How Many People Die on Rural Roads in the US Each Year?

Quick answer: 16,006 people died on rural roads in the US in 2024 — 41% of all 39,254 road deaths — according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), analysing federal crash data. Urban roads saw more deaths in total (22,905), but in the most rural states, country roads account for four out of five deaths.

The national picture

The IIHS state-by-state figures for 2024 split every US road death by where it happened:

• Rural roads: 16,006 deaths, 41%
• Urban roads: 22,905 deaths, 58%
• Location unknown: 343 deaths, 1%
• Total: 39,254 deaths

These are counts, not rates. They show where deaths happened, not how risky each mile of road is, and they should not be read as a league table of danger per journey. What they do show is scale: two out of every five people killed on US roads in 2024 died outside a town or city, on roads that carry far less attention than urban highways.

The most rural states

In the most sparsely populated states, rural roads dominate the death toll:

• North Dakota: 81% rural — 73 of its 90 road deaths
• Maine: 80% rural — 142 of 177 deaths
• South Dakota: 80% rural — 117 of 146 deaths
• Montana: 79% rural — 163 of 206 deaths
• Idaho: 75% rural — 179 of 238 deaths
• Vermont: 71% rural — 42 of 59 deaths

The pattern is consistent: long distances between towns, high-speed single-carriageway roads, and a small urban population mean that almost every fatal crash in these states happens on a rural road.

The least rural states

At the other end of the scale, rural deaths are rare — mostly because these places have very little land coded as rural at all:

• Massachusetts: 8% rural — 30 of 363 deaths
• Connecticut: 13% rural — 39 of 310 deaths
• Hawaii: 13% rural — 13 of 102 deaths
• Rhode Island: 13% rural — 7 of 52 deaths
• New Jersey: 15% rural — 100 of 670 deaths
• District of Columbia: 0 rural deaths — the whole district is coded as urban

The gap between North Dakota at 81% and Massachusetts at 8% shows why national averages hide the real story. A driver in North Dakota faces a road-death profile dominated by rural roads. A driver in Massachusetts barely encounters one.

Big states, different stories

The biggest states tell a different story from the most rural ones. Their rural death counts are large, but their rural shares are much lower, because most of their driving happens in cities:

• Texas: 1,494 rural deaths, 36% of its 4,160 road deaths — the largest rural count of any state
• California: 1,053 rural deaths, 27% of 3,876
• North Carolina: 1,009 rural deaths, 62% of 1,619 — a big state where rural roads still dominate
• Florida: 651 rural deaths, 21% of 3,138

Texas alone accounts for almost one in ten rural road deaths in the country, yet rural roads are only just over a third of its total. North Carolina is the exception among the big states: despite its large cities, nearly two-thirds of its road deaths happened on rural roads. The contrast shows why both the count and the share matter. A state can have a terrible rural toll in absolute numbers while most of its deaths still happen in cities — or a modest total with a heavily rural profile.

Driving rural roads in autumn

Autumn adds its own rural hazards. Harvest traffic puts slow farm vehicles on the road, animals cross more often at dawn and dusk, and the evening commute increasingly happens on dark, unlit roads. Darkness is a danger everywhere — our night-driving figures show most US road deaths happen after dark — and on an unlit country road there are no streetlights to compensate. Roadworks on rural highways add another hazard: see how many people die in work zone crashes each year.

A few habits matter most on country roads. Slow down on roads you do not know, especially over crests and around bends where you cannot see what is coming. Expect oncoming traffic on undivided roads and slow vehicles around the next corner. Keep headlights clean and properly aimed for unlit roads, and never out-drive what your headlights can show you.

How these numbers were counted

All figures come from the IIHS state-by-state analysis, IIHS state-by-state, posted in June 2026 and based on the US Department of Transportation's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS): the census of every fatal motor-vehicle crash on US public roads in which someone died within 30 days. Rural and urban are the land-use codings recorded in FARS, and 343 deaths had an unknown location. More statistics are in the article archive.