Registered automobiles
Automobiles registered during the year, taxicabs included.
More on how it is measured
- FHWA Highway Statistics table MV-1 counts the vehicles registered in each state during the year, from the records of the state motor vehicle agencies: private, commercial and publicly owned vehicles, but not those of the armed forces.
- A vehicle is counted in the state that registered it.
From the 2012 table FHWA allocates light-duty vehicles between automobiles and trucks with its own method, and automobiles fall from 125.7 million in 2011 to 111.3 million in 2012 while trucks rise from 118.5 million to 133.1 million, so the split is not comparable across those years. The all motor vehicles total is. Many sport utility vehicles, pickups and vans count as trucks, not automobiles. States keep their registers differently: some report registration transactions during the year or vehicles on multi-year registrations instead of active registrations, and a change in what a state reports can move its count sharply from one year to the next (Delaware in 2021, New York in 2024). Values for states FHWA estimated, or for which it repeated the previous year, are marked estimated. FHWA publishes some counts with fractions; they are rounded to whole vehicles.
Key facts
- Registered automobiles in the United States was 97.41 million in 2024, according to the Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation.
- California had the highest registered automobiles of 51 states in 2024, at 12.98 million, and Alaska the lowest, at 122,678. Source: the Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation.
- Published for 52 places, with figures from 2010 to 2024.
Rankings
US states by registered automobiles, 2024
Places with data
Countries
Regions and states
- California
- Texas
- Florida
- New York
- Pennsylvania
- Illinois
- Ohio
- Georgia
- North Carolina
- Michigan
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- Washington
- New Jersey
Use this data in your AI agent
Invokely serves this figure to AI assistants through MCP and to code through a REST API, with the source and citation attached. Ask your assistant:
Which places have the highest registered automobiles? Use official data and cite it.
rank_places {"indicator":"registered_automobiles","level":"region","within":"United States"}
GET https://invokely.ai/api/v1/rank?indicator=registered_automobiles&level=region&within=United%20States