- 38.1% of all trips are trips returning home—the single largest category, but a mirror of every other trip purpose rather than a destination in its own right.
- Excluding trips home, shopping and errands are the single most common reason Americans get in the car (24.6% of remaining trips), narrowly ahead of commuting to work (20.3%).
- Social and recreational trips are less frequent than shopping or work trips, but average the longest distance (20.2 miles) and longest duration (38.8 minutes) of any common trip purpose.
- A small "something else" category (1.6% of trips) averages 42.6 miles—more than triple the overall average trip distance—and this article discloses that finding without a full explanation for it.
01 Introduction
Trips returning home make up 38.1% of all trips—the single largest category. Excluding trips home, shopping and errands are the single most common reason Americans get in the car (24.6% of remaining trips), narrowly ahead of commuting to work. Commuting gets most of the attention in discussions of American driving, but it's only one of several reasons people get in the car. The 2022 National Household Travel Survey asks respondents to record every trip they take over a travel day, along with its purpose, distance, and duration. Weighted to be nationally representative, that data makes it possible to answer, directly, why Americans actually drive—and the answer is more varied than "commuting" alone.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use daily trip file (tripv2pub.csv)02 Trip Purpose: The Full Breakdown
NHTS classifies each trip by its purpose using the variable WHYTRP1S. Across all trips recorded in the survey, the distribution looks like this:
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use daily trip file, variable WHYTRP1S, weighted by WTTRDFIN| Trip Purpose | Share of All Trips |
|---|---|
| Home | 38.1% |
| Shopping/Errands | 15.2% |
| Work | 12.6% |
| Social/Recreational | 10.7% |
| Meals | 7.8% |
| School/Daycare/Religious | 6.5% |
| Transport someone | 5.7% |
| Medical/Dental | 1.9% |
| Something else | 1.6% |
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Use the Calculator03 Excluding the Trip Home: What People Are Actually Doing
Because trips home aren't a destination purpose in their own right, a clearer picture of why people actually leave the house comes from excluding that category and re-calculating shares among the remaining trips.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use daily trip file, weighted by WTTRDFIN, excluding WHYTRP1S=01 (Home)| Trip Purpose | Share of Non-Home Trips |
|---|---|
| Shopping/Errands | 24.6% |
| Work | 20.3% |
| Social/Recreational | 17.3% |
| Meals | 12.6% |
| School/Daycare/Religious | 10.4% |
| Transport someone | 9.2% |
| Medical/Dental | 3.0% |
| Something else | 2.6% |
04 Distance and Time by Purpose
Trip purposes differ substantially in how far and how long they take, independent of how often they occur.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use daily trip file, variables TRPMILES and TRVLCMIN, weighted by WTTRDFIN| Trip Purpose | Avg. Distance | Avg. Duration | Share of Total Miles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 13.3 mi | 26.8 min | 40.4% |
| Shopping/Errands | 5.9 mi | 18.6 min | 7.1% |
| Work | 15.6 mi | 29.3 min | 15.6% |
| Social/Recreational | 20.2 mi | 38.8 min | 17.2% |
| Meals | 8.5 mi | 18.8 min | 5.3% |
| School/Daycare/Religious | 6.5 mi | 20.3 min | 3.4% |
| Transport someone | 8.0 mi | 18.5 min | 3.6% |
| Medical/Dental | 12.9 mi | 28.3 min | 1.9% |
| Something else | 42.6 mi | 32.9 min | 5.5% |
Social and recreational trips make up only 10.7% of all trips but 17.2% of total miles driven—more than one and a half times their share of trip count—because they average nearly twice the distance of a typical shopping trip. Shopping and errands run the opposite way: they are the single most common non-home purpose but among the shortest, so they account for a comparatively small 7.1% of total miles.
Calculated from the table above: 17.2% miles ÷ 10.7% trips = 1.6x; shopping 15.2% trips vs. 7.1% miles05 The Fuel Cost of Each Purpose
Applying this site's standard fuel-cost convention—23.7 MPG (the on-road fuel economy of the light-duty vehicle fleet, per DOE/ORNL's Transportation Energy Data Book, Table 4.3, 2020) at $3.30 per gallon—to each purpose's average one-way distance gives a rough estimated fuel cost per trip.
Calculated: Average Distance ÷ 23.7 MPG × $3.30/gal, one-way, using the distances in Section 04| Trip Purpose | Avg. Distance | Est. Fuel Cost (One-Way) |
|---|---|---|
| Shopping/Errands | 5.9 mi | $0.82 |
| School/Daycare/Religious | 6.5 mi | $0.91 |
| Transport someone | 8.0 mi | $1.11 |
| Meals | 8.5 mi | $1.18 |
| Medical/Dental | 12.9 mi | $1.80 |
| Home | 13.3 mi | $1.85 |
| Work | 15.6 mi | $2.17 |
| Social/Recreational | 20.2 mi | $2.81 |
| Something else | 42.6 mi | $5.93 |
06 A Note on the "Something Else" Category
The "something else" purpose category is small (1.6% of trips, 396 surveyed trip records) but its average distance, 42.6 miles, is more than three times the overall average trip distance in this dataset. This is a genuine finding in the data, not a rounding artifact—the sample size behind it is substantial enough to be reliable as a category average.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use daily trip file, WHYTRP1S=97, n=396 unweighted trip records07 Methodology and Caveats
All figures in this article are drawn directly from the 2022 National Household Travel Survey's public-use daily trip file, weighted using the survey's trip weight (WTTRDFIN) to produce nationally representative estimates.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use daily trip file- Each trip is one leg, not a round trip. A shopping trip and the return trip home are recorded as two separate trips with two different purposes (Shopping/Errands, then Home), not as a single round-trip errand.
- Fuel cost estimates in Section 05 are this site's own calculation, not an NHTS-published figure, using the same 23.7 MPG on-road fleet average and $3.30/gal reference used consistently across this site for comparability.
- Purpose is self-reported by survey respondents and reflects the main reason for that specific trip segment, not every activity that may have occurred along the way.
08 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 daily trip file (tripv2pub.csv). nhts.ornl.gov
- Federal Highway Administration. 2022 NextGen National Household Travel Survey, Public Use Codebook, Version 2.0.1 (December 2024). Used to verify the WHYTRP1S trip-purpose variable definitions.