Carpool commute share, explained
Share of workers who carpooled to work. Source: ACS B08301.
What it measures
The carpool share is the percentage of workers 16 and older who commute by car, truck, or van as a passenger or with at least one other person. The Census records carpools by occupancy (2-person, 3-person, 4-person, 5+) but the headline metric sums all carpools regardless of size. Most "carpools" in the US are actually family members traveling together (a parent dropping a child at school on the way to work, two spouses commuting to nearby jobs) rather than the formal coworker carpool arrangements that the term implies.
Why it matters
Carpool share is small (around 8% nationally) but consequential: shifting one drive-alone commuter into a carpool effectively removes a car from the road during peak hours. State and metro transportation agencies have built HOV-lane and HOT-lane infrastructure to incentivize carpooling, and employers in tight labor markets sometimes subsidize carpool matching as a benefit. The carpool share also signals the prevalence of multi-worker households (working spouses, working parents with school-age kids) commuting in coordinated patterns.
Top US places by carpooled to work
Top 25 per geography type from the latest ACS vintage. See the full ranking links for the complete eligible universe.
Top states (2024)
SEE ALL 51 →Top metro areas (2024)
SEE ALL 925 →Top counties (2024)
SEE ALL 3,144 →Top cities (2024)
SEE ALL 6,826 →Top ZIP codes (2024)
SEE ALL 16,889 →How the Census measures it
ACS Table B08301. CensusEasy reports the sum of all carpool categories (2-person through 5-or-more-person carpools) as the carpool share.
How to read the numbers
The US carpool share is about 8%. State rates range from about 7% to 12%; the metric does not vary as widely across geography as transit share or drive-alone share. The highest rates appear in metros with strong family-based commute patterns (some Southern metros, Mountain West college towns), the lowest in metros where commute origins and destinations are too dispersed to support shared rides. The metric has trended downward for decades, the carpool share has fallen by about half since 1980 as solo car ownership became near-universal.
Caveats and limitations
Most carpools are between household members, not coworkers, so changes in the carpool share track changes in household composition (more dual-earner households, more parents commuting with kids) more than they track conscious commuter behavior. Carpool share is also negatively correlated with affluence: as households add a second vehicle, they typically stop carpooling.