California fatal crashes

2019–2023 are the latest five final FARS years. The official 2024 national CSV ZIP exists, but NHTSA’s April 2026 manual and research note identify 2024 as the Annual Report File (ARF), subject to revision, and 2023 as Final. This compilation therefore excludes 2024. See NHTSA's April 2026 release note for the final-file and Annual Report File distinction.

NHTSA defines a qualifying FARS crash as involving a motor vehicle on a trafficway customarily open to the public and a vehicle occupant or nonoccupant who dies within 30 days of the crash. FARS is a census of qualifying fatal crashes, not an estimate of all crashes or injuries.

Each ACCIDENT.csv record is one fatal crash; deaths are the sum of its FATALS field. Involvement uses NHTSA's official ACC_AUX.CSV crash flags: A_LT for large trucks, A_MC for motorcycles and A_PED for pedestrians. A value of 1 means yes. The auxiliary and accident files are joined by STATE and ST_CASE, so each crash counts once per category. A person or vehicle need not have died for its involvement to count. Involvement does not establish fault or causation.

NHTSA defines large trucks as commercial or noncommercial trucks with a gross vehicle weight rating over 10,000 pounds. Motorcycles include motorcycles, motor scooters and mopeds within NHTSA's classification; pedestrian involvement uses NHTSA's pedestrian flag. Vehicle classification began using vPIC in 2020, and NHTSA cautions that these vehicle-type counts are not comparable with 2019 and earlier. Beginning in 2022, motorized bicycles were classified as pedalcycles rather than motorcycles; crashes involving only motorized bicycles are no longer included in FARS. These changes affect involvement comparisons across years.

The motorcycle section counts killed motorcycle operators/riders and passengers from PERSON.csv, using INJ_SEV, PER_TYP, BODY_TYP, HELM_USE, HOUR and VE_FORMS in the same final-file records. Alcohol involvement is omitted from this edition because NHTSA's alcohol-impaired-driving measure uses BAC values reported to FARS and BAC values imputed when test results are unknown; this compilation does not impute missing BAC values.

The national total includes the 50 states and District of Columbia, and excludes Puerto Rico. Road classes use FUNC_SYS in ACCIDENT.csv; county names and codes use COUNTYNAME and COUNTY. Road and county tables cover 2023; county tables are limited to ten records per state. Downloads retain these same scopes.

Shares divide the distinct involved-crash count by all fatal crashes in the same geography and year. We publish the numerator and denominator without percentage rounding. A death difference subtracts the first year from the last; five-year totals sum the annual counts. No adjustments, estimates or forecasts are added.

Vehicle miles traveled are not supplied in these imported FARS CSV files, so this edition does not report deaths per 100 million VMT. Counts alone do not compare exposure or establish which state, county or road class has a greater crash risk.

People's Justice is a legal-information publisher, not a law firm. Review our publishing methodology or request a correction.