Updated on September 7, 2026. Confirm every odds figure on State Farm’s map and every death count on the IIHS Fatality Facts page. This is a plain-English readout of those files plus state DOT crash counts — not a 50-state statute table, and not legal advice.
If you just hit a deer: this page is the numbers. The checklist is what to do if you hit a deer. Get out of the travel lane, hazards on, people first, do not walk up to the animal, call police, photograph the car.
Parent hub: Deer safety — collisions, disease, ticks, and fawns. This URL is the data child. The FAQ pages stay live; this table does not swallow them.
Facts (sourced)
| U.S. animal-collision claims | About 1.7 million, July 1, 2024–June 30, 2025, down from 1.8 million the year before. Deer more than 1.1 million of them. National odds 1 in 139 (was 1 in 128). |
|---|---|
| Highest odds | West Virginia 1 in 40 — top of the State Farm list for more than a decade. |
| Highest claim count | Pennsylvania ~147,000 estimated industry claims. Then Michigan ~126,000, North Carolina 88,000, Texas 86,000, Ohio 80,500. |
| Peak claim months | October–December: ~650,000 claims, 41% of the year. November, then October, then December. |
| U.S. deaths, 2024 | 210 deaths in crashes that began with an animal strike (FARS / IIHS). 63% the animal itself was the most harmful event; 12% a rollover; 8% a later hit on a fixed object. |
| Deadliest states, 10 years | Texas 197 animal-strike deaths 2015–2024. Pennsylvania 127. Michigan 119. Wisconsin 117. Ohio 73. |
| Officials | State Farm, Sept. 16, 2025 · IIHS Fatality Facts 2024 (posted June 2026) |
State Farm counts insurance claims for collisions with any animal. Police crash files count reported crashes, often only when someone is hurt or the car is towed. IIHS deaths are fatal crashes whose first harmful event was an animal — any species. A 2000–02 review of 147 fatal animal crashes in nine states found deer in 77% of them. Those three numbers will never match. Treat them as three different questions.
How to read a “deer collision” number
Search “deer collisions by state” and you get a single ranking. That ranking is almost always State Farm’s annual claim-odds list. It is a good list. It is not a count of deer, and it is not a count of people killed.
- Odds (State Farm) answer “how likely is a driver in this state to file an animal-collision claim this year?” West Virginia wins because the herd is large, the roads are rural, and the denominator — licensed drivers — is small.
- Claim count answers “how many bumpers got hit?” Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, and Ohio win because they have a lot of cars and a lot of white-tailed deer.
- Police-reported crashes answer “how many times did a trooper write it down?” Michigan’s 58,324 deer-involved crashes in 2024 are a fifth of all motor-vehicle crashes in the state. Pennsylvania’s 6,426 “deer-related” crashes the same year look tiny next to 147,000 claims because PennDOT’s reportable-crash bar is high: injury, or a vehicle that has to be towed. Most deer hits are a bumper and a drive home.
- Deaths (IIHS / FARS) answer “who died after the first harmful event was an animal?” Texas leads on volume. A lot of those deaths are the second crash — the ditch, the tree, the oncoming lane — not the deer.
If you need the night-of steps, stop here and open what to do if you hit a deer. If you need whether it is an accident, whether it goes on a record, or whether you can leave, those are separate pages: is hitting a deer considered an accident, driving record, drive off, it ran off, and insurance rates.
Highest odds, July 2024–June 2025
State Farm’s 2025 analysis (claims from July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025) puts the national chance of an animal-collision claim at 1 in 139. Deer are the animal in more than a million of those claims. The top ten states, with odds of a claim:
| Rank | State | Odds of an animal-collision claim |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | West Virginia | 1 in 40 |
| 2 | Montana | 1 in 53 |
| 3 | Wisconsin | 1 in 58 |
| 4 | Michigan | 1 in 61 |
| 5 | Pennsylvania | 1 in 62 |
| 6 | South Dakota | 1 in 73 |
| 7 | Iowa | 1 in 76 |
| 8 | Mississippi | 1 in 77 |
| 9 | Wyoming | 1 in 82 |
| 10 | Virginia | 1 in 82 |
Source: State Farm, “How likely are you to have an animal collision?” (posted Sept. 29, 2025) and the Sept. 16, 2025 newsroom release. Wisconsin moved up from fifth last year. Michigan and Pennsylvania each dropped one spot. West Virginia has held first for more than ten years.
Confirmed mid-pack from the same 2024–25 file, cited by local papers that published the State Farm rank for their state: Missouri 1 in 97 (17th; it was 1 in 83 / 14th the year before). Georgia 1 in 109. Florida 1 in 575 (46th). I am not inventing the other 30-odd ranks. State Farm’s map is the rest of the list; click a state there rather than trust a blog that filled the holes.
