- About 32.4 million American workers (21.2%) say their job requires them to drive.
- Of those, 56.0% use their own personal vehicle to do that work driving, not an employer-provided one; another 32.2% use a non-household vehicle, and 11.8% use both.
- Workers whose job requires driving log 47% more daily miles (37.7 vs. 25.6) and 40% more daily time behind the wheel (69.8 vs. 50.0 minutes) than workers whose job doesn't.
01 Introduction
Most of this site's driving-statistics content covers commuting to work. The 2022 National Household Travel Survey also asks a different, less-covered question directly: does your job itself require you to drive? This article uses that question, along with a follow-up on whose vehicle gets used, and this site's own cross-reference to actual daily trip data, to answer how many Americans drive for a living, whose car they're driving, and how much more of their day it actually takes.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use person file, variable DRIVINGOCCUPATION.02 How Many Drive for a Living
Among the 153.1 million workers asked this question, 32,399,039 (21.2%) said yes, their job requires driving.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use person file, variable DRIVINGOCCUPATION, weighted by WTPERFIN. 32,399,039 "Yes" of 153,098,757 total valid responses ("Yes" + "No").| Response | Workers | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Job requires driving | 32,399,039 | 21.2% |
| Job does not require driving | 120,699,718 | 78.8% |
That's a little over 1 in 5 workers, roughly comparable in scale to the population of Texas. This includes obvious cases like truck, delivery, and rideshare drivers, but also sales representatives, home health aides, real estate agents, and any other job where driving between locations is a core part of the work, not just the commute to a single workplace.
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Use the Calculator03 Whose Vehicle Do They Use?
The same survey then asks people whose job requires driving which vehicle they actually use to do it. The answer has real financial implications: a majority use their own car.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use person file, variable DRIVINGVEHICLE, asked only of respondents who answered "Yes" to DRIVINGOCCUPATION, weighted by WTPERFIN.| Vehicle Used for Work | Workers | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Household vehicle (their own) | 18,146,289 | 56.0% |
| Non-household vehicle | 10,430,248 | 32.2% |
| Both | 3,822,501 | 11.8% |
04 How Much More Do They Actually Drive
To see how much this actually adds to a person's day, this site cross-referenced the DRIVINGOCCUPATION responses against each person's own recorded trips in the same survey's daily trip file, summing personal-vehicle driver trips per person.
Calculated by this site: FHWA/BTS 2022 NHTS person file (perv2pub.csv, DRIVINGOCCUPATION) joined to the public-use daily trip file (tripv2pub.csv) by household and person ID, 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.| Group | Avg. Daily Miles | Avg. Daily Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Job requires driving | 37.7 | 69.8 |
| Job does not require driving | 25.6 | 50.0 |
| Difference | +47.3% | +39.6% |
This comparison is a same-day snapshot from the survey, not a full annual total, and is presented here only as a relative comparison between the two groups (both computed the same way from the same file), which is a more reliable measurement than either group's absolute daily figure on its own. Workers whose job requires driving spend meaningfully more of their day behind the wheel, on top of whatever commute they may also have.
Methodology note: absolute totals summed from NHTS trip-level weights are known to undercount relative to FHWA's administratively-measured VMT (see this site's hours-spent-driving analysis for a fuller explanation); the relative comparison between two groups computed identically from the same file is not affected by a uniform undercount.05 What This Means
For the 18.1 million workers who use their own vehicle for work driving, this isn't just extra time and gas money; it's extra depreciation, maintenance, and insurance exposure on a personal asset, driven in service of a job. The IRS standard mileage rate exists specifically to offset that cost when an employer reimburses it, and this site's own analyses of vehicle lifespan and maintenance and repair costs both scale directly with miles driven, meaning this group is disproportionately exposed to those costs. Anyone whose job requires driving their own car, and who isn't tracking mileage for reimbursement or tax purposes, is likely underestimating a real, measurable cost of that job.
06 Data Sources
- Federal Highway Administration / Bureau of Transportation Statistics: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use person file (variables DRIVINGOCCUPATION, DRIVINGVEHICLE) and daily trip file (variables TRPMILES, TRVLCMIN, TRPTRANS, DRIVER). nhts.ornl.gov
- This site's related analysis: IRS Standard Mileage Rate History, How Many Hours Do Americans Spend Driving Each Year?, and How Many Miles Does the Average Car Last?