Americans now spend almost 3 full days stuck in traffic each year, per a new report
The time we spend on congested roads is rising — but it’s not just rush hour workers causing the holdup.
If you’re reading this at your desk, having just endured another white-knuckled, mood-ruining commute that you swear never used to be this bad, you’re not alone: Americans sat in traffic for a whopping 63 hours on average last year, a new report found.
You are traffic
That’s the highest level that the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, which published its 2025 Urban Mobility Report last week, has recorded since it started tracking the data in 1982. Of course, measurements vary quite widely across the 494 areas that make up the Institute’s top-line figure, though that won’t make the idea of spending almost three days stuck in traffic any easier to digest for millions of Americans.
Though the pandemic curbed congestion on US roads, as car journeys took a backseat in a locked-down world and nature finally started to heal, America’s roads have wound up more blocked than ever — delays are up nine hours on average from the 2019 level.
Interestingly, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute actually lays a lot of the blame for the surging stats on the way that our driving habits have changed postpandemic, with midday, midweek, and weekend slowdowns all now accounting for a higher share of total delays, rather than typical commuting hours.
According to the report, drivers in very large urban areas (populations over 3 million) spent some 93 hours in traffic last year, with the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim and San Francisco-Oakland areas in California, perhaps unsurprisingly, topping the congestion charts in 2024.
The Institute’s area-based analysis, for what it’s worth, differs from the INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard, which put New York City as America’s most congested city in June — second globally to Istanbul.
