How to add more than 10 stops to Google Maps
Last updated: August 12, 2026
Google Maps is great at getting you to one place — but try planning a bigger trip and you hit a wall: a route maxes out at 10 stops (your start plus 9 destinations). The “Add stop” option simply disappears after that. And even under the limit, Google Maps drives your stops in exactly the order you typed them — it never reorders them into the fastest route.
Here are the three ways around the limit, from most tedious to easiest.
Option 1: Split your trip into multiple routes
The manual workaround. Break your list into chunks of 10, make the last stop of route A the first stop of route B, and navigate them one after another.
- Works everywhere, needs no other tools.
- But you're juggling several maps, and nothing tells you the best overall order — a bad split can bake in miles of backtracking before you start driving. (More on that in the best order to visit multiple addresses.)
Option 2: Google My Maps
My Maps lets you pin far more than 10 places on a custom map. It's handy for visualizing a trip, but it's a drawing tool, not a navigator: directions still work in layers of 10, there's no turn-by-turn navigation from the map itself, and it won't optimize the order of your stops either.
Option 3: Sort your stops first, then open Google Maps
The easiest fix is to let a route planner do the thinking before Google Maps does the driving. SortStops is a free multi-stop route planner built for exactly this:
- Add up to 25 stops — type them, or paste your whole list at once.
- Press sort. Your stops are optimized into the fastest order using Google's own routing engine, with real driving times.
- Open the finished route in Google Maps and start navigating.
No account, no app to install, nothing to pay. Try the free route planner — paste your list and you'll have the fastest order in seconds.
One honest caveat
On some devices Google Maps still trims very long routes when it opens them. If that happens, navigate the trip in sorted chunks — because the order is already optimized, splitting it costs you nothing: just start the next leg where the last one ended.
Why doesn't Google Maps just do this?
Reordering stops into the fastest route is a genuinely hard problem (the classic “traveling salesman problem”), and Google Maps is built for navigation, not trip planning. Google's routing engine can optimize stop order — it just isn't exposed in the Maps app. That engine is what SortStops uses under the hood, so you get Google-quality driving times with the sorting Google Maps leaves out.