Name: Fatal Crash Data by City, County and Road, 2020-2024
Creator: Ask Legal Matters

What is in these files?

These CSV files hold the fatal crash figures shown on our state, county and city injury guides, from NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) for 2020 through 2024: fatal crashes and deaths by year for 7,114 cities and towns and 3,079 counties, the roads with the most fatal crashes in each, and one file per state. They add no figure that the guides do not already show.

Download the data

Download the data (2020-2024, CSV, UTF-8)
File	What it holds	Rows
fars-2020-2024-cities.csv	Fatal crashes and deaths per year, after dark, non-motorist and intersection counts, for every city or town with at least one fatal crash coded to it	7,114
fars-2020-2024-counties.csv	The same figures for every county with at least one fatal crash	3,079
fars-2020-2024-roads.csv	Up to 10 roads per city or county with 2 or more fatal crashes, as ranked on the guides	22,677
fars-2020-2024-states.csv	Per state: how many cities and counties have records, and the share of crash reports with no city recorded	49

Source: NHTSA FARS (2020: Final File; 2021: Final File; 2022: Final File; 2023: Final File; 2024: Annual Report File (ARF)), national data files downloaded from NHTSA on November 3, 2026. Each row links to the guide that shows it.

One file per state

Each state file holds that state's city and county rows, with an area_type column.

How the figures were built

Each fatal crash in NHTSA's national FARS files (accident.csv for each year) is counted once for its county and, when the reporting agency recorded a city, once for that city: the recorded city name is matched to the same state's place list, ignoring case and punctuation and treating Saint as St and Mt as Mount; when several places share a name, the one in the crash's county is used. A crash with no city recorded counts only for its county.

Deaths are FARS's count of people who died within 30 days of the crash. After dark means the lighting was recorded as dark (lighted, not lighted or unknown lighting); non-motorist means a pedestrian, cyclist or other person outside a vehicle was involved; intersection means the crash was recorded at or related to an intersection.

Roads are the first trafficway the agency recorded, with the name cleaned the same way on every page. The same street with and without a route number is one row ("Westheimer Rd" and "Westheimer Rd (FM 1093)"). A route recorded without a street name keeps its own row, labelled "street name not recorded" when a named road carrying that route is in the same table, because the records do not show which stretch it was. Only roads with 2 or more fatal crashes are listed, at most 10 per place.

Limits of the data

The 2024 figures are NHTSA's Annual Report File, its first release for that year; NHTSA revises them in the Final File, so 2024 counts can change.
City counts depend on the reporting agency recording a city. In some states a large share of reports record none, so city figures are lower than the true number; the states file gives that share for each state.
FARS counts only crashes on public roads in which someone died within 30 days. These files do not count injury or property-damage crashes.
A road row counts crashes recorded on that trafficway, not every crash near it, and different agencies may name the same road differently.
NHTSA had not published 2025 FARS data when these files were built.

How to cite these figures

Cite the guide page where you read a figure; each crash table on our guides ends with a ready-made citation. For the files, cite: Ask Legal Matters, "Fatal crash data by city, county and road, 2020-2024," compiled from NHTSA FARS (2020: Final File; 2021: Final File; 2022: Final File; 2023: Final File; 2024: Annual Report File (ARF)), https://asklegalmatters.com/injury-guides/data/.

NHTSA's own data and documentation: Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS).

Questions and corrections

Email legal@asklegalmatters.com with the file, the row and the correction; we will check it against the NHTSA files and update the data and the guides. Reporters: see the press page. Ask Legal Matters is a lead-generation service, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice.