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.
Retail Hospitality Logistics Property Energy Transport & travel
| Publisher | Department for Transport |
|---|---|
| Licence | Open Government Licence v3 what this means |
| Updates | Updated annually |
| Cost | Free — open data |
| Last verified | 2026-07-16 |
What your business can use it for
Site selection
Compare 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 analysis
Show 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 planning
Weight areas by real vehicle activity — especially useful if your customers are drivers, hauliers or fleets rather than households.
Works with data you already have
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Sites you already map — shops, depots, poster sites, branches
Map coordinates
The count points reference file carries WGS84 latitude/longitude and OSGB easting/northing per point; join it to the flow data on count_point_id -
Your site or territory postcodes
Postcodes
No 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
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Bulk download
Road traffic statistics — downloads by area or road
No 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
- The traffic figures and the details of where each counting point sits are in two files you join on a point id — a straightforward step, but a step nonetheless before you can map anything.
- Some counts are actual measurements and others are estimates, marked in a 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.
Worth knowing before you start
- Not every figure is counted. Many are modelled estimates — check the estimation method column and filter to counted points if the number has to stand up.
- 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.
- The flow data has no location on it. It is useless until you join the count points reference file to it.
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.