Truck accident statistics by state

01 Why there is no single number for your state

This is the same problem the companion national page describes, arriving one level down. There, two agencies published two different headline figures. Here, one agency publishes five different state tables, which is why truck accident statistics by state are harder to quote responsibly than national ones.

So when somebody presents truck accidents by state as a ranked list, the first question is which of the five they used, because the ordering changes depending on the answer.

02 The five tables, and what each counts

Read the right-hand column as table numbers rather than counts. This section lists the five tables, not five figures.

Fatalities in Crashes Involving Large Trucks by StatePeople who died. One crash can produce several.FMCSA, Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts, Trends Table 29

Table 29deaths

Fatal Crashes Involving Large Trucks by StateEvents, not people and not vehicles. Always lower than the deaths figure.FMCSA, Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts, Trends Table 30

Table 30events

Large Trucks Involved in Fatal Crashes by StateVehicles. One crash can involve more than one truck.FMCSA, Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts, Trends Table 31

Table 31vehicles

Single-Vehicle Fatal Crashes Involving Large Trucks by StateA subset. No other vehicle was involved.FMCSA, Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts, Trends Table 32

Table 32subset

Multiple-Vehicle Fatal Crashes Involving Large Trucks by StateThe other subset, and the category most injury claims come from.FMCSA, Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts, Trends Table 33

Table 33subset

Our national statistics page works through the equivalent problem at the country level, and our fatal crash data page deals with the census these tables are drawn from.

03 What the disagreement actually looks like, using figures from 2014

California265 fatal crashes against 300 deaths. A gap of 35.FMCSA, Trends Tables 29 and 30, 2014 figures, historical illustration only

265 / 3002014, not current

Florida168 fatal crashes against 190 deaths. A gap of 22.FMCSA, Trends Tables 29 and 30, 2014 figures, historical illustration only

168 / 1902014, not current

Georgia128 fatal crashes against 155 deaths. A gap of 27.FMCSA, Trends Tables 29 and 30, 2014 figures, historical illustration only

128 / 1552014, not current

Indiana113 fatal crashes against 129 deaths. A gap of 16.FMCSA, Trends Tables 29 and 30, 2014 figures, historical illustration only

113 / 1292014, not current

Left figure is fatal crashes, right is deaths. Same state, same year, two published tables. Neither is wrong.

The gap is not a discrepancy to be resolved. It is arithmetic: a crash that kills two people is one entry in the crashes table and two in the deaths table. Anybody quoting the larger figure while calling it accidents is not lying, but they are not being precise either.

04 Why raw counts rank freight corridors

This is the caution our research overview promised this page would carry, and it is the reason a league table of truck accidents by state is close to meaningless without an exposure denominator.

• Miles driven vary enormously. A long interstate corridor carries freight that begins and ends somewhere else entirely.
• Rates need a denominator. The national tables divide by vehicle miles traveled for exactly this reason, and a raw count has no such adjustment.
• Even the denominator is estimated. FMCSA notes that the Federal Highway Administration changed its methodology for estimating miles traveled by vehicle type from 2007, and that involvement rates may therefore differ significantly from earlier years.
• So treat any state ranking with suspicion. Particularly one presented as showing where trucking is most dangerous.

One national figure worth holding alongside all this: in 2022 there were 6,050 large trucks and buses involved in fatal crashes. That number includes buses, which is why it is larger than the 5,837 large trucks alone reported on our national page. Both come from the same publication and they do not contradict each other.

05 How to get the current numbers yourself

We are sending you to the source rather than reproducing it, and the reason is worth stating plainly.

• We could not verify current state figures while writing this. So we did not publish any. A statistics page that invented numbers would be worse than no page.
• A reproduced table goes stale silently. The source is revised; a copy on somebody's website is not, and nothing tells you which you are reading.
• Take the data year with the figure. Every table is headed with the years it covers, and a number lifted without that heading cannot be checked.
• Then note which table you used. If you quote it later, quoting the table number is what makes it verifiable.

The current edition, with the publication and report number, is linked from our research overview.

06 Red flags

These are all visible without opening the source, which is what makes them worth knowing when somebody puts truck accident statistics by state in front of you.

A closing word on what this page does not contain. It has no fifty-state table, and that is deliberate rather than an omission to be filled in later. We could not retrieve verified current state figures while writing it, and publishing a table of numbers we had not checked would contradict the standard the rest of this research section is built on. What matters far more for anybody actually hurt is which state's law applies, not how that state ranks. Our guide to choosing a truck accident firm covers finding somebody licensed where it happened.

Sources, and what we deliberately left out

A shorter sources note than usual, because this page identifies tables rather than reproducing them.

What we left out, and why. There is no fifty-state table on this page. We could not retrieve verified current state-by-state figures while writing it, and reproducing numbers we had not checked would contradict the standard this research section is built on, which is that every figure carries the publication it came from and the year it describes. Section five tells you exactly which tables to open. If this page is revised to include a table, the figures must be taken from the published edition table by table rather than assembled from anywhere else.

On the 2014 figures in section three. They are drawn from the published versions of Tables 29 and 30 and exist for a single purpose: to demonstrate with real numbers that two of the five tables return different counts for the same state in the same year. They are more than a decade old, they are labeled as such in the section heading, in a banner above the table, in every row and in the caption below it, and they are not current statistics for any state.

A cross-check worth recording. This page cites 6,050 large trucks and buses involved in fatal crashes in 2022, while our national page cites 5,837 large trucks. Those figures do not conflict: the first includes buses and the second does not, and both come from the same publication. We mention it because a reader moving between the two pages would otherwise reasonably wonder whether the site disagrees with itself.

Common questions, answered

General information, not legal advice. State crash counts say nothing about any individual claim.