Drive the M6 and it feels like a lorry road. The official counts say that feeling is right.

Between Junction 8W and Junction 9 at Great Barr, the M6 carries 31,213 lorries every single day. On one stretch further north, better than one vehicle in five is an HGV.

For comparison, the busiest stretch of the M4 runs at about 4% lorries. On the M6 at Great Barr it is 17.3%, and the M6 carries roughly 1.4 times as much freight on its busiest freight stretch as the M1 does on its.

The ten heaviest freight stretches of the M6

Stretch	Lorries per day	All vehicles	Lorry share
J8W to J9	31,213	180,440	17.3%
J9 to J10	27,805	166,153	16.7%
J8E to J7	24,159	174,714	13.8%
J20 to J21 spur	23,492	187,521	12.5%
J21 spur to J21A	21,505	163,344	13.2%
J17 to J18	21,167	143,072	14.8%
JM6 Toll to J3	21,131	134,697	15.7%
J16 to J17	19,484	132,457	14.7%
J1 to J2	19,171	99,800	19.2%
J6 to J5	18,447	147,469	12.5%

Why it matters when something goes wrong

A motorway carrying thirty thousand lorries a day does not behave like one carrying six thousand. Lorries need more room to stop, take longer to move clear of an incident, and a single HGV breakdown in a live lane removes far more capacity than a car does. It is one reason M6 delays can build quickly and clear slowly.

It is also why we run this site: check the latest M6 traffic news before you set off, and see what roadworks are planned.

Traffic count figures on this page are from the Department for Transport road traffic statistics, 2025. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.