This paper studies the trajectories and near field of round jets in crossflow. Incompressible direct numerical simulations are performed at velocity ratios of 1.5 and 5.7 and the effects of jet velocity profile and boundary layer thickness on the jet trajectory are examined. The ‘rd’ scaling used at present (Margason 1993) does not contain any information on these parameters, and trajectories scaled by rd do not collapse. The trajectory is strongly influenced by the near field which depends on both the jet velocity profile and the crossflow boundary layer. A length scale is proposed to describe the near field of the jet. An analytical expression is proposed for this length scale which is a measure of the relative inertia of the jet and the crossflow. Incorporating this length scale significantly improves the scaling of the trajectories.