- Adults with less than a high school education drive 11.8 miles a day; adults with a professional or doctoral degree drive 28.6 miles a day, a 142.4% gap.
- Most of that gap is explained by income, not education itself. Comparing education tiers within the same income bracket shrinks the gap sharply in most brackets, and it reverses entirely in one ($25k–49.9k, where the least-educated group drives more).
- A real, positive education effect still shows up in 5 of 6 income brackets after this control, ranging from a modest 20.4% to a large 70.3%, but the size is inconsistent enough that it can't be summarized as one clean number.
01 Introduction
Education correlates with almost everything: income, occupation, where people live, how long they commute. That makes it a genuinely hard variable to study on its own, since any raw relationship between education and driving could just as easily be a relationship between income and driving wearing an education-shaped disguise. This article does both halves of that analysis: first the raw, uncontrolled numbers, then the same comparison repeated inside fixed income brackets, to see how much of the raw gap survives.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use person file, variable EDUC.02 The Raw Numbers: A Steep Education Gradient
Looking only at educational attainment, without accounting for anything else, driving distance climbs steeply and almost monotonically with each additional level of education.
Calculated by this site: FHWA/BTS 2022 NHTS person file (perv2pub.csv, EDUC, restricted to R_AGE≥25) joined to the public-use daily trip file (tripv2pub.csv) by household and person ID, summing TRPMILES for personal-vehicle (TRPTRANS 01, 02, 03, 04, 06, car, van, SUV, pickup, or RV) trips where DRIVER=01, weighted by WTPERFIN.| Education Level | Avg. Daily Miles |
|---|---|
| Less than high school | 11.8 |
| Some high school, no diploma | 12.0 |
| High school graduate | 20.0 |
| Some college | 24.4 |
| Associate's degree | 26.6 |
| Bachelor's degree | 27.3 |
| Master's degree | 26.4 |
| Professional/Doctoral degree | 28.6 |
A 142.4% gap between the least and most educated adults is a large number, large enough to look like a genuine, direct effect of education on driving. The next section tests whether it actually is.
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Use the Calculator03 But Is It Education, or Just Income?
To separate the two, this site grouped adults into three broad education tiers (high school or less; some college or an associate's degree; a bachelor's degree or higher) and compared them separately within each of six household income brackets. If education were driving the pattern on its own, the same upward step should appear inside every bracket. It doesn't.
Calculated by this site: FHWA/BTS 2022 NHTS household file (hhv2pub.csv, HHFAMINC) joined to the person and trip files as above, cross-tabulated by education tier within each income bracket, weighted by WTPERFIN. Income brackets match does-income-affect-how-much-you-drive.html for consistency across this site.| Household Income | HS or Less | Some College/Assoc. | Bachelor's+ | Bachelor's+ vs. HS or Less |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $25k | 9.8 | 11.3 | 11.8 | +20.4% |
| $25k–49.9k | 20.4 | 17.9 | 18.6 | −8.8% |
| $50k–74.9k | 20.2 | 24.2 | 34.4 | +70.3% |
| $75k–99.9k | 23.8 | 26.8 | 29.6 | +24.4% |
| $100k–149.9k | 18.3 | 28.1 | 27.0 | +47.5% |
| $150k+ | 20.7 | 40.0 | 26.8 | +29.5% |
Five of the six brackets still show a positive Bachelor's-plus-over-high-school-or-less gap, so education isn't purely a stand-in for income. But the size of that gap swings wildly, from a modest 20.4% at the bottom of the income scale to 70.3% in the $50,000–74,900 bracket, and it flips negative entirely in the $25,000–49,900 bracket, where the least-educated group actually drives the most. That inconsistency is itself the finding: there is no single "education effect" that holds steady once income is accounted for.
Calculated from the table above.04 Why the Within-Income Pattern Isn't Clean
NHTS doesn't ask people to explain their own mileage, so this section is this site's own interpretation of the pattern above, not a separately published government finding. Education and income are so entangled in the U.S. population that comparing education tiers within a fixed income bracket doesn't compare otherwise-similar people; it compares different kinds of people who happen to share an income level for very different reasons. A high-school-or-less adult earning $150,000 or more is a demographically unusual case, likely a business owner, tradesperson, or commission-based salesperson, categorically different from the far more numerous bachelor's-degree professionals who dominate that income bracket (34.4 million weighted, versus 5.3 million for high-school-or-less at that income). The reversal in the $25,000–49,900 bracket and the unusually high 40.0 miles/day for "some college" at $150,000+ likely reflect similar composition effects rather than a stable, mechanical relationship between education and driving.
This paragraph is this site's own interpretation of the pattern shown in Sections 02-03, not a finding separately published by NHTS or any federal agency.05 What This Means
The honest answer to "does education affect how much you drive" is that the simple, widely-quotable version of that question (a 142.4% gap between the least and most educated) is mostly a restatement of income's effect, not a separate discovery. A more careful answer, controlling for income, still finds a real but inconsistent education effect in most income brackets, layered on top of income's much larger and more reliable effect documented in this site's income analysis. Anyone trying to estimate their own driving from demographic averages should weight income far more heavily than education, and treat any single "by education level" statistic, including the headline number in this article's own key findings, as a number that mostly describes income differences wearing an education label.
06 Data Sources
- Federal Highway Administration / Bureau of Transportation Statistics: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use household file (variable HHFAMINC), person file (variables EDUC, R_AGE), and daily trip file (variables TRPMILES, TRPTRANS, DRIVER). nhts.ornl.gov
- This site's related analysis: Does Household Income Affect How Much You Drive?, Does Having Enough Cars Affect How Much You Drive?, and Do Parents Drive More Than People Without Kids?.