Skip to content

The American Driving Test Index: 50 states + DC, ranked.

Getting on the road looks different in every state. We ranked all 50 plus DC on the three things that shape a new driver's experience: how hard the knowledge test is, how safe the roads are, and how much it costs to insure a car. Every number comes from official government and industry data, and it's all free to explore below.

Three views, one map.

Flip between test difficulty (how strict the knowledge test is), road safety (how dangerous the roads are), and insurance burden (how heavy the cost of insuring a car is). In every view, a darker shade means a higher score. Hover, tap, or pick a state to see its details and open its page.

DC T-28th of 51
Test-difficulty score
020406080100
easierharder
Download this map:PNGPNG (2400px)SVG·Free to reuse with the credit line intact.

Source: state DMV licensing pages and IIHS state-laws tables (2025).

Pick a state from the menu above or tap one on the map to see its details.

What the numbers say.

Across the 51 jurisdictions we score, harder knowledge tests and safer roads tend to travel together - but loosely. Two findings stood out.

Top-10 in both
NJ · MD · ME · WA

Of the hardest knowledge tests and the safest road networks, only New Jersey, Maryland, Maine and Washington show up on both lists.

The off-trend states
NY · ID

New York has one of the country's easier tests (#47) but the 3rd-safest roads. Idaho does the opposite - 5th-hardest test, 45th on safety.

On the other end, 3 states appear in both bottom-10s (easiest tests AND most dangerous roads): Oklahoma, Iowa, Mississippi.

Do harder tests mean safer roads?

Barely. Plot every jurisdiction's test difficulty against its road-safety score and the cloud is nearly round: the correlation is r = 0.20, which explains only about 4% of the difference between states.

easy test, safe roadseasy test, dangerous roadshard test, dangerous roads02550751000255075100Knowledge-test difficulty (0-100, higher is harder)Road-safety composite (higher is safer)Marylandhardest testMainehard test, safe roadsMassachusettseasy test, very safeIdahohard test, riskier roadsOklahomaeasy test, riskier roadsIowaeasy test, riskier roadsMississippieasiest test, least safeMontanalowest road-safety score

r = 0.20 · almost no relationship: test difficulty explains only about 4% of the safety spread. Driving exposure tracks safety far more than licensing rules do. Scores are scaled 0-100 across states, so 0 and 100 mark the lowest and highest state, not absolutes.

Download this chart:PNGPNG (2400px)SVG·Free to reuse with the credit line intact.

Why test difficulty and road safety barely correlate. The index measures test difficulty because test-takers need to know it, and road safety separately, as context. It has never claimed one causes the other. Between-state fatality differences are dominated by driving exposure and geography, enforcement, and demographics, which licensing rules do not control. A plain exposure measure, vehicle-miles driven per person, correlates with the safety score at r = -0.55 (about 2.7x the strength of the test-difficulty link, and roughly 31% of the variance versus 4%). State licensing rules explain little of the between-state variance in road outcomes. That is context for the map, not a verdict on whether harder tests are worthwhile.

Every state, at a glance.

All 50 states plus DC, side by side. Sort and filter below. Ranks always stay out of all 51.

Sort
Filter

Showing 1–26 of 51 jurisdictions. Ranks are always out of all 51; “T-” marks a shared rank.

StateTestSafetyIns.

Each score is scaled 0 to 100 across all 51 jurisdictions, so 0 and 100 mark the lowest and highest in that column, not an absolute zero or a perfect score. Georgia's 0.0 test-difficulty means it is the least demanding to license in, not that it has no test.

What a license really costs.

Passing the test is the cheap part. The real bill is insurance. In 2023 the average American driver spent $1,282 a year to insure a car, and more than one in seven drivers carried none at all. Where you live moves that number a lot: our Insurance Burden Index, which blends spend, uninsured drivers, affordability and required coverage into one 0-100 score, puts Florida under the heaviest load and Maine the lightest. Flip the map above to Insurance burden to see all 51 shaded, and the table below scores each state.

The fees are tiny. The first year of insurance is not.

The DMV fees to get on the road, the permit and the license, come to under $100 almost everywhere. Then the first insurance bill arrives. Here is the first-year total in the five priciest and three cheapest states, fees and insurance stacked together.

Florida$1,913Florida: $1,913 first year — $48 government fees + $1,865 first-year insuranceLouisiana$1,819Louisiana: $1,819 first year — $65 government fees + $1,754 first-year insuranceNew York$1,817New York: $1,817 first year — $65 government fees + $1,753 first-year insuranceDistrict of Columbia$1,771District of Columbia: $1,771 first year — $94 government fees + $1,677 first-year insuranceNew Jersey$1,607New Jersey: $1,607 first year — $34 government fees + $1,573 first-year insuranceMaine$921Maine: $921 first year — $65 government fees + $856 first-year insuranceIowa$913Iowa: $913 first year — $40 government fees + $873 first-year insuranceNorth Dakota$838North Dakota: $838 first year — $30 government fees + $808 first-year insurance
One-time government fees First-year insurance (NAIC 2023 average)
First-year insurance = NAIC 2023 all-driver average expenditure. New drivers typically pay 2-3x this. Fees = permit + initial license.

