States With the Most Registered Vehicles

The United States has more than 297 million registered vehicles. Here are the ten states with the most, based on the latest available data from the Federal Highway Administration. The figures cover private, commercial, and publicly owned vehicles of all types.

California has the most of any state, with 30,940,652 vehicles registered. That is more than the bottom twenty states combined. Texas ranks second with 23,606,401, and New York is third with 20,991,098 vehicles.

Population and Ownership

The majority of the list above correlates with population. California has 7.3 million more vehicles than Texas, and that gap alone is larger than the entire vehicle count of most states.

However, drivers who own more than one vehicle lift some states up the list. Ohio is a good example. It ranks fifth in registered vehicles despite being the seventh most populous state.

Nationally, 36 percent of households own two vehicles, and another 22 percent own three or more, and in rural states, that share runs even higher.

The top ten states hold more than half of every registered vehicle in the country, at 52.3 percent. The remaining 142 million vehicles are split across the other forty states and Washington, D.C., which has the fewest in the country, with 302,647 registered vehicles.

States With the Fewest Registered Vehicles

The states with the fewest registered vehicles are Rhode Island, Alaska, Vermont, and Delaware. Each has fewer than 900,000, reflecting small populations rather than low car ownership.

Drivers Are Keeping Their Vehicles Longer Than Ever

The average ownership period of a new vehicle in the United States is now 8.4 years, with some models being held 9.7 to 11.4 years. This average has increased roughly 23% since the late 2000s, when most drivers kept vehicles for about 5 to 6 years. Today,

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