As well as generating the far field pressure, which allows wave propagation in the cochlea, the vibration of an individual element of the basilar membrane (BM) will also generate a near field pressure, which increases its mass and gives rise to local longitudinal coupling. This paper compares the efficiency and accuracy of a number of different methods of calculating the near field pressure distribution, and explores the connections between them. In particular it is shown that a common approximation to the wavenumber description of the near field pressure is equivalent, in the spatial domain, to an exponential decay away from the point of excitation. Two important properties of the near field pressure are its maximum amplitude, which is finite if the vibrating element has a finite length, and the value of its spatial integral, which determines the added mass on the BM due to the fluid loading. These properties are calculated as a function of the BM width relative to the width of the fluid chamber. By parameterizing the near field pressure variation in this way, it can be readily incorporated into coupled models of the cochlea, without the considerable computational expense of calculating the full three dimensional pressure field.