What Counts as a Fatal Crash in FARS?

The short answer

FARS, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, is NHTSA’s census of fatal motor vehicle crashes. A crash is in it when it happened on a road open to the public, involved a motor vehicle in transport, and at least one person died from it within 30 days. Every state reports every such crash, every year, so the file is a count, not a sample.

Every figure on CrashRate comes from this file. That is why every page says “fatal”: the record holds nothing else.

Three conditions

• A public road. The crash happened on a trafficway customarily open to the public. A crash in a private parking lot, on a farm track or on a racetrack is not in FARS, whatever happened there.
• A motor vehicle in transport. At least one motor vehicle was moving on that road. A pedestrian or cyclist killed by a car is in the file; two cyclists colliding with no motor vehicle involved is not.
• A death within 30 days. Someone involved, whether in a vehicle or not, died from the crash within 30 days of it. A death on day 31 is not counted. A death from a crash that happened in late December is counted in the year of the crash, which is one reason the latest year’s file is revised once.

Crashes and deaths are two numbers

FARS has one row per crash and records how many people died in it. In 2024 the file holds 36,297 fatal crashes in the United States and 39,254 deaths, because some crashes killed more than one person. CrashRate’s rate counts crashes; the deaths are printed beside it. NHTSA’s own headline figures usually count deaths. Neither is wrong, but a rate built on one cannot be compared with a rate built on the other.

What else the file records

Each crash carries fields about where and when it happened and who was involved. The county and state pages count a handful of them over 2020 to 2024: rural or urban, the road’s functional class, the hour, the lighting, the weather, whether a pedestrian or cyclist died, whether police recorded speeding, and whether a driver was recorded as alcohol-involved. In 2024 nationally, 7,049 crashes (19%) killed a pedestrian and 10,203 (28%) were coded as speeding-related. These are counts of what the police report said, never inferences.

What FARS leaves out

• Every crash where nobody died. Injury crashes and property-damage crashes are far more numerous and sit in fifty separate state files. No page here says anything about them, and a fatal crash rate is not a crash rate.
• Congestion and traffic. FARS has no measure of how busy a road is. “Dangerous” in the sense of a slow commute is a different subject.
• Fault. Speeding or alcohol involvement is recorded for the crash, not assigned as blame to a person. The file is not a finding of fault.
• Deaths after 30 days, and deaths off public roads. By definition, as above.

The latest year is provisional

NHTSA publishes each year twice: an Annual Report File first, then a final file once late-arriving reports and 30-day deaths are in. The 2024 figures on this site come from the Annual Report File and will be replaced when the final file appears. Earlier years are final. Each page names which file its latest year used.

When the county is missing

FARS codes each crash to a county, and CrashRate joins that code to the Census Bureau’s population. Connecticut replaced its eight counties with nine planning regions in 2022, and the Census Bureau now publishes population for the regions only, while FARS still codes crashes to the old counties. So Fairfield County shows its 50 fatal crashes in 2024 and no rate, and the Connecticut page carries both rates. A handful of crashes each year are coded to an unknown county and appear only in the state total.

What this guide does not cover

It does not cover how the rate is calculated, which has its own guide, or how police complete the crash report FARS is built from. It does not cover injury data, and it does not say how safe any road is.

Look up a county

The Fatal Crash Rate lookup shows the FARS count, the deaths and the fields above for any US county or state.

This guide is for informational purposes only and is not professional advice. A fatal crash rate describes fatal crashes recorded in one place over one year. It is not all crashes, not injuries, and not the risk to any one driver, road or trip.

Last reviewed: October 2026 · Against the FARS 2024 Annual Report File.