What Is FARS?

The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) is NHTSA's nationwide census of fatal motor vehicle traffic crashes. Established in 1975, it records every crash on a US public road in which at least one person dies within 30 days of the crash. FARS is not a sample, it is a complete accounting of every qualifying event. That completeness makes it the gold standard for traffic safety research.

Data flows from state agencies to NHTSA. After a fatal crash, state coders draw on police accident reports, death certificates, coroner and medical examiner records, emergency medical service records, and hospital data. Each crash is coded against hundreds of standardized data elements, vehicle type, road characteristics, time of day, contributing factors, restraint use, and more. NHTSA then validates the submissions before publishing the annual file.

PlainRoadSafety presents FARS data for all 51 states and 3,000+ counties across 10 cause categories, covering the years 2015–2023. You can explore state-level summaries, cause breakdowns, and safety rankings built directly from this data.

What FARS Tracks

Each FARS record captures three levels of information:

• Crash level: Date, time, location (state, county, latitude/longitude), road type (urban/rural, interstate, arterial), weather, light conditions, number of vehicles and fatalities.
• Vehicle level: Make, model, year, vehicle type, speed at impact, travel speed limit, pre-crash maneuver, rollover, fire, hit-and-run status, driver age, sex, and BAC if tested.
• Person level: Age, sex, person type (driver, passenger, pedestrian, cyclist), injury severity, restraint use, airbag deployment, and cause of death.

From these elements, NHTSA derives the cause categories that appear on PlainRoadSafety: alcohol-impaired driving, speeding, distracted driving, pedestrian crashes, unrestrained occupants, motorcyclists, cyclists, nighttime crashes, weather-related crashes, and work zone fatalities.

Fatality Rate Per 100,000 Population

Raw fatality counts alone are misleading. California reports thousands of traffic deaths per year while Wyoming reports dozens, but that difference mostly reflects population, not road safety. The per-100K rate makes states comparable by controlling for population size.

The formula is straightforward: divide the number of fatalities by the state's population, then multiply by 100,000. The national average typically falls between 11 and 13 deaths per 100K population. States above this threshold have elevated risk; states below it perform better than average. The safest states (Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey) consistently post rates around 5–7 per 100K. The most dangerous states (Mississippi, Wyoming, South Carolina) regularly exceed 20 per 100K, more than three times the national average.

Browse the safest states ranking and the deadliest states ranking to see how all 51 states compare on this metric.

Fatality Rate Per VMT

Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) is the total distance driven by all vehicles in an area over a year. NHTSA reports fatality rates per 100 million VMT as a second measure of road danger, one that accounts for how much driving actually occurs.

A state where people drive far more miles will naturally have more crashes than one where people drive less, even if both states' roads are equally dangerous. Per-VMT rates expose the underlying danger level independent of driving volume. Rural states with high per-population rates often look better on a per-VMT basis because their higher death tolls partly reflect higher total mileage driven on rural highways. Conversely, dense urban states sometimes look worse per-VMT because urban stop-and-go travel exposes pedestrians to more risk per mile driven.

NHTSA's target in the National Roadway Safety Strategy is to move toward zero fatalities per VMT over time. The current national rate is approximately 1.3–1.4 deaths per 100 million VMT.

How Cause Categories Work

NHTSA assigns contributing factors to crashes based on coded data elements. Importantly, these categories are not mutually exclusive, a single crash can be tagged with multiple causes. A crash involving a drunk driver who was also speeding and whose passenger was unrestrained counts toward the alcohol, speeding, and unrestrained occupant categories simultaneously. This is why cause percentages on PlainRoadSafety add up to well over 100% when summed.

Each cause percentage reflects what share of all fatalities involved that factor, not the sole cause. Alcohol-impaired driving, for example, was involved in roughly 19% of all US traffic fatalities in the most recent data year, meaning around one in five deaths occurred in a crash where at least one driver had a BAC above 0.08. Explore each cause in detail on the causes page.

Urban vs. Rural Fatalities

FARS distinguishes between urban and rural crashes based on Census Bureau urbanized area classifications. Rural roads consistently account for a disproportionate share of traffic deaths relative to their share of total miles traveled. Roughly half of all US traffic fatalities occur on rural roads, which carry only about 30% of total VMT. This disparity stems from higher posted speed limits, longer emergency response times, less divided highway infrastructure, and greater prevalence of single-vehicle run-off-road crashes on rural two-lane roads.

State-level data on PlainRoadSafety reflects rural-urban composition. States with large rural populations and extensive two-lane highway networks tend to post higher fatality rates than predominantly urban states, independent of driver behavior differences. See how this plays out on the Safest Roads in America guide.

Frequently Asked Questions