Highest claim counts, not highest odds
| State | Estimated industry animal-collision claims, July 2024–June 2025 |
|---|---|
| Pennsylvania | ~147,000 (Insurance Information Institute rounds this to 148,000) |
| Michigan | ~126,000 |
| North Carolina | 88,000 |
| Texas | 86,000 |
| Ohio | 80,500 |
All 50 states saw a slight drop versus the previous year, per State Farm. Volume and odds are not the same job. Pennsylvania files the most claims and is only fifth in odds. Texas is fourth in claims and is not in the top ten odds at all — too many drivers in the denominator. West Virginia is first in odds and does not appear in the volume top five. If you are packing a truck for a November hunt in deer hunting by state country, use odds. If you run a claims desk, use volume.
Lowest odds
| Rank from the bottom | State / D.C. | Odds |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nevada | 1 in 966 |
| 2 | Hawaii | 1 in 907 |
| 3 | District of Columbia | 1 in 794 |
| 4 | Alaska | 1 in 661 |
| 5 | Arizona | 1 in 577 |
Low odds are not “no deer.” Hawaii has free-ranging axis deer on several islands and still sits second-safest on this list because most driving is not in that habitat. Alaska’s animal problem on the highway is often moose, not Sitka blacktail. Arizona has Coues and mule deer; the claim rate is still low because so much of the driving is urban or open desert. Nevada is desert plus Las Vegas miles. None of those states is a reason to swerve.
Why West Virginia stays first
West Virginia’s herd is not the largest in America. Deer population by state is a different ranking. What West Virginia has is a lot of deer per mile of two-lane, a lot of wooded right-of-way, and not that many licensed drivers to spread the claims across. IIHS’s own note on animal-strike deaths is that the numbers “reflect the size of the driving population, the size of the animal population and the percentage of rural roads.” Odds capture that mix. Raw deaths do not: West Virginia had 23 animal-strike deaths in the entire 2015–2024 decade, 2 of them in 2024. Texas had 197 and 20. Both facts can be true.
Mississippi in the top ten surprises people who think this is a northern-woods problem. It is a suburban-edge and farm-woodlot problem. Pine, soybeans, and a four-lane that cuts a creek bottom will do it in November just as well as a Wisconsin county trunk.
Fall is when you file. Summer is when more people died in 2024.
State Farm’s claim year is front-loaded into October, November, and December — 650,000 claims, 41% of the total — because that is the rut for most of the white-tailed range, plus the clock change, plus hunting pressure that pushes deer across roads they already knew. When deer are most active is dawn and dusk year-round; the rut just puts more of them on the pavement at those hours.
Fatal crashes are a smaller, uglier file, and they do not always peak with the claims. IIHS’s 2024 animal-strike deaths by quarter: January–March 25, April–June 65, July–September 67, October–December 53. The deadliest quarter in 2024 was summer, not the rut. Motorcycles are a big part of why. Michigan’s 2024 deer-involved file: 291 motorcycles, 0.5% of the vehicles, 7 of 14 people killed. Wisconsin’s 2024 deer-crash file: 221 motorcycle-deer crashes, 7 of 9 deaths. WisDOT’s line is the one to remember — on a motorcycle the chance that a deer crash kills or seriously injures you is in another universe from the same crash in a pickup.
That is also why the how-to page keeps saying do not swerve. Of the 210 U.S. animal-strike deaths in 2024, 26 were coded with a rollover as the most harmful event and 16 with a later fixed-object hit. The deer is ugly. The tree is worse.
Car-mounted deer whistles do not have evidence behind them. State Farm tells drivers not to bother; the research roundup is do deer whistles work.
What state crash files actually say
Insurance odds are one map. The state DOT or state police file is the other. These are the 2024 (calendar) counts I can source to an agency PDF or newsroom, not a roundup blog. They are deer or deer-involved, not “any animal,” except where the agency says otherwise.
Michigan — 58,324 deer-involved crashes
Michigan Traffic Crash Facts, 2024 Deer: 58,324 motor vehicle-deer crashes, 20.2% of all crashes in the state, down 0.8% from 58,806 in 2023. 1,816 people injured. 14 killed — 6 passenger-vehicle occupants, 7 motorcyclists, 1 ORV/ATV. November alone: 10,017 crashes (17.2%). Fourth quarter: 25,037 (42.9%). Highest hour: 7:00–7:59 a.m. (6,204). Top counties by count, not rate: Kent 2,097, Oakland 2,024, Jackson 1,557 — the southern Lower Peninsula, where the people are. MSP’s own deer-crash page puts about 80% of those crashes on two-lane roads. Hunt context: Michigan deer hunting.
