Gallons of Gas per Driver per Year, by State (2024)

The average licensed driver in the United States burned about 531 gallons of gasoline on the road in 2024. The Federal Highway Administration counts 127.3 billion gallons of highway gasoline and 239.8 million licensed drivers, which makes 531 gallons each. By state the figure runs from 233 in the District of Columbia to 795 in Alabama, and at the EIA’s modeled 2024 state prices that is about 1,744 dollars a year for the national driver, between 810 in the District and 2,384 in Kentucky.

Rankings that circulate under the same question print much larger numbers. One of them puts Wyoming at 1,627 gallons per driver. The arithmetic behind it is correct, but its numerator is every gallon of motor fuel taxed in Wyoming in 2022, diesel and alternative fuels included. Gasoline was 799 of those gallons per driver, 622 burned on the highway and 177 in nonhighway use. The other 828 gallons per driver were diesel and alternative fuels, much of it presumably freight moving through the state, and a Wyoming driver with a pickup does not burn anything like 1,627 gallons.

374 to 781 gallons: two choices behind one national number

The federal source is Table MF-21 of Highway Statistics, “Motor-Fuel Use,” which FHWA builds from the reports that state motor-fuel tax agencies file. It splits each state’s fuel into combined gasoline and gasohol and a second group called special fuel, which the 2024 edition labels diesel and alternative fuels. Within each group it separates highway use, which includes private and commercial vehicles and an estimate of public use, from nonhighway use, which FHWA estimates with a model because tax records do not show where a gallon is burned. The table says plainly that public use and nonhighway use were estimated by FHWA.

That gives three usable numerators. Highway gasoline, 127.3 billion gallons in 2024, is the closest to what cars, SUVs, pickups and vans bought. Total gasoline adds 14.3 billion gallons of nonhighway use, which is 10.1% of all gasoline: gasoline burned in equipment that does not travel on public roads. EIA’s State Energy Data System notes give logging saws as one example of that equipment. All motor fuel adds 45.7 billion gallons of diesel and alternative fuels, bringing the total to 187.2 billion. Each can be divided by licensed drivers, by Census residents, or by the driving-age population, and the answers differ by more than a factor of two.

The denominators disagree too. The same DL-1C table prints a total population of 339,058,370, which is 1.05 million fewer people than the Census Bureau’s July 1, 2024 estimate of 340,110,988. Dividing highway gasoline by FHWA’s figure gives 375.4 gallons per resident instead of 374.2. The difference is small at the national level and larger in some states: the District of Columbia is 3,134 people lower in the FHWA table than in the Census estimate, and California is 133,587 lower. The Census number is used for residents throughout so that the population source is one that anyone can download.

A gallon in this table is a gallon that a state taxed or reported, not a gallon measured at an engine. FHWA’s notes on the table say the series rests on state tax-agency reports, that some states allow distributors a flat percentage for losses in storage and handling, and that the allowance used in the analysis was capped at one percent. Because the tax point is usually the wholesale rack, a gallon is assigned to the state where it was sold, not the state where the car was registered or where the tank was finally emptied. For a state that borders a lower-tax neighbor, or one that straddles a freight route, sold and burned can be different places. For the national total the two are the same thing, which is why the national figure of 531 gallons is more reliable than any single state’s.

Reproducing the Wyoming figure of 1,627 gallons

Two widely read state rankings can be matched to the decimal from FHWA’s tables. The 24/7 Wall St list published on April 24, 2023 says it reviewed FHWA data for 2021 on motor fuel consumption and licensed drivers; it gives Wyoming 1,712.1 gallons, North Dakota 1,277.0 and Mississippi 1,225.4, with Hawaii lowest at 511.8. The ConsumerAffairs ranking, republished by Stacker on June 1, 2024, uses 2022 FHWA data and describes its method as “dividing the total amount of motor fuel used in each state by the number of licensed drivers.” Table 2 repeats that division from the 2021 and 2022 tables and then divides highway gasoline alone.

All twelve recomputed figures land on the printed ones. So the rankings are not wrong arithmetic; they answer a different question from the one in their headlines. “Gas” in those pieces means every gallon of motor fuel taxed in the state: gasoline, diesel and, since the table’s 2024 relabeling, alternative fuels. In Wyoming gasoline of all kinds was 50% of that fuel in 2021 and 49% in 2022, and highway gasoline alone 40% and 38%. In Hawaii all gasoline was 90% and 89%, and in New York 79% and 77%. Diesel use in a state with heavy through traffic says almost nothing about what the state’s own drivers spend at the pump, and it makes the top of the list look as if Wyoming drivers burn several times the fuel of a typical American.

