Average Miles Driven Per Year in the U.S.

The average car racks up anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 miles per year. To find your vehicle’s average car mileage per year, divide the number on your odometer by the car’s age.¹

By State

Collectively, people in the U.S. drive a total of over 3 trillion miles, according to the most recent publicly available data from the Federal Highway Administration. See annual mileage by state below, which we calculated by dividing the total annual miles driven by the number of licensed drivers per state.^2,3

States Whose Drivers Drive the Most

Wyoming leads the nation in average miles driven per driver at 21,575 miles annually. Mississippi follows behind at 19,766 miles, while Missouri rounds out the top three with 18,758 miles. Other states with high annual mileage include New Mexico (18,283 miles), Indiana (18,052 miles), and Alabama (17,684 miles). These states significantly exceed the national average of 13,662 miles per driver, likely due to factors such as longer commutes, rural landscapes, and less developed public transportation systems.

States With the Most Driving 

• Wyoming
• Mississippi
• Missouri
• New Mexico
• Indiana

States Whose Drivers Drive the Least

The District of Columbia has the lowest average miles driven per driver at 6,678 miles annually, less than half the national average. New York follows with 9,750 miles, while Rhode Island comes in third with 9,923 miles. Other states with low annual mileage include Washington State (9,951 miles), Alaska (10,695 miles), and Pennsylvania (10,961 miles). These areas tend to have more compact urban centers, better public transportation options, and shorter commute distances, contributing to their lower average miles driven per driver.

States With the Least Driving 

• Washington, D.C.
• New York
• Rhode Island
• Washington
• Alaska

What factors affect how much you drive? It’s not only your work commute, but also your age and sex, according to the hard numbers.

Commute

Commuting miles are the distance someone travels to and from their workplace.⁴ In 2023, the last time the U.S. Census Bureau posted this data publicly, the average one-way commute was 26.8 minutes, or about half an hour. However, the plurality of commutes, 15 percent, were between 15 and 19 minutes long.⁵

Learn more in our 2024 report on commuting in the U.S.

The longer your commute, the higher your annual mileage is likely to be.

Age

Age is another factor that plays a role in the amount of miles driven and, subsequently, the highest average miles per driver by age group. Teen drivers and seniors drive the least, while people ages 20 to 54 drive the most. That makes sense, as younger and older people are less likely to have daily work commutes and thus drive more infrequently.

Sex

Men drive an average of 63 percent more miles per year than women, which is one of the reasons why men pay more for car insurance than women.

As for why there’s such a gap between genders in the number of miles driven, it could be because more women stay at home to care for children and men are more likely to work in driving-related industries like trucking, among other factors.

Age and Sex

When you combine age and sex, you find that the demographic that drives the most is males between the ages of 35 and 54. Women age 65 and up drive the least — specifically, a whopping 64 percent less than the rest of the population.

COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID made car insurance more expensive due to the pandemic causing a labor shortage, a broken supply chain, and higher prices for cars and their parts. But in 2020, when national stay-at-home orders were in place and most nonessential workplaces shut down, people drove less than usual. From 2019 to 2020, highway congestion in most U.S. cities dropped from 51 percent congested to 43 percent. Annual delays went from 54 hours in 2019 to 27 hours in 2020, while vehicle miles traveled dropped by 11 percent from 2018 to 2020.

Interestingly, even though people were driving less because of the pandemic, vehicle ownership and licensure increased during this time, just at a slower rate.⁷

Overall, travel in the U.S. peaked in 2019 at 3.26 trillion miles annually (14,263 average annual miles per driver), dipped to 2.9 trillion (12,724 average miles) in 2020 due to the pandemic, and is climbing again, to 3.20 trillion (13,662 average miles) in 2023⁸.

The more miles you drive per year, the higher your insurance premium will be. However, unless you’ve signed up for a usage-based insurance program, mileage is not the only factor that affects car insurance rates. It’s just one factor, combined with your driving history, home address, vehicle type, and more. Still, how many miles you drive per year will affect the cost of your car insurance.

What’s Considered Low Mileage?

Since most people drive about 10,000 miles annually, low mileage is around 7,500 miles or less.

Low-Mileage Discounts

If you’re a low-mileage driver, you can get discounts by enrolling in a usage-based insurance program. With some of these programs, you’ll get a discount just for signing up, plus bigger discounts if you have low mileage and drive safely.

When enrolled in one of these programs, your mileage will be tracked with either an app or a physical device installed in your car. Along with mileage, some of these programs track driving behaviors like hard braking, rapid acceleration, and distracted driving. The less you drive and the safer you drive, the more you’ll save.

Along with usage-based programs, there are also insurance companies that run entirely on a pay-per-mile model, such as Metromile and Root. Thanks to this structure, these insurers have some of the lowest average annual prices of any company we’ve tested: $1,855 and $1,120, respectively. Always compare auto insurance quotes between providers to find out how much you can save by driving fewer miles.

So, what is your mileage? There are a few ways to find out.

1. Track your mileage for a month. Track your mileage for a month using your odometer, then multiply the number by 12 to get your annual mileage. Of course, this result could be a bit skewed if you took any vacations by car in the past year and consequently drove more than usual.
2. Check maintenance records. Compare your mileage on your car’s scheduled maintenance reports a year apart from each other.
3. Calculate backwards. If you know how many miles your car had when you bought it, you can divide your total mileage but the number of months you’ve had the car. So let’s say the car had 50,000 miles when you bought it three years ago, and now it has 80,000 miles. That means you’ve driven 30,000 miles in three years, or 10,000 miles annually, or about 833 miles monthly.

Since the pandemic, the average mileage has steadily increased. Mileage is one of the factors providers take into account when determining premiums, so you can lower the cost of your auto insurance by driving less. Many insurers offer usage-based programs, and some primarily use a pay-per-mile model. Learn more about average miles driven per year in our frequently asked questions below.