Wisconsin — 17,432 deer crashes
WisDOT 2024 deer-crash fact sheet: 17,432 deer crashes, 14% of all crashes, 9 killed (7 of them motorcyclists), 707 injured. One person killed or injured every 12.2 hours. Waukesha County led with 937, then Washington 798, St. Croix 791, Dane 770, Sheboygan 763. That is not the north woods. That is the suburban ring around Milwaukee plus the exurban counties people drive through to hunt. Final year-end stats later posted 17,432 deer crashes and 9 fatalities for 2024. Hunt context: Wisconsin deer hunting.
Pennsylvania — 6,426 reportable deer-related crashes
PennDOT, Oct. 2, 2025: 6,426 deer-related crashes in 2024, a five-year high, up from 6,315 in 2023. Multiple outlets citing PennDOT put 2024 deer-related deaths at 19. IIHS coded 15 Pennsylvania animal-strike deaths in 2024 under the FARS first-harmful-event rule. Those are not a contradiction. They are two definitions. The useful comparison is 6,426 police-reportable deer crashes versus ~147,000 insurance claims. Most Pennsylvania deer hits never become a crash report. AAA East Central has been quoting about 5,600 dollars as a typical deer-related claim in the region; that is a regional insurer figure, not a statewide mean, and it is not a State Farm number. Hunt context: Pennsylvania deer hunting.
Ohio — about 18,800 deer-involved crashes a year
Ohio State Highway Patrol’s OSTATS dashboard, cited in ODOT’s wildlife-crossing brief: 113,240 deer-involved crashes from 2019 through early December 2024, about 18,800 a year, 95% property-damage-only, 45 fatal in that span. Calendar 2023 was 20,206. The 2024 figure in that brief (17,376) is through December 2 and is not a finished year. An OSHP 2024 bulletin put 47% of 2019–2023 deer-involved crashes in October–December, 22% in November alone, and named Stark, Richland, Hancock, and Defiance as the high-count counties. Hunt context: Ohio deer hunting.
North Carolina — animal strikes are about 8% of crashes
NCDOT, Avoiding Collisions with Deer: about 8% of all vehicle crashes in the state involve animal strikes, most of them deer. Wake County led a 2022–2024 animal-crash ranking with 2,676, then Guilford 2,080, Randolph 1,909. The current NC crash form does not split deer from other animals; NCDOT’s own map notes that prior research put deer at more than 90% of reported animal crashes. State Farm still put North Carolina third in the country for claim count (88,000). Hunt context: North Carolina deer hunting.
Texas — most deaths, not the highest odds
State Farm: 86,000 animal-collision claims, fourth in the country. IIHS: 20 animal-strike deaths in 2024, 197 from 2015–2024 — the most of any state, every way you cut the decade. That is miles driven, rural ranch roads, and a mix of white-tailed deer, axis in some counties, and other large animals FARS does not name. Hunt context: Texas deer hunting.
Deaths by state, 2015–2024 (IIHS / FARS)
These are motor-vehicle crash deaths in which the first harmful event was a collision with an animal. FARS does not code the species. IIHS posted the table in June 2026. Sorted here by the 10-year total. Hawaii is not a row in the published table; the 49 listed states already sum to the U.S. total of 1,964, so Hawaii and D.C. coded zero deaths under this definition for the decade. I am not filling those cells with a guess.
| State | 2024 | 2015–2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Texas | 20 | 197 |
| Pennsylvania | 15 | 127 |
| Michigan | 14 | 119 |
| Wisconsin | 13 | 117 |
| Ohio | 10 | 73 |
| Illinois | 8 | 63 |
| Indiana | 5 | 59 |
| Minnesota | 6 | 59 |
| Florida | 3 | 58 |
| New York | 7 | 58 |
| Missouri | 6 | 57 |
| Georgia | 6 | 55 |
| Oklahoma | 2 | 53 |
| South Carolina | 7 | 53 |
| Kansas | 5 | 52 |
| Kentucky | 8 | 52 |
| Montana | 1 | 48 |
| North Carolina | 10 | 44 |
| California | 1 | 43 |
| Tennessee | 7 | 39 |
| Colorado | 2 | 36 |
| Iowa | 5 | 36 |
| Virginia | 1 | 35 |
| Arizona | 5 | 34 |
| New Mexico | 3 | 30 |
| Alabama | 1 | 27 |
| Arkansas | 1 | 27 |
| Mississippi | 3 | 26 |
| Oregon | 4 | 25 |
| New Jersey | 3 | 24 |
| Washington | 2 | 24 |
| West Virginia | 2 | 23 |
| Utah | 1 | 19 |
| South Dakota | 2 | 18 |
| Louisiana | 3 | 17 |
| Nebraska | 0 | 17 |
| Alaska | 0 | 15 |
| North Dakota | 4 | 15 |
| Maine | 2 | 14 |
| Maryland | 6 | 14 |
| Wyoming | 1 | 13 |
| Nevada | 2 | 12 |
| Idaho | 2 | 9 |
| New Hampshire | 0 | 8 |
| Connecticut | 1 | 7 |
| Massachusetts | 0 | 4 |
| Vermont | 0 | 4 |
| Delaware | 0 | 3 |
| Rhode Island | 0 | 2 |
| U.S. total | 210 | 1,964 |
Source: IIHS, Fatality Facts 2024, collisions with animals, state table 2015–2024. Year-by-year cells live on that page. I am not pasting the 11-column original.
