Department for Transport
Road Traffic Counts (AADF)
How many vehicles pass 46,000 points on the road network on an average day — split into cars, vans, lorries, buses and bikes, going back to 2000. The closest thing to free footfall data for anything on a road.
At a glance
- Publisher
- Department for Transport
- Updates
- Updated annually
- Cost
- Free — open data
- Last checked
- 2026-07-16
What your business can use it for
- Site selectionCompare candidate sites on the traffic actually passing them — and on the right traffic, since a trade counter wants vans and lorries where a coffee shop wants cars and pedestrians.
- Market analysisShow how busy your roads have become over twenty years, and back up a claim about passing trade with the government's own counts rather than a guess.
- Territory planningWeight areas by real vehicle activity — especially useful if your customers are drivers, hauliers or fleets rather than households.
Works with data you already have
- Sites you already map — shops, depots, poster sites, branchesMap coordinatesEvery row of the flow file carries its count point's WGS84 latitude/longitude and OSGB easting/northing; the count points reference file holds the same per point
- Your site or territory postcodesPostcodesNo postcode on the record — get there via local_authority_code (ONS LAD) for area totals, or match your postcode's coordinate to nearby count points
How to get it
- Road traffic statistics — downloads by area or roadBulk downloadNo account needed. Take the whole country or cut it to one local authority. Refreshed each spring with the previous year's counts.
What's involved in using it
- Council codes are the ones in use when each year was published, so older rows carry codes for councils that have since been reorganised (Dorset, Buckinghamshire, North Yorkshire, Cumbria, Somerset) and need translating before they line up with today's council areas.
- Some counts are actual measurements and many others are modelled estimates, marked in the estimation method column, so for confident analysis you filter to the counted ones rather than treating every figure as measured.
- Otherwise it's one of the tidier datasets here — the main flow file already has council codes and coordinates on it, so joining to your own locations is relatively clean.
The technical detail, for whoever sets it up (3)
- Count points sit on major roads and a sample of minor ones. A quiet street near your site probably has no point at all.
- It is an annual average day, so it smooths away the rush hour, the weekend and the seasonal peak that may be exactly what you care about.
- Great Britain only — Northern Ireland is not in this dataset.
Ask us about Road Traffic Counts (AADF)
Ask a factual question about Road Traffic Counts (AADF) — what it covers, how often it changes, whether it matches the records you keep — and we will answer, free. Or tell us what you are trying to work out, and we will tell you what it would take to get this data working next to the numbers you already have.