Deadliest States for Drunk-Driving Fatal Crashes Involving Female Drivers: Montana’s Rate Is 23 Times Higher Than Massachusetts

Alcohol-impaired drivers cause thousands of fatal crashes on American roads each year, yet the risk’s distribution across the country and the driving population is uneven. For female drivers, the geography of that danger follows patterns that raw national totals cannot capture. The gap between the safest and deadliest states is not a matter of degrees; it is a Chasm measured in lives. The numbers that follow reveal exactly where that risk is most concentrated and by how much.

According to an analysis by Ace Law Group, a Las Vegas-based personal injury law firm, this study extracted alcohol-impaired female driver involvements in fatal crashes from the NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) database covering 2019 to 2023, then normalized those totals against licensed female driver counts from the Federal Highway Administration Highway Statistics 2021, Table DL-1C. The resulting per capita rate per ranked State 100,000 licensed female drivers, not by raw crash totals, to control for population size.

Top 10 States With the Highest Per Capita Rate of Alcohol-Impaired Female Driver Fatal Crash Involvements (2019-2023)

Eight of the top 10 states are in the Mountain West, South, or interior West, reflecting a strong geographic concentration of risk outside major urban coastal markets. Montana’s rate of 4.43 per 100,000 is nearly 2.8 times higher than Colorado’s 1.58, the lowest rate among the top 10, underscoring the severity of the gap even within the high-risk tier.

Looking at the study, Patrick W. Kang, Founder of Ace Law Group, commented:

“Montana’s rate of 4.43 alcohol-impaired female driver fatal crash involvements per 100,000 licensed female drivers is approximately four times the national average. These numbers make clear that where you drive in America can be as consequential as how you drive. Road safety policy must account for these disparities.”

The 5 Safest States: Rates Below 0.42 per 100,000 Licensed Female Drivers (2019-2023)

Massachusetts, at 0.19 per 100,000, posts a rate 96% below Montana’s 4.43, the largest top-to-bottom spread recorded in the dataset. Four of the five safest states are in the Northeast, consistent with the region’s 0.67 average and reinforcing the sharp geographic divide separating low-risk Northeastern markets from the high-risk Mountain West and Southern states.

How All 50 States Classify by Risk Tier: From Extreme to Below the National Average

Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho are the only three states qualifying as Extreme or High Risk, yet together they show that the most acute danger remains within a narrow geographic band. The single largest tier is Below Average, covering 29 states, meaning more than half of all U.S. states fall beneath the national benchmark; a few high-rate outliers concentrated in the Mountain West and the South pull a distribution upward.

Raw Crash Volume vs. Per Capita Rate Rank: How the Top 10 Highest-Volume States Reorder by Risk

Michigan presents the starkest example: it ranks 8th by raw crash volume but falls to 27th by per capita rate, a gap of 19 places, because its large licensed female driver population dilutes its absolute total into a below-average rate of 0.93 per 100,000. Louisiana and South Carolina move in the opposite direction, ranking higher by per capita risk than their volume totals imply, marking them as states where the per capita rate more accurately signals elevated danger. 

Methodology

Fatal crash data were extracted from the NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) Drivers Involved in Fatal Crashes database for the five years spanning 2019 through 2023. The filtering process focused on female drivers in fatal crashes who were alcohol-impaired when the crash occurred. The researchers aggregated total involvement by state for the full five-year window and divided by five to calculate an annual average. To normalize for differences in state population and driver demographics, researchers divided each state’s five-year total by the number of licensed female drivers in that state, sourced from the Federal Highway Administration Highway Statistics 2021, Table DL-1C. They then multiplied this result by 100,000 to produce a per capita rate. That per capita rate ranked the states in descending order.

Data Sources: 

• • NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS): https://cdan.dot.gov/query

• Highway Statistics (2019 – 2023): https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2021/dl1c.cfm

• Research Dataset: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ACPZ1BZHRZaG9kDJD0y3AJ0l2kjlQysazWYvdLif-JA/edit?gid=0#gid=0
• Study by: http://acelawgroup.com/

About Ace Law Group

The study was conducted by Ace Law Group, a Las Vegas–based personal injury law firm representing injured individuals throughout Nevada. The firm handles car accidents, commercial vehicle crashes, premises liability claims, and serious injury cases, with a proven record of securing substantial verdicts and settlements for clients.

For more information, visit acelawgroup.com.