Americans Killed Each Other On The Road A Little Less Often In 2025

It doesn't feel like we get a lot of good news these days, but that doesn't mean it's all bad news all the time. Just most of the time. So when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its annual report on U.S. traffic deaths over the last year, we braced ourself for the worst, only to instead discover a morsel of unambiguously good news — U.S. traffic deaths actually declined in 2025. And it wasn't because we drove less, either. In fact, Americans drove more miles while killing fewer people than they did in 2024. 

According to NHTSA, U.S. drivers still killed 36,640 people in 2025, which is 36,640 too many, but compared to the traffic deaths we saw in 2024, that's still a 6.7% reduction. Not everyone will agree, but the way I see it, fewer people dying is better than more people dying. Additionally, preliminary data from the National Highway Administration shows we drove more in 2025 than we did the year before, traveling 29.8 billion miles or an increase of 0.9%. That also works out to a fatality rate of 1.10 deaths for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled, the best since 2014.

2025 also marks the fourth year in a row of falling traffic deaths. The pandemic proved to be terrible for road safety, with traffic deaths jumping 7.3% to 39,007 in 2020 and then another +10.8% in 2021, when we set a new record with 43,230 deaths. Since 2022 when traffic deaths fell -1.2%, the numbers have improved every year. They fell 4.0% in 2023 and 4.3% in 2024, and with 2025's traffic deaths falling even further, we're now almost back to pre-pandemic levels.

If there's any downside here, it's probably that 2025's 36,640 traffic deaths is still higher than the 36,355 deaths we saw in 2019 before the pandemic hit. But hey, maybe that's an upside to gas being so expensive. If everyone who doesn't own an EV can't afford to drive as much, we might end up killing fewer people this year. Lowering traffic deaths by the same percentage in 2026 that we saw in 2025 would get us down to about 34,000 in a year, which would be better than what we saw back in 2015. 

Of course, no one knows what will happen in the future, but when you break traffic deaths down by quarter, the pattern becomes even more encouraging. Deaths really began climbing in the Q3 2020, and we didn't see a drop until Q2 2022. Since then, however, we've seen 15 straight quarters of falling road deaths. At least in theory, there's no reason these improvements shouldn't only continue. Local safety advocates have won some big victories in recent years that have helped make our roads and streets less dangerous, even if no U.S. city can match Helsinki's zero traffic deaths a year. 

The only potential problem there is that, during COVID, people engaged in riskier behavior and that sent traffic deaths through the roof. If gas prices continue to climb, as it looks like they will, are we going to see that same COVID-era risk-taking make a comeback? If we do, we could easily see the gains we've made in recent years erased. I'd hope that wouldn't be the case, but we've seen it before, and we may see it again.