Crash & Safety Trends Analysis

Analysis

· as of July 1, 2026

The most notable feature of this dataset is not the year-over-year decline in crashes but the pronounced spike in June and July 2025, followed by an abrupt drop that almost certainly reflects reporting lag rather than a genuine safety improvement. June 2025 logged 20,061 total crashes — the highest single month in the entire 60-month series — and July 2025 followed at 19,688, both running roughly 30% above the dataset's pre-2025 monthly average of approximately 15,500. By contrast, the two most recent months on record, January 2026 at 8,374 crashes and February 2026 at just 575, are implausibly low relative to every prior January and February in the series; January 2025 recorded 16,422 crashes and January 2024 recorded 17,393, making the 2026 figures almost certainly artifacts of incomplete data submission to FMCSA rather than a real-world trend. Analysts and researchers should treat any months within roughly two to three months of the data pull date with caution for this reason.

Setting aside the truncated tail, the year-over-year comparison across complete 12-month windows is more credible. Crashes in the trailing 12 months totaled 165,252, down from 185,154 in the prior 12-month period, a decline of 10.7%. Fatalities over the trailing 12 months reached 4,926, and injuries totaled 89,787. The composition of crashes across the full dataset shows that tow-away incidents track closely with total crash volume — tow-away counts in the trailing 12 months reached 153,289, representing roughly 92.8% of total crashes, a ratio that has remained largely stable across the series. Fatal crashes as a share of total crashes have been more variable month to month, ranging from roughly 2.9% in some summer months to above 3.4% in periods like March 2022, when 530 fatal crashes occurred out of 16,674 total.

The 2022 period represents the elevated plateau in this series, with monthly crash totals consistently in the 15,000 to 18,000 range across most of that year. The subsequent gradual moderation from 2023 onward is consistent with broader freight market softening following the post-pandemic volume surge, though the data alone cannot establish causation. Across the full five-year window, total crashes reached 842,685 and fatalities reached 27,595, providing a longer baseline against which any single-year movement should be evaluated.