About $1,075 separates Florida ($1,913) from North Dakota ($838). The fees barely move the needle; the premium is the whole story. And because these are all-driver averages, a brand-new driver usually pays two to three times as much in year one.

The road test, state by state.

Passing the written knowledge test earns a permit; the behind-the-wheel road test earns the license, and what it takes varies widely, from 20 to 100 supervised hours, with one state (Mississippi) skipping the road test entirely. Our road-test guides cover the rules, what to bring, how the drive is scored, and retakes for all 51 jurisdictions. These states ask for the most practice:

Oregon
100 supervised hrs · 21st-hardest test
Maine
70 supervised hrs · 6th-hardest test
Pennsylvania
65 supervised hrs · 2nd-hardest test
Kentucky
60 supervised hrs · 12th-hardest test
Maryland
60 supervised hrs · 1st-hardest test
North Carolina
60 supervised hrs · 4th-hardest test
Explore all 51 road test guides →

How we built this.

For road safety, we read NHTSA's fatal-crash records (41,025 of them, the most recent national release), pair them with FHWA's state-by-state vehicle-miles and licensing tables, layer in CDC self-reported behavior for seat-belt use and drinking-and-driving, and finish with the IIHS's state-laws tables for graduated-licensing and distracted-driving provisions. Six pieces of data, equally weighted, scaled 0-100.

For test difficulty, we score five inputs read straight from each state DMV: the passing score, the margin you're allowed for error, supervised-driving hours required before a road test, the age at which the full license arrives, and whether the test can be taken online. Same scaling, same scoreboard. Both composites are min-max scaled 0-100 across states, so 0 and 100 mark the lowest and highest state, not an absolute floor or a perfect score.

For insurance burden, we weight four 2023 inputs: the NAIC average annual expenditure (45%), the IRC uninsured-driver rate (25%, since uninsured drivers shift cost onto everyone else), the average expenditure as a share of the Census median household income (20%, which turns cost into affordability), and the statutory minimum-liability index inverted (10%, because thinner required coverage leaves more exposure). Each input is min-max scaled across the 51 jurisdictions, then combined by those weights into a 0-100 score where higher means a heavier burden.

For the true cost of getting licensed, we add the one-time government fees (the permit fee and the initial driver-license fee, counted once where a state bundles them) to a first-year insurance estimate equal to the NAIC 2023 all-driver average expenditure. That average is deliberately conservative: new drivers commonly pay two to three times it. Driver education is required for most under-18 applicants but is bought from private providers at prices the state does not set, so we describe it rather than fold a made-up number into the total.

A few things we don't claim. The correlation between test difficulty and road safety in this dataset is r = 0.20 - a real, positive nudge, but well short of cause-and-effect. We describe the picture; we don't prescribe. Single-year crash counts in very small jurisdictions are noisy. Self-reported survey data is self-reported. The sources below have the receipts.

Why difficulty and safety barely move together. Fatality differences between states are driven mostly by driving exposure and geography, enforcement, and demographics, none of which a licensing rule controls. A plain exposure measure, vehicle-miles driven per person, correlates with the safety score at r = -0.55 - about 2.7x as strong as test difficulty, and roughly 31% of the between-state variance versus 4%. State licensing rules explain little of the between-state variance in road outcomes; that is not the same as saying a harder test does not help the person taking it.

On the safety ranking's stability. The road-safety composite weights its six inputs equally. Dropping any single input one at a time keeps the ranking almost unchanged (Spearman rho stays at or above 0.94 across all six leave-one-out variants), so no one metric is driving the result.

Sources & data notes
  • Composite score: each of the six metrics is converted to a z-score across the 51 jurisdictions; the four 'lower is better' metrics are sign-flipped; the six z-scores are averaged and the result rescaled linearly to 0–100 (higher = safer / stronger laws).
  • BRFSS 'Drink and Drive' module is not run by every state every year; states without 2023 data use the most recent prior year (recorded per state in context.metric_years).
  • GDL and distracted-driving strength scores are computed by DMV IQ from the IIHS law tables; they are not official IIHS ratings.
  • Teen-driver fatality-rate denominator was estimated from the national teen share of licensed drivers for DC, KY, where FHWA DL-22 reported an implausibly small "19 and under" count (context.teen_rate_denominator_estimated = true).
  • 1 state(s) have at least one IIHS provision that could not be auto-parsed (context.iihs_provisional = true).
  • Test-difficulty composite (difficulty_score) scores five inputs: passing percentage, error margin, required supervised-driving hours, full-license age, and whether the knowledge test can be taken online. The error margin is 1 − (correct answers required ÷ total questions), so the question count is captured through the margin rather than scored on its own. Same z-score → equal-weight average → 0–100 rescale methodology as the road-safety composite. Higher = harder. difficulty_rank: 1 = hardest. Distinct from composite_score (road safety).
  • Motorcyclist fatality rate per 10,000 registered motorcycles = FARS motorcyclist fatalities (riders+passengers, BODY_TYP 80–89) ÷ FHWA MV-1 motorcycle registrations × 10,000. Single-year FARS counts are noisy for small jurisdictions.

Spot an error? Email [email protected].

The American Driving Test Index (2026): All 50 States + DC, Ranked | DMV IQ