The same mix explains why such rankings disagree with each other by hundreds of gallons. A list that counts all motor fuel per driver puts the national average above 781 gallons for 2024. A list that counts highway gasoline per driver gives 531. A list that counts all gasoline per resident gives 416, and one that counts highway gasoline per resident gives 374. Four defensible methods give four national numbers, from 374 to 781 gallons, and the two rankings reproduced above state their method only in a methodology paragraph, not in the headline.

The chart shows the mechanism. In the 2024 table special fuel is 54% of Wyoming’s highway fuel, 44% of North Dakota’s, 43% of Alaska’s and 43% of New Mexico’s, against 26% for the country, and those are the four states in the chart whose dots sit farthest to the right of their gasoline dot. Alabama, Mississippi and Texas have more modest shares of special fuel but also high gasoline use, so they rank near the top on both measures. Hawaii, New York and the District of Columbia are near the bottom on both. The rank correlation between the two per-driver measures across the 51 places is 0.84, strong but not identical. The largest rank swaps are at places with a large diesel or off-road share: Alaska moves 33 places between the two measures and Idaho 18.

The driver count is the weaker half of the ratio

Gasoline per driver is gasoline per resident divided by the number of licensed drivers per resident. For Kentucky the identity reads 454 gallons per resident divided by 0.605 drivers per resident, which is 751 gallons per driver. Kentucky’s gallons per resident put it ninth in the country, but its licence rate is the second lowest among the 50 states, at 756 licensed drivers per 1,000 people aged 16 and over against 872 nationally. Dividing a middling quantity by a small count produces a top-three result. Kansas has the same pattern, with 745 licensed drivers per 1,000 adults, and so does Texas at 800.

At the other end the count is too high to be plausible. Arkansas lists 2,969,286 licensed drivers against 2,470,061 people aged 16 and over in the same FHWA table, which is 1,202 licences per 1,000 adults, and Delaware lists 907,403 against 861,117, or 1,054. Those are more drivers than eligible people. Licence rolls can run ahead of the population when they include expired, duplicate or out-of-state-resident records, and FHWA’s table does not say which applies. Either way, Arkansas shows only 459 gallons per driver, 42nd of 51, but 442 per resident, 13th, and the per-driver number is an artifact of the licence count.

The year-to-year counts show how soft the denominator can be. Kansas lost 13.8% of its licensed drivers between the 2023 and 2024 tables and the District of Columbia lost 19.0%, while the national total rose 0.9%. No population moves that way in a year. Alabama’s and Arkansas’s 2023 entries were 2022 data republished, which is why Arkansas appears to gain 28.7% in 2024. These swings flow straight into gasoline per driver. Kansas goes from 605 gallons per driver on the 2023 tables to 729 on the 2024 ones, a change driven mostly by the driver count, since Kansas’s highway gasoline moved by only 3.8% over the same two tables.

All 50 states and DC, 2024

Table 4 lists every state with highway gasoline from MF-21, licensed drivers from DL-1C, residents from the Census Bureau and the SEDS price. The sort order is gallons per driver. The flag column marks the rows where the next section finds a reason to doubt the simple reading. The state median is 529 gallons per driver, and the middle half of states sits between 470 and 608.

Where the state numbers mislead

Alabama, Mississippi and Wyoming are high on every measure

Some of the top of the list is real. Alabama leads per resident as well as per driver, at 587 gallons a year against 374 nationally, and its licence rate of 739 per 1,000 residents is close to the national 705, so the denominator does not manufacture the result. Wyoming at 537 and Mississippi at 529 follow. The tables do not say why. The candidates are long rural distances, a high share of light trucks, lower prices than the coasts, and gallons sold to visitors and through traffic that are counted in the state but not in its driver or resident totals. FHWA’s vehicle-miles tables could separate the first from the last, but dividing gallons by miles would be a different article, and this one does not claim an explanation the data cannot show.

Fuel bought across a tax line: New Hampshire and Delaware

Both states ask less in fuel tax than every neighbor. The EIA’s tax table for July 1, 2024 gives New Hampshire a total state gasoline tax and fee of 23.8 cents a gallon against 27.4 in Massachusetts, 31.4 in Maine and 32.6 in Vermont. Delaware charges 23.0 cents, against 46.3 in Maryland, 58.7 in Pennsylvania and 42.35 in New Jersey. A Maryland driver who fills a 15-gallon tank in Delaware saves about 3.49 dollars in state tax. The gallon counts fit that incentive. New Hampshire is seventh per resident at 458 gallons while Massachusetts is 337 and Vermont 402; Delaware is 14th at 439 while Maryland is 348 and Pennsylvania 324.

