India's first household travel survey finds two-wheelers take 42.6 percent of work trips

Two-wheelers account for 42.6 percent of journeys to a fixed workplace in India, and buses account for 55.8 percent of overnight household trips. Those two shares come from the first National Household Travel Survey, run by the National Statistics Office from July 2025 to June 2026 and released this week. The sample is 492,023 households and 2.03 million people, drawn from 14,274 villages and 10,377 urban blocks.

The work-trip figure is the one that has been shortened, in several reports, to "9 percent use public transport." Both numbers can be true, and they describe different cuts. Among people travelling to a fixed workplace, the single largest mode is the two-wheeler, at 42.6 percent. Cars are a small share of the daily work commute, about 3 percent in the summaries that use a rounded public-transport figure of 9 percent. Buses, on the work journey of more than a kilometre, are the main mode for 6.7 percent. Monorail or tram accounts for 2.1 percent of that longer work trip, and rail for 0.2 percent. Metro, suburban rail, monorail and tram together carry about 5 percent of urban work commutes.

What a work trip costs

The average worker spends 785 rupees a month getting to a fixed workplace. Urban workers spend 1,044 rupees. Rural workers spend 612. Men spend 835. Women spend 533. The gap is not a fare table. It is the survey's measure of what respondents report spending, split by place and by sex.

Students spend less, and the split is the same shape. The average student commute costs 443 rupees a month. Urban students spend 617. Rural students spend 361. Education trips themselves are dominated by walking, at 37 percent, then buses at 29.5 percent, then bicycles at 15.8 percent. A school journey and a workplace journey are different systems in this dataset. One is mostly on foot or by bus. The other is mostly on a two-wheeler.

The overnight journey is a bus journey

The same survey reverses the ranking once the trip includes a night away. Buses take 55.8 percent of household overnight journeys. Inter-city rail takes 17.7 percent. Cars take 15.1 percent. Two-wheelers take 8.8 percent. Bus and rail together are 73.5 percent of overnight travel. The two-wheeler, which leads the daily work trip, is a minor mode once the household stays out.

Purpose sorts the overnight trips further. Social, communication and religious reasons account for 70.2 percent. Tourism, culture, leisure and sport account for 7.4 percent, and 9.3 percent in urban households. Self-care and maintenance account for 6.5 percent. Most overnight movement in this first national picture is a visit, not a holiday.

Other trips inside the day

Trips that are not the commute to a fixed job fall in yet another order. Two-wheelers are 32.2 percent. Walking is 24.9 percent. Auto-rickshaws are 18.9 percent. Bicycles are 12.6 percent. Buses are 8.5 percent. The auto-rickshaw, almost absent from the slogans about the survey, is the third mode for ordinary within-day travel. Any plan that talks only about buses and metros is missing the vehicle that takes nearly a fifth of these trips.

The gender split on the urban work bus is the sharpest single comparison in the public summaries. Among urban workers travelling more than a kilometre, 21.7 percent of women use the bus as the main mode, against 6.9 percent of men. Men are on the two-wheeler. Women, in the city, are on the bus at three times the male rate. A service cut on urban buses lands on a different group from a fuel-price move that hits two-wheelers.

What the survey is for

The NSO has said the survey is meant as a base for route planning, public-transport scheduling and infrastructure choices. It is the first time India has a national household picture of mode, purpose and cost together. Earlier urban studies and census commuting tables did not cover overnight trips, student costs and within-day errands in one instrument, and they did not use this sample.

The useful reading is the split, not the single headline. Daily work is a two-wheeler trip, 42.6 percent, costing 785 rupees a month, more in cities, more for men. Overnight travel is a bus trip, 55.8 percent, with rail second. School is a walk or a bus. The errand in the day is as likely to be an auto as a bus. Women in cities use the work bus at 21.7 percent. Men use it at 6.9 percent. Those are the figures a transport budget can actually spend against.