Fatal Crashes in Northeast Georgia Counties, 2019 to 2024

Deaths and rates by county

Deaths are counted in the county where the crash happened, whoever was killed.

Deaths by county and year

2024 figures are from NHTSA's Annual Report File; the final file may revise them slightly.

Jackson County up close

Jackson County's yearly toll ranged from 9 to 22 deaths over the six years (2019: 14, 2020: 12, 2021: 13, 2022: 22, 2023: 14, 2024: 9). Its rate of 16.9 per 100,000 residents a year was the third-highest of the eight Northeast Georgia counties we cover, behind Banks (23.3) and Madison (22.9), two small, rural counties where a few crashes move the rate a lot.

The roads with the most deaths in Jackson County were US-441 / SR-15 (13), I-85 (9), SR-124 (7), US-129 / SR-11 Connector (6), US-129 / SR-11 (6). 50% of the county's deaths came in crashes between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., and NHTSA's estimate puts 21 of the 84 deaths in crashes with a driver at .08 or higher. A large truck was involved in crashes that killed 16.

The county's population grew from 73,015 in 2019 to 94,302 in 2024 (Census Bureau estimates), so a steady number of deaths means a falling rate per resident. The rate above uses each year's population.

Where the deaths happen

I-85 had the most deaths of any road in the eight counties: 59, of which 46 were in Gwinnett County and 9 in Jackson County. But interstates carried only a small part of the toll. 9% of the area's deaths were on interstates, 54% on other U.S. and state highways and 27% on county roads.

Highways such as SR-124 (through Hoschton and Braselton), US-441 (through Commerce and Homer) and US-129 (between Gainesville, Jefferson and Athens) account for many of the rest, as the tables below show.

The roads with the most deaths in the eight counties

Each crash is counted once, on the road it happened on. Where two or more route numbers share a stretch of road, the road is listed with all of them.

488 of the 512 fatal crashes on interstate, U.S. and state routes were matched to a named road. The rest still count in every other figure on this page.

Four main corridors

These overlap in places, so they do not add up: on the Athens Perimeter, US-129 and US-441 share the road with US-29 and US-78, and part of SR-316 is also US-29. Business routes (such as US-129 Business through Jefferson) are not included.

Deaths by type of road

Road type as recorded in FARS. Georgia crash records do not always say whether a numbered highway is a U.S. or a state route, so the two are combined.

What was involved

One death can fall in more than one row. The alcohol figures are NHTSA's statistical estimates (they fill in drivers who were not tested), rounded to whole deaths.

What this means if you or your family were hurt

• Most deaths here were not on the interstate: 9% were on interstates, 54% on U.S. and state highways and 27% on county roads. Who maintains the road can matter: a claim that involves a city, a county or the State of Georgia has its own written-notice deadline, as short as six months. See claims against a Georgia city, county or the state.
• More than half of the deaths (56%) came in crashes between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Evidence from a night crash, such as the lighting at the scene and marks on the road, can be gone within days, so photos taken early help.
• About one death in four (25%) came in a crash where NHTSA estimates a driver had a blood alcohol level of .08 or higher. If an impaired driver hurt you or someone in your family, our page on drunk and impaired driver injury cases explains how those claims work in Georgia.
• A large truck was involved in crashes that killed 108 people in the eight counties (12%). A truck crash can involve the trucking company and its insurer as well as the driver. See truck accidents.
• If you need a copy of the police report for a crash, our guide on getting a Georgia accident report explains how.

How we did this

We counted every crash in NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) for 2019 to 2024 that happened in Banks, Barrow, Athens-Clarke, Gwinnett, Hall, Jackson, Madison or Walton County, the eight Northeast Georgia counties with their own page on this site. FARS is the federal census of fatal crashes: it covers every crash on a public road in which someone died within 30 days.

Rates divide each county's deaths by the sum of its July 1 population estimates for the same six years (Census Bureau Vintage 2025 for 2020 to 2024, Vintage 2020 for 2019), then multiply by 100,000. Counties with heavy through traffic or few residents get high rates per resident: a rate is a fact about the county's roads, not only its people.

Time of day, large-truck involvement and speeding use NHTSA's own flags from the FARS auxiliary files, so they match NHTSA's published counts for Georgia. The alcohol figures use NHTSA's multiple-imputation estimates of the highest driver blood alcohol level in each crash, the method behind NHTSA's published "alcohol-impaired driving fatalities"; we add up the fractional estimates and round at the end.

To name the road, a crash had to pass two tests: the route number in the FARS road name had to match an OpenStreetMap road carrying the same number within 100 meters of the crash's FARS coordinates (60 meters when the record used the wrong prefix, such as "US-60" for SR 60). The road is then labelled with every route number OpenStreetMap shows for that stretch, so concurrent routes are counted once.

The scripts, the extracted FARS rows and the checksums of every source file are kept with this study. A separate check script re-derives the county totals from NHTSA's auxiliary files (using the census tract of each crash) and compares Georgia's totals with NHTSA's published Traffic Safety Facts report for Georgia; both agree.

Limits

• Counts are small for Banks and Madison counties, so one or two crashes change their rate noticeably.
• FARS records where a crash happened, not where the people killed lived.
• 2024 figures are from NHTSA's Annual Report File; the final file may revise them slightly. 2019 to 2023 are from NHTSA's final files.
• Road labels depend on the crash coordinates in FARS and on OpenStreetMap's route tags. Crashes that could not be matched are left out of the road tables only.
• Driver distraction is under-reported in crash records, so we do not report it here.