DUI's: By The Numbers.
DUI's might be the most uneven crime across the country. Where you drive impaired decides how the law applies. In one state a first offense is a civil ticket. In another it's ten mandatory days in jail. The map below shows the four numbers that decide which story is yours.
- Reporting
- Auro Editorial
- Updated
- May 2026
- Read time
- 5 min · interactive
Four numbers that decide what a DUI costs you.
How often the state arrests for impaired driving. Density of enforcement and density of harm — they aren't the same number.
Where a single charge gets ugliest.
Same data as the map, sorted. The ten states that lead the country on the metric you're looking at.
How we built this map.
Sources
FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (DUI arrests, 2022–24), Bureau of Justice Statistics state court case-processing data, NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System, and Auro's own survey of state DUI statutes (May 2026 edition).
What we counted
Arrests for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, charged under each state's equivalent DUI / DWI / OWI / OUI statute. Wet-reckless and lesser-included pleas are counted as convictions for the conviction-rate metric.
What we didn't
Race and class disparities in who gets stopped. They are real, large, and not visible in a state-level average. A serious accounting of DUI in America requires zooming in on who, not just where — that map is harder, and it is coming.
Edge cases
Wisconsin treats a first OWI as a civil offense, with no mandatory jail; that is why its bar is short on the rightmost map. Arizona, Tennessee, Washington, and Alaska mandate jail on every first DUI conviction; that is why theirs is full.
Keep reading
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