Roanne (French pronunciation: [ʁɔan]; Arpitan: Rouana; Occitan: Roana) is a commune in the Loire department, central France.

An overland route led to Lyon and the Rhône, thus Roanne developed as a transshipping point between Paris and the Mediterranean in early modern France, when waterways were at least as important as roads.

The renewed navigation on the Loire encouraged the export of local products: wines, including casks of Beaujolais that had been shipped overland, ceramics, textiles, and after 1785, coal from Saint-Étienne, which had formerly been onloaded upstream at Saint-Rambert, since river improvements at the beginning of the century.

Half the population of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Roanne depended in some way on this transportation economy: merchants and factors, carriers, carpenters and coopers, master-boatmen and their journeymen and oarsmen, and waterfront laborers (Braudel p360f).

The city is home to Chorale Roanne Basket, two-time champion of France's top basketball league LNB Pro A.