Microproduct data guideintermediate

NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System

Census of fatal U.S. motor-vehicle crashes for building road-safety maps and fatality-trend monitors.

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At a glance

Difficulty
Intermediate — some data preparation helps
Size
Medium · 0.05–2 GB
Formats
CSV, SAS, ZIP
Access
Download or API
API key
Not required
Provider
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
Updates
Annual
Data terms
NHTSA public-information terms

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

FARS is a census of fatal crashes on U.S. public roads. Start with one year's accident CSV. It does not include non-fatal crashes, and FARS is not the same as NHTSA recall records.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An internet connection
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Open the NHTSA datasets and APIs page and choose FARS, not the recalls API.
  2. 2.Request one year and one state from the Crash API accident dataset.
  3. 3.Keep state, county, date, and fatality count.
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3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://crashviewer.nhtsa.dot.gov/CrashAPI/FARSData/GetFARSData",
    params={
        "dataset": "Accident",
        "FromYear": "2022",
        "ToYear": "2022",
        "State": "12",
        "format": "json",
    },
    timeout=60,
)
response.raise_for_status()
crashes = pd.DataFrame(response.json().get("Results", [[]])[0])
crashes["retrieved_at_utc"] = pd.Timestamp.now(tz="UTC")
print(crashes.head())
4

Test a useful signal

Profile one state's fatal crashes

Test whether a FARS extract can power a bounded road-safety sketch.

  1. 01Keep crash identifier, date, county, and fatality count from the bounded year.
  2. 02Count fatal crashes by county and list records missing coordinates if present.
  3. 03Explain that FARS covers fatal crashes only and is not NHTSA's vehicle-recall file.

Dataset details

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-18. Temporal coverage: annual FARS files from 1975-present.

Theme

Health, Food & Safety

Domains

TransportationVehicle SafetyPublic Health

Data types

Event DataTabularCrash Records

Tasks

Safety AnalysisMappingTrend Analysis

Geography

United States

Formats

CSVSASZIP

Provider

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

Data terms

NHTSA public-information terms