Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) Processed Data – rfars

The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) is a nationwide census of all U.S. motor vehicle crashes resulting in a fatality, maintained by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). While the raw FARS data are publicly available, they are distributed in formats that require significant preprocessing before analysis. This dataset provides a processed version of the FARS database (2015-2024), optimized for immediate use in R, Python, Excel, and other modern data tools. It was prepared using the rfars R package, enabling researchers, policymakers, and educators to access and analyze fatal crash data more efficiently and reproducibly.

This dataset is provided in two different file formats to support a wide range of users and analysis environments:

CSV (.csv) - a plain text format, with each of the five tables saved separately. These files are the most universally compatible and can be opened directly in Excel.

RDS (.rds) - a native R format containing the full dataset as a list of the five related tables (flat, multi_acc, multi_veh, multi_per, events, and codebook). This version is recommended for R users, since it can be loaded in one step with readRDS() and preserves all variable types exactly as processed.

If you are new to crash data or limited in data analysis resources, fars_flat.csv is the best starting point, via Excel.

See also: Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) Processed Data – rfars