Open data: US motorcycle licensing and helmet laws
Two free datasets covering all 51 US jurisdictions — 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Every helmet-law record carries the statute or official agency document it was verified against (51 of 51), so a figure can be traced to primary law rather than to another aggregator. Last verified 2026-07-28.
Downloads
US Motorcycle Licensing & Training Dataset
One record per jurisdiction covering the licence or endorsement issued, permit rules and validity, minimum ages, fees, knowledge and skills testing, engine-size tiers where they exist, and the state rider-training program — each cluster carrying its own sources and verification date.
US Motorcycle Helmet Law Dataset
One record per jurisdiction: the helmet regime (universal, conditional or none), the exemption conditions and who each binds, eye-protection and passenger rules, penalties, and the statute the requirement is drawn from.
CSV is offered for the helmet dataset only. Its records are genuinely flat. The licensing dataset nests licence, training and helmet clusters that each carry their own sources and verification dates, and flattening that to a single table would drop the provenance that makes it worth citing — so it stays JSON.
Reading the CSV: a cell reading not_published means no primary source publishes that figure — it does not mean “no”. A verified absence is written as false or 0. The two are never merged, which is why the file has no blank cells: in a spreadsheet a blank reads as a negative, and that would misstate the 20 jurisdictions that simply publish no eye-protection rule.
Licence and attribution
Both datasets are released under CC BY 4.0. Use them commercially, republish them, build on them — the only requirement is attribution. Copy this:
<a href="https://www.getmotorcyclelicense.com/data">US Motorcycle Licensing & Helmet Law Dataset</a> by GetMotorcycleLicense, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>
How the data is verified
Every record is checked against that jurisdiction’s own statute, administrative code, or the DMV/DPS/BMV that issues the credential — never against a competing aggregator, a dealer, or a law firm’s summary. Where a jurisdiction publishes no figure, the field is left empty rather than filled with an estimate: an absent value means nobody published one, and zero means a verified zero. Those are never conflated. Full method on the about page.
What this data is not
- It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for the statute. Where a decision matters, follow the source link on the record.
- There is no historical time series. Each record is a current snapshot with a verification date, not a record of how a law changed.
- Laws change. A record is accurate as of its own
lastVerifieddate, which travels with every row rather than being stated once for the whole file.