It takes about 90 minutes for something in low Earth orbit—like the International Space Station—to go once around the Earth, while the Earth itself takes about 365 days to orbit the Sun.

What “orbit the Earth” can mean

When people ask “how long does it take to orbit the Earth?” they might mean two different things:

  1. How long Earth takes to orbit the Sun (a year).
  2. How long a spacecraft or satellite takes to go once around Earth.

I’ll cover both, plus how altitude changes the answer.

1. Earth orbiting the Sun

  • Earth completes one full orbit around the Sun in about 365.25 days (one year).
  • More precisely, the orbital period is about 365.256 days, often called a sidereal year.
  • That extra quarter of a day is why we add a leap day roughly every four years.

So in everyday language: Earth orbits the Sun once per year.

2. Satellites orbiting the Earth

How long a satellite takes to orbit Earth depends mostly on altitude :

  • Low Earth orbit (LEO) , a few hundred kilometers up (like the ISS at about 400 km):
    • Orbital period is roughly 90–93 minutes.
* That works out to about 15–16 orbits per day.
  • Higher orbits :
    • As altitude increases, gravity is weaker and the satellite moves more slowly, so the orbital period gets longer.
* There is a special altitude where one orbit takes **24 hours** , so the satellite stays above the same point on Earth (a geostationary orbit).

A simple way to picture it:

  • Closer to Earth → shorter, faster orbits (around 1.5 hours).
  • Farther from Earth → longer, slower orbits (up to 24 hours and beyond).

3. Quick examples

  • International Space Station: about 90–93 minutes per orbit.
  • Typical LEO satellites: similar, about 1.5 hours.
  • Geostationary communication satellites: about 24 hours per orbit, matching Earth’s rotation.

TL;DR:

  • Earth orbits the Sun in about 365 days.
  • A low-orbit satellite (like the ISS) orbits Earth in about 90 minutes.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.