Marietta, GA to Birmingham, AL: distance, drive time and fuel cost

The route runs from Marietta, GA to Birmingham, AL, crossing a single state line — Georgia and Alabama. Speed limits and everyday driving rules are set state by state, so what is posted can change as you cross. At roughly 2 hr 34 min this is a straightforward day's drive with one proper stop in the middle. Leaving early puts you in Birmingham with the afternoon still ahead of you.

There are 5 towns of any size close to the line between the two cities, the first being Douglasville, GA at about 16 miles in. That matters mostly for where you can stop: on a 2 hr 34 min drive the useful question is not how far it is but where the fuel, food and daylight run out.

The route also crosses a time-zone boundary, so the clock at the far end is 1 hour behind the one you set off with. Arrival times booked at the destination are in local time, which is the part people get wrong.

Driving beats flying on this one: 12 min quicker door to door once security, boarding and the trips to and from the airports are counted. For 154 miles that is the straightforward answer.

154 miles at 25.4 miles per gallon is about 6.1 gallons, which comes to roughly $19.11 at $3.15 a gallon. Split between four people that is about $4.78 each, which is the comparison worth making before you look at a flight price rather than after. Two figures in that sentence are assumptions rather than facts about your trip: the price per gallon, reviewed 2026-08, and the consumption, which is a US fleet average. Both are published with the rest of the method under fuel cost assumptions.

The size of that assumption is easy to see on this route. A fifty-cent move in the pump price either way changes the total by about $3.03 — so read $19.11 as the middle of a range from roughly $16.07 to $22, not as a quote. A car that does noticeably better or worse than 25.4 mpg shifts it further, and neither figure includes tolls, which are charged on a good deal of the interstate network in the northeast and on individual bridges and tunnels elsewhere. Nothing on this page knows which tolls apply to a particular route, so none are counted.

For the same reason the 54 kg of CO₂ this drive implies is arithmetic on the fuel rather than a measurement: 6.1 gallons of gasoline at the EPA's figure of 8.89 kg per gallon. It is useful for comparing this route against flying it, or against a longer way round, and not useful as an absolute number.