If you hit one tonight
Stay in your lane if you are still rolling. Hazards. Shoulder. People first. Do not approach the deer. Call. Photograph. That is the whole list; the reasons are on what to do if you hit a deer. Direct contact with the deer is usually a comprehensive claim, not collision — until you swerve into a tree, at which point it is often collision. Liability-only does not fix the car. Details: how hitting a deer affects insurance rates.
If the deer ran, do not chase it into the ditch. Note the direction and tell the dispatcher. That night is I hit a deer but it ran off. If you already left, call the non-emergency line now rather than guessing the statute: is it illegal to hit a deer and drive off.
A folding triangle and a flashlight that is not your phone are the two pieces of kit that actually help on a dark two-lane after a strike. Put the triangle well back so the next driver sees metal before they see you.
Find a warning triangle on Amazon Amazon associate tag checkcheck-20. We may earn a commission.
FAQ
Which state has the most deer collisions?
Depends which file. Highest odds: West Virginia, 1 in 40. Most insurance claims: Pennsylvania, about 147,000. Most police-reported deer crashes among the states that publish a clean deer file: Michigan, 58,324 in 2024. Most deaths over ten years: Texas, 197.
Are State Farm “deer collision” odds actually deer?
They are animal-collision claims. Deer are the top animal and more than 1.1 million of 1.7 million claims. Rodents, dogs, raccoons, cattle, and “unknown” fill the rest. Montana and Wyoming’s ranks include elk, moose, and livestock in a way West Virginia’s mostly does not.
Why don’t Pennsylvania’s 6,426 crashes match 147,000 claims?
Reportable-crash rules. PennDOT’s file is the serious and the towed. State Farm is estimating industry claims, including the bumper that still drove home. Michigan reports a much larger share of deer hits because deer-involved crashes are 20% of the state’s crash file, not a rare add-on.
When is the worst month?
For claims, November, then October, then December. For Michigan’s 2024 police file, November (10,017). For IIHS deaths in 2024, the July–September quarter was slightly ahead of spring. Motorcycles and summer daylight change the death calendar.
Do deer whistles work?
No good evidence. State Farm says not to use them. Do deer whistles work?
Will this go on my driving record or raise my rates?
A deer-only strike that is not your fault usually does not go on a driving record. Comprehensive claims are treated differently from at-fault collision claims, but insurers still see a claim. Full answers: driving record and insurance rates. Is hitting a deer considered an accident? is the language question.
Sources
- State Farm newsroom, animal-collision claims July 2024–June 2025 (Sept. 16, 2025)
- State Farm, how likely are you to have an animal collision (top 10 odds, posted Sept. 29, 2025)
- Insurance Information Institute, Facts + Statistics: deer vehicle collisions
- IIHS Fatality Facts 2024: collisions with fixed objects and animals (posted June 2026; FARS)
- Michigan Traffic Crash Facts, 2024 Deer fact sheet (PDF)
- Michigan State Police OHSP, deer-vehicle crashes
- WisDOT, 2024 deer-crashes fact sheet (PDF)
- WisDOT, deer crashes rise during late spring (May 7, 2025)
- PennDOT, watch for deer on roadways (Oct. 2, 2025)
- ODOT, deer-vehicle collision / wildlife underpass brief (OSHP OSTATS)
- NCDOT, avoiding collisions with deer
- Missouri 1 in 97 / rank 17: Springfield News-Leader citing State Farm, Oct. 1, 2025. Georgia 1 in 109: local 2025 write-ups of the same State Farm file. Florida 1 in 575 / rank 46: Patch, Dec. 2025, citing State Farm.
Parent hub: Deer safety — collisions, disease, ticks, and fawns. How-to: what to do if you hit a deer. Herd size is a different list: deer population by state.
