. 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: 234 miles or 376 km

Flight time: 43 minutes

The straight line flight distance is 10 miles less than driving on roads, which means the driving distance is roughly 1.0x 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.

Des Moines to Minneapolis road trip

Let's say you're actually planning a road trip to Minneapolis, and you want to stop along the way to rest. If it's a real road trip, you might want to check out interesting stops along the way, eat at great restaurants, and maybe even find a hotel to stay overnight. That's what Trippy is perfect for, helping you figure out travel plans in detail.

Based on the length of this trip, we think you could spread out this fun road trip over more than one day.

Road trip: 2 days of driving

With the full itinerary planned out, we can estimate your total travel time for this trip.

Travel time: 6 hours on the road with 1 overnight

Itinerary

Start in Des Moines.

Drive for about 38 minutes, then stop in Ames (Iowa) and stay for about 1 hour. Next, drive for another 48 minutes then stop in Webster City and stay for 1 hour. Drive for 41 minutes then stop in Iowa Falls and stay for 1 hour. Drive for 1 hour then stop in Clear Lake. Stay overnight.

The next day, drive for about 39 minutes, then stop in Albert Lea and stay for about 1 hour. Next, drive for another 41 minutes then stop in Waseca and stay for 1 hour. Drive for 1 hour then stop in Eagan and stay for 1 hour.

Finally, drive for about 22 minutes and arrive in Minneapolis.

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:

Des Moines to Minneapolis airports and flights

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: Des Moines International Airport (DSM)

Arrival airport: Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (MSP)

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: 16 minutes

Getting to your destination: 21 minutes

Now finally, let's look at an example flight from DSM to MSP and figure out how long it would take to fly including take-off and landing, and time to taxi on the runway.

Commercial flight time: 1 hour, 5 minutes

So now we can finally get an idea of the total travel time from Des Moines to Minneapolis including time spent getting to/from the airports, an estimated wait time of 2 hours at the airport for TSA security lines and waiting at the gate, and the actual flight itself.

Total travel time: 4 hours

To see the details on this flight plan, including recommended airports, airline, and route, check out the flight planner:

How far is it the other way?

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 Minneapolis to Des Moines, or go to the main page to calculate the distance between cities.

If you happen to know Des Moines, don't forget to help other travelers and answer some questions about Des Moines!

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