UK road accident statistics, by the numbers

Road accidents in Great Britain

In 2024 there were 128,272 casualties in reported road collisions in Great Britain. Of those, 29,467 were killed or seriously injured, and 1,602 people lost their lives. While the long-term trend is downward, the numbers remain substantial — and car occupants make up around 55% of all casualties, the largest single group.

Many collisions never appear in these figures at all. STATS19 records what police attended, so damage-only incidents are excluded by design, and injury collisions that were never reported are simply absent. Under-reporting is known to be worst for cyclists and for slight injuries, which is why we lean on the killed-and-seriously-injured count: it is the most consistently recorded figure in the dataset.

The casualties are not spread evenly

Car occupants are the largest single group of casualties, but they are not the group most likely to be badly hurt. Pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists have no vehicle structure around them, and they account for a share of the killed and seriously injured far larger than their share of journeys. That gap is the reason we publish separate pedestrian, cyclist and motorcyclist maps rather than one combined view.

National totals hide the local picture

A national casualty count tells you almost nothing about a particular road. The same records, cut to a place, show where collisions cluster and which junctions keep appearing year after year. We publish that for 125 towns and cities, for every British highway authority, and for individual numbered roads that cross council boundaries.

One cut is worth singling out: 185 sites recorded an injury collision in every one of the last five years. Repetition on that scale is not bad luck, and applying a persistence filter is something no other published map does.