- Only 50.0% of Americans age 16–17 hold a driver's license—essentially a coin flip, far below every adult age group.
- The license rate jumps to 74.7% by ages 18–19, then continues climbing through early adulthood, peaking at 94.5% for ages 45–54.
- The rate holds near its peak through the 50s and 60s, then declines to 80.6% for Americans 75 and older.
- The gap between the youngest group (16–17) and the peak age group (45–54) is 44.5 percentage points—the widest spread in the data.
- Men hold licenses at a higher rate than women (90.0% vs. 86.1%), and rural Americans hold licenses at a higher rate than urban Americans (92.9% vs. 86.8%).
01 Introduction
Only 50.0% of Americans age 16–17 hold a driver's license—essentially a coin flip—before the rate climbs to 74.7% by ages 18–19 and peaks at 94.5% for ages 45–54. Driving isn't something every eligible American does as soon as they can. The 2022 National Household Travel Survey asks respondents directly whether they are a licensed driver, making it possible to measure exactly how common driver's licenses are at every stage of life—rather than assume everyone who's old enough to drive does.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use person file (perv2pub.csv), variable DRIVER02 License Rate by Age: The Full Breakdown
Weighted to be nationally representative, the share of Americans holding a driver's license rises sharply through the teens and twenties, plateaus in middle age, and declines again after 65.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use person file, variable DRIVER cross-tabbed with R_AGE, weighted by WTPERFIN| Age Group | License Rate | Survey Records (n) |
|---|---|---|
| 16–17 | 50.0% | 381 |
| 18–19 | 74.7% | 292 |
| 20–24 | 84.0% | 738 |
| 25–34 | 90.3% | 2,082 |
| 35–44 | 93.4% | 2,179 |
| 45–54 | 94.5% | 2,060 |
| 55–64 | 93.3% | 2,743 |
| 65–74 | 93.0% | 2,866 |
| 75+ | 80.6% | 1,463 |
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Use the Calculator03 The Youth Gap: 16-17 vs. 18-19
The single sharpest jump in the entire dataset happens right at the edge of the teen years: the license rate rises 24.7 percentage points, from 50.0% at ages 16–17 to 74.7% at ages 18–19.
Calculated: 74.7% − 50.0% = 24.7 percentage pointsThis is a single-year snapshot from the 2022 survey, not a historical trend. This site does not have earlier NHTS survey cycles on file to verify whether the 16–17 license rate has changed over time, so no claim is made here about whether today's teens are more or less likely to be licensed than teens in past decades.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey (single survey year)04 The Decline After 65
License rates hold steady in the low-to-mid 90s from the mid-30s all the way through the mid-70s, then drop to 80.6% for Americans 75 and older—a decline of 13.9 percentage points from the 65–74 group.
Calculated: 93.0% (ages 65–74) − 80.6% (ages 75+) = 12.4 percentage points; peak-to-75+ comparison: 94.5% (ages 45–54) − 80.6% = 13.9 percentage points05 License Rate by Gender and Location
Age is not the only factor tied to whether an American holds a driver's license. Two other dimensions in the same survey show real, if smaller, gaps: gender and whether someone lives in an urban or rural area.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use person file, variable DRIVER cross-tabbed with R_SEX and URBRUR, weighted by WTPERFIN| Group | License Rate | Survey Records (n) |
|---|---|---|
| Male | 90.0% | 7,187 |
| Female | 86.1% | 7,663 |
| Urban | 86.8% | 11,707 |
| Rural | 92.9% | 3,143 |
Men are 3.9 percentage points more likely to hold a license than women (90.0% vs. 86.1%). The location gap runs wider and in the direction you might expect from car-dependency patterns: rural Americans are 6.1 percentage points more likely to be licensed than urban Americans (92.9% vs. 86.8%)—consistent with the same pattern in this site's vehicle ownership by household analysis, where rural households own more vehicles and are far less likely to own none. A personal vehicle, and the license to drive it, is closer to a necessity where public transit is limited; in dense urban areas with transit alternatives, both are more optional.
Calculated: 90.0% − 86.1% = 3.9 percentage points; 92.9% − 86.8% = 6.1 percentage points06 Methodology and Caveats
All figures in this article are drawn directly from the 2022 National Household Travel Survey's public-use person file, weighted using the survey's person weight (WTPERFIN) to produce nationally representative estimates.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use person file- This is a single-year snapshot, not a trend. This site does not have other NHTS survey cycles on file, so no comparison to past years is made.
- License status is self-reported by survey respondents or a household proxy, not verified against state DMV records.
- Single-year age brackets showed some inconsistency at ages 16 through 19 (for example, the 16-year-old rate came out slightly higher than the 17-year-old rate in the raw single-year data), consistent with normal sampling variation at that sample size; this article uses grouped brackets (16–17, 18–19) for a more statistically reliable comparison.
- Gender and location figures (Section 05) use the survey's R_SEX and URBRUR variables and the same DRIVER/WTPERFIN methodology as the age breakdown, verified to reproduce the exact same age-group figures published above before being applied to these two additional dimensions.
07 Data Sources
Every figure in this article comes from a U.S. government source. No proprietary, estimated, or third-party data was used.
- Federal Highway Administration / Bureau of Transportation Statistics. 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use person file (perv2pub.csv). nhts.ornl.gov