latitude and longitude

Latitude and longitude are a pair of numbers (coordinates) used to describe a position on the plane of a geographic coordinate system. The numbers are in decimal degrees format and range from -90 to 90 for latitude and -180 to 180 for longitude.

For example, Washington DC has a latitude 38.8951 and longitude -77.0364. In API calls you will often see the numbers placed together and separated by a comma: -77.0364,38.8951. In some cases, altitude can be included as a third value.

Find a location's coordinates

If you need to find a location's latitude and longitude, you can use the Mapbox Search playground, which allows you to search for a location and retrieve its coordinates in longitude,latitude format.

Coordinate format handling

Different Mapbox services handle coordinate order differently. When you start using a Mapbox product, read its documentation to see how the latitude and longitude should be formatted. For example, Mapbox GL JS and most Mapbox web services APIs use the format longitude,latitude, while other products including the Mapbox Maps SDK for iOS use the format latitude,longitude.

Related resources:

• Mapbox web services APIs coordinate documentation
• Mapbox GL JS LngLat object documentation