The fair place to meet is Las Vegas, NV — the city closest to the midpoint of El Paso and San Francisco. From the farther side that’s about 12 hr 12 min of driving.
Recommended midpoint
Las Vegas, NV
From El Paso
12 hr 12 min
582 mi to Las Vegas
From San Francisco
8 hr 44 min
417 mi to Las Vegas
San Francisco has the shorter trip; the split is off by about 3 hr 28 min. The alternatives below can even it out. El Paso and San Francisco are about 993 miles apart.
El Paso and San Francisco are about 993 miles apart by road. Split the difference and you arrive near Las Vegas, the city closest to the halfway point between them. That puts roughly 12 hr 12 min of driving on the El Paso side and 8 hr 44 min on the San Francisco side — the fairest single meeting point among the cities near the middle.
Over this distance most people will fly rather than drive the whole way. Las Vegas still makes a fair, central place for El Paso and San Francisco to converge, splitting the travel instead of asking one side to cross the country.
If Las Vegas doesn't have what you're after, Phoenix and San Diego are also close to the midpoint and worth a look — each keeps the drive reasonably balanced between El Paso and San Francisco.
Las Vegas, colloquially shortened to Vegas, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and the county seat of Clark County. It is the 24th-most populous city in the United States, with 641,903 residents at the 2020 census. Read more →
El Paso is a city in and the county seat of El Paso County, Texas, United States. It is the 22nd-most populous city in the U.S., sixth-most populous city in Texas, and the most populous city in West Texas with a population of 678,815 at the 2020 census. Read more →
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the fourth-most populous city in California and the 17th-most populous in the United States, with a population of 826,079 in 2025. Among U.S. Read more →
City descriptions adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA); photos via Wikimedia Commons, credited above.
Estimates use straight-line distance and typical road speeds; real drive times vary with route and traffic.