The match proves little by itself. Delaware’s licence count is above its adult population, and New Hampshire’s high licence rate pushes it down the per-driver list. What the comparison does show is how little a state’s gallons-per-driver figure says about its own residents. A tax table and a neighbor’s border decide part of it. A state next to a higher-tax neighbor sells gallons to the neighbor’s drivers, and the neighbor’s statistics look correspondingly lean. The deep dive on why gas prices differ by state lays out the 51-row tax table behind these gaps.

Cities and visitors

The District of Columbia is last on every gasoline measure: 233 gallons per driver and 140 per resident. Its tax of 34.9 cents is not the explanation, because that sits below both Virginia’s 40.4 and Maryland’s 46.3, so a price gap does not push its drivers across the line. The likelier reasons are those of any compact city with 702,250 residents: short trips, transit, and fill-ups in the suburbs, none of which these tables measure. The licence count is unstable as well, down 19% from 2023 to 2024. Treat the District as a data point about one city.

Visitors are the opposite case and are harder to see. Gasoline sold to tourists is in a state’s numerator but not in its driver count, so heavily visited states should look high. Florida at 486 gallons per driver, Nevada at 483 and Hawaii at 412 are all below the state median of 529. If visitors lift them at all, the lift is too small to show against the effect of local driving patterns, and a page that attributes a state’s ranking to tourism without a volume series is guessing.

Off-highway gasoline and the 2024 model change

Nonhighway use is the one part of the table FHWA models rather than counts, and the 2024 edition says it uses the “2025 Nonhighway Model.” Nationally nonhighway gasoline was 10.1% of all gasoline in 2024. In Alaska it was 23.2%, in Idaho 20.6%, Minnesota 18.1%, Wisconsin 17.3%, Iowa 16.9%, and in Wyoming and North Dakota about 15%. The tables do not break the nonhighway total down by equipment, so the reasons for Alaska’s share cannot be read from them. Because FHWA estimates nonhighway use rather than counting it, and the highway figure depends on that estimate, those states’ highway figures are the least certain, and they carry the N flag in Table 4.

The model change also breaks year-over-year comparisons. Between the 2023 and 2024 tables national highway gasoline fell 3.3%, from 131.7 to 127.3 billion gallons, while nonhighway gasoline rose 41%, from 10.1 to 14.3 billion. Total gasoline barely moved, from 141.8 to 141.6 billion, a change of 0.2%. FHWA’s footnote warns that the estimates may not be comparable to prior years because of the revised procedures. The highway line alone does not show that people drove 3% less in 2024. To compare years, use total gasoline per driver, which was 597 gallons on the 2023 tables and 590 on the 2024 ones, with the driver-count caveats above attached.

From gallons to dollars per driver

How good the state price is

The EIA does not publish a retail regular-gasoline price for every state. Its weekly and annual series cover nine: California, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Texas and Washington. For the other 42 places, the closest official figure is the State Energy Data System, which publishes a 2024 motor gasoline price for each state in dollars per million Btu. Its technical notes say that, since the EIA stopped the retail survey after data year 2010, SEDS estimates the nine surveyed states from the EIA-878 weekly survey’s growth rates and moves every other state with its regional (PAD district) price change from the prior year’s state price. The series includes federal and state motor fuel taxes and excludes general sales taxes and local fuel taxes.

So the dollar column is a modeled estimate, not a survey result, and it is not a regular-grade price. The conversion is made at 0.12023 million Btu per gallon, the ratio that SEDS’s own 2024 expenditure, consumption and price series imply, and the national result is 3.286 dollars a gallon. Table 5 tests the model where a survey exists.

Across the nine surveyed states the SEDS price lands within 4.1% of the survey average: above it in 5 states, below it in 3 and level in Washington. The gap runs from 4.1% below to 2.9% above. California, Florida and New York are the three where SEDS is lowest against the survey, by 2.3%, 4.1% and 4.1% respectively. A dollar column built on this series is good for comparing states with each other and for a ballpark of annual cost, and it does not support cents-level claims. The deep dive on AAA versus EIA price averages explains why even two published averages for the same week and state differ.

Dollars per driver, and the offset price creates

Multiply the gallons by the price and the ranking reshuffles. Kentucky tops the dollar list at 2,384 dollars, from 751 gallons at $3.174 a gallon; Alabama is second at 2,296, Kansas third at 2,260 and Wyoming fourth at 2,184. The District of Columbia is last at 810 and New York next to last at 1,241 dollars. Excluding the District, the gallons-per-driver gap between first and last state is a factor of 2.04, and the dollar gap is a factor of 1.92. High-price states use fewer gallons, so the price partly offsets the quantity. California’s 436 gallons rank 44th, but at $4.42 a gallon its 1,926 dollars rank 14th, and Hawaii’s 412 gallons rank 46th while its 1,946 dollars rank 13th. Texas, with the cheapest gasoline among the larger states, spends 2,076 dollars per driver, 9th, because it burns 720 gallons at $2.882.

