Top 100 Countries by Road Fatalities per 100,000 Inhabitants, 2025

Road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants: what the 2025 edition measures

This ranking tracks the estimated road traffic death rate per 100,000 people—a standard public-health way to compare how lethal road environments are across countries of very different size. A rate (rather than a raw death count) makes it possible to compare risk at the population level, and to discuss equity: high rates are often concentrated where safer infrastructure, vehicle standards, enforcement capacity, and post-crash care lag behind motorisation and urban growth.

Definition: what “road traffic death rate per 100,000” means

Conceptually, the indicator is a ratio. The numerator is the estimated number of people who die from injuries sustained in road traffic crashes within a defined period; the denominator is the total resident population. Presenting the result “per 100,000” is a scaling choice that makes differences visible without dealing with very small decimals.

Two countries with identical rates can still have very different absolute burdens: a large country can have a lower rate but a larger number of deaths, while a smaller country can have a higher rate but fewer total deaths. In road safety, both views matter: the rate signals relative risk; the absolute count signals total burden and potential health-system load.

Why WHO uses estimates and why numbers can differ from national reports

Road injury mortality is not measured with the same completeness everywhere. Some countries have high-quality, timely cause-of-death registration, while others face underreporting, delays, or incomplete coding of external causes. To enable comparability, WHO publishes a harmonised indicator series that can incorporate multiple data sources and modelling where direct measurement is not fully reliable.

That is why “estimates vs registration” is not a technical footnote—it changes how the ranking should be read. A difference between a WHO estimate and a national figure does not automatically mean one side is “wrong”; it can reflect different case definitions, time windows, adjustment for undercounting, and the practical limits of death registration systems.

“Per 100,000” does not prove causality and it does not adjust for exposure (vehicle-kilometres travelled, the share of motorcycles, the mix of rural vs urban driving, or freight intensity). It is best interpreted as a high-level risk signal that becomes more informative when linked to context: mobility patterns, road user mix, enforcement, vehicle fleet quality, and access to emergency care.

Context: WHO’s road safety topic summary notes that about 1.2 million people died in road traffic crashes in 2021, and that progress since 2010 has been modest relative to the ambition of halving deaths by 2030.

Table 1 — TOP 100 countries by estimated road traffic death rate (per 100,000), 2025 edition