Top 100 Cities by Traffic Congestion Index, 2025

by admin December 16, 2025 4951 16 min read

StatRanker • Mobility

Where Traffic Feels Slowest: A Global Top-100 Snapshot of Urban Congestion (2025 edition)

This ranking focuses on a single, consistent headline metric: average travel time to drive 10 km (minutes:seconds) in a city’s defined area, as reported in the TomTom Traffic Index 2025 edition (covering 2024 traffic patterns). Using “time per 10 km” keeps comparisons intuitive: it translates congestion into the unit most people and businesses actually feel—minutes lost on everyday trips.

How to read it: a difference of even 2–3 minutes per 10 km scales quickly across commuting, deliveries, and service calls. Values are presented as rounded journey times for comparability across cities.

Table 1 — TOP 100 Cities by Average Travel Time per 10 km (2025 edition, data year 2024)

Rank	City (Country)	Avg travel time / 10 km

Bar chart — Top 20 slowest cities by travel time (10 km)

The chart shows the Top 20 from the Top-100 list, converted to minutes (rounded). Small rounding differences can occur when converting mm:ss into decimal minutes.

What sits behind congestion: intensity, exposure, and “time lost”

The main ranking uses average travel time per 10 km. That metric is excellent for comparing how “slow” a typical trip feels, but it does not fully express how much congestion accumulates into a year. To capture the exposure side, TomTom also reports time lost—an annual estimate of extra travel time during peak periods.

Interpretation: two cities can have similar travel times per 10 km, but different annual time lost. The difference is often explained by peak duration, commuting intensity, and how frequently congestion spills beyond the core rush hours.

Table 2 — Top 50 cities by annual time lost in peak traffic (2025 edition)

Values are shown in hours per year and rounded to whole hours for comparability.

Rank	City (Country)	Time lost

Scatter — congestion level (%) vs. annual time lost (hours)

This plot tests a simple question: do higher congestion percentages reliably translate into higher annual time lost? In practice, the association is positive but imperfect—because “time lost” is also driven by how long and how often peak conditions persist.

Each point is a city with both metrics available in the embedded dataset. Congestion is expressed as a percentage, while time lost is expressed in hours per year.

What the ranking implies for cities, economies, and daily life

In a time-based ranking, a city’s position is best understood as a summary of how efficiently its street network converts demand into movement. When average travel time per 10 km rises, the burden is not evenly distributed: it is concentrated among commuters with fixed schedules, time-sensitive services, and freight movement that is constrained to specific hours. This is why congestion is often correlated with wider economic frictions—higher costs per delivery, wider buffers in scheduling, and reduced predictability in service response.

Because the Top 100 list is global, “high congestion” can reflect different underlying mechanisms across regions: rapid demand growth in motorisation, dense historic cores, peak-hour concentration of jobs, limited rapid transit alternatives, or physical bottlenecks in river crossings and ring-road interfaces.

Policy takeaway The largest near-term gains often come from reliability improvements rather than headline speed: incident management, signal coordination, bottleneck mitigation, and targeted peak spreading. Over the long run, sustained improvement typically requires aligning land use, high-capacity transit, and pricing or access rules that reflect scarce road space.

Table 3 — Regional leaders (Top 3 cities per region)

Regional summaries highlight where congestion is most concentrated within comparable contexts. The metric reference is consistent with the main ranking: average travel time per 10 km (2025 edition, data year 2024).

Region	Top 3 cities (ranked)	Metric reference
Latin America	Barranquilla (Colombia) • Lima (Peru) • Trujillo (Peru)	Avg travel time per 10 km
Asia	Kolkata (India) • Bengaluru (India) • Pune (India)	Avg travel time per 10 km
Europe	London (United Kingdom) • Dublin (Ireland) • Bucharest (Romania)	Avg travel time per 10 km
North America	Mexico City (Mexico) • New York (United States) • Los Angeles (United States)	Avg travel time per 10 km
Africa	Nairobi (Kenya) • Cape Town (South Africa) • Lagos (Nigeria)	Avg travel time per 10 km
Oceania	Sydney (Australia) • Melbourne (Australia) • Auckland (New Zealand)	Avg travel time per 10 km

Primary data sources and technical notes

TomTom Traffic Index — official index hub. Definitions, city pages, and global coverage.
https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/
TomTom Traffic Index — ranking pages. Interactive city ranking used to compile comparable city lists.
https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/ranking/
TomTom Traffic Index — city-level methodology notes (within city pages). Metric framing and reported indicators at city level.
https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/
TomTom press materials for the 2025 edition. Edition-level summaries and interpretive context.
https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/press-releases/