A worked example for one state, using only the table’s inputs: Alabama’s highway gasoline is 3,028,297 thousand gallons, which is 3,028,297,000 gallons, divided by 3,810,682 licensed drivers, giving 794.7 gallons (795 rounded) per driver. The SEDS price is 24.03 dollars per million Btu times 0.12023 million Btu per gallon, or 2.889 dollars a gallon. Gallons times price is 2,296 dollars. The same gallons spread over Alabama’s residents rather than its drivers cost 1,696 dollars per person.

The same gallons at October 2026 prices

Gasoline is a good deal more expensive now than in 2024. The EIA’s weekly regular price for the week of October 26, 2026 was $4.269 nationally, against an average of $3.304 for 2024. Table 6 holds the 2024 gallons per driver fixed, which is a what-if and not a forecast of 2026 consumption, and prices them at the nine states’ published weekly regular prices.

At the national price the same 530.7 gallons (531 rounded) cost 1,753 dollars at the 2024 average and 2,266 dollars at the October 26 price, an extra 512 dollars a year. The table carries the unrounded gallons, so 531 times $3.304, which is $1,754, comes out one dollar above the printed figure. Texas drivers, with the lowest regular price of the nine, face an increase of 555 dollars from the same gallons; California drivers face 593. The percentage rise in cost is the same as the percentage rise in price, 29.2% nationally, because gallons are held constant. If the price stays near $4.27, people will drive some fewer gallons, so this is a ceiling for the what-if rather than a prediction. For the weekly state, city and PADD prices behind the snapshot, see the PetroEyes gas price tracker.

Which version of the number fits which purpose

The tables support four different questions, and each has a measure that fits it and one that misleads. Table 7 matches them. The pattern behind the matches is that the denominator should be the thing the question is about: people for a question about places, drivers only for a question about licence holders, and the same fuel in both years for a question about change.

Your own gallons against the state average

The state figure averages all licensed drivers, including people who drive little or not at all, and it counts the gasoline vans and pickups that run commercial routes. A better estimate of your own use needs two inputs you know: annual miles and your vehicle’s miles per gallon. Gallons equal miles divided by miles per gallon. Table 8 is an illustration, not a survey. It picks round inputs so that you can see how far a plausible driver lies from the national average of 531 gallons.

A driver covering 12,000 miles a year at 25 miles per gallon uses 480 gallons, which is 51 gallons below the national average of 531. At $3.304 a gallon that is $1,586, and at $4.269 it is $2,049. A 16,000-mile driver at 20 miles per gallon uses 800, about the same as the Alabama average. The national average therefore describes a driver who covers roughly 13,000 miles in a 25-mpg vehicle, but a commuter in a truck and a retiree in a hybrid sit well on either side of it.

Two rules of thumb follow from the tables. First, when a ranking quotes more than about 900 gallons per driver for a state, check whether it includes diesel; the 2024 highway gasoline figure for no state exceeds 795. Second, when a state looks very high or very low per driver, compare its per-resident rank before drawing any conclusion about how its people drive. For how a state’s price gets to the pump in the first place, the gasoline price breakdown separates crude, refining, distribution and tax, and the California price analysis shows why a state with the highest regular price of the nine EIA surveys pays only about 10% more than the national average per driver (Table 4), while its price is about a third higher.

Long-run price comparisons need inflation adjustment before any state-by-year cost is stated. The inflation-adjusted gas price history converts every year since 1978 to a common dollar so that a 2024 bill can be set against an earlier one. And the diesel price guide covers the fuel that makes up most of the difference between the rankings and the totals above.

Data and sources, all checked November 3, 2026: Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics: Table MF-21, Motor-Fuel Use, 2024 (December 2025) and Table DL-1C, Licensed Drivers by Sex, 2024 (February 2026), with the 2023, 2022 and 2021 editions (MF-21 2023, MF-21 2022, MF-21 2021, DL-1C 2023, DL-1C 2022, DL-1C 2021). FHWA had not published a 2025 edition on that date. U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2024 state population estimates (July 1, 2024). U.S. Energy Information Administration: State Energy Data System (2024 motor gasoline price, expenditure and consumption files; technical notes on petroleum prices and petroleum consumption); Weekly Retail Gasoline and Diesel Prices (national and nine state series, annual and weekly, release of October 27, 2026); Federal and State Motor Fuels Taxes (July 2024 sheet). Published rankings reproduced: 24/7 Wall St, States Where Drivers Use The Most Gas Each Year (April 24, 2023) and the ConsumerAffairs ranking as republished by Stacker, States with the most gas guzzling drivers (June 1, 2024). Ratios, per-driver and per-resident figures, dollar costs and rank comparisons are computed from the sources above.