- Households earning $150,000 or more drive 169.4% more daily personal-vehicle miles than households earning under $25,000 (22.9 vs. 8.5 miles/day).
- The relationship isn't a straight line. Average daily miles actually peak at the $75,000–99,999 bracket (22.6 miles), then dip 9.3% at $100,000–149,999 (20.5 miles), before rebounding at $150,000+.
- The steepest jump in the entire curve happens at the bottom: households under $25,000 drive about half of what the very next bracket ($25,000–49,999) drives.
01 Introduction
This site's vehicles-per-household analysis already showed that wealthier households own more vehicles. That leaves an obvious follow-up question unanswered: do they actually drive more, or do the extra vehicles just sit in the driveway? Using 2022 National Household Travel Survey data, joined by household income bracket, the answer is a clear yes, but with a genuine wrinkle partway up the income scale that a simple "richer people drive more" headline would miss.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use household, person, and trip files, variable HHFAMINC.02 The Headline: Higher Income, More Driving
Across the full income range, the pattern is unmistakable: higher-income households drive substantially more, both in distance and in time.
Calculated by this site: FHWA/BTS 2022 NHTS household file (hhv2pub.csv, HHFAMINC) joined to the person file (perv2pub.csv) by HOUSEID, joined to the daily trip file (tripv2pub.csv) by HOUSEID and PERSONID, summing TRPMILES and TRVLCMIN for personal-vehicle (TRPTRANS 01, 02, 03, 04, 06, car, van, SUV, pickup, or RV) trips where DRIVER=01, weighted by WTPERFIN. Income brackets match vehicles-per-household.html for consistency across this site.| Household Income | Avg. Daily Miles | Avg. Daily Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Under $25k | 8.5 | 21.2 |
| $25k–49.9k | 16.1 | 36.6 |
| $50k–74.9k | 20.0 | 37.4 |
| $75k–99.9k | 22.6 | 45.0 |
| $100k–149.9k | 20.5 | 39.9 |
| $150k+ | 22.9 | 41.9 |
The lowest bracket stands apart from every other group. Households earning under $25,000 drive less than half of what the next bracket up drives, a much bigger jump than any other step in the table. From there, the climb continues but flattens out considerably in percentage terms.
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Use the Calculator03 Not a Straight Line: A Peak and a Dip
If income drove mileage in a simple, linear way, the table above would climb steadily from left to right. It doesn't. Average daily miles peak at the $75,000–99,999 bracket, then actually fall by 9.3% at $100,000–149,999, before climbing again to a new high at $150,000 and above.
Calculated: (22.6−20.5)÷22.6=9.3% (peak-to-dip). FHWA/BTS 2022 NHTS household, person, and trip files, cross-referenced by this site.This isn't a rounding artifact: the $75k–99.9k bracket has 2,436 unweighted person-records and the $100k–149.9k bracket has 3,559, so the dip isn't a small-sample fluke in either direction. It's a genuine, if modest, non-linearity in an otherwise upward-sloping relationship.
FHWA/BTS 2022 NHTS person file, unweighted record counts within each income bracket after joining to household and trip files.04 Why the Pattern Might Exist
NHTS doesn't ask households to explain their mileage, so this section is this site's own interpretation of the pattern above, not a separately published government finding. The steep jump out of the lowest bracket most plausibly reflects car access itself: many under-$25,000 households have no vehicle at all or share a single one (see this site's households-without-a-car analysis), which mechanically caps how much personal-vehicle driving is even possible, regardless of how much any one person might want to drive. The mid-range dip at $100,000–149,999 is harder to explain with certainty; one plausible factor is that this bracket may skew toward dual-income professional households in denser metro areas with shorter commutes and more non-driving options, while the $75,000–99,999 and $150,000+ brackets may include relatively more single-income or exurban/rural households where a longer commute is the norm. This site's own urban vs. rural driving analysis shows a similar-sized effect from geography alone, which could easily be intersecting with income here in ways this dataset can't fully separate.
This paragraph is this site's own interpretation of the pattern shown in Section 03, not a finding separately published by NHTS or any federal agency.05 What This Means
The clearest, most reliable takeaway is at the bottom of the income scale: households earning under $25,000 drive dramatically less, most likely because of constrained vehicle access rather than a preference for driving less, and any driving-cost estimate for that group should account for a real gap between what they might need to drive and what they can actually afford to drive. Above that lowest bracket, income keeps mattering, but the relationship is bumpier than a simple "more money, more driving" rule of thumb, and geography (urban vs. rural, commute length, metro density) is very likely doing real work underneath the income numbers rather than income acting entirely on its own.
06 Data Sources
- Federal Highway Administration / Bureau of Transportation Statistics: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use household file (variable HHFAMINC), person file, and daily trip file (variables TRPMILES, TRVLCMIN, TRPTRANS, DRIVER). nhts.ornl.gov
- This site's related analysis: Vehicles per Household, How Many American Households Don't Own a Car?, and Urban vs. Rural Driving: Who Actually Drives More?.