The Transport Accident Commission’s running tally is the number our newsroom checks first thing every morning. As of the start of May 2026, the Victorian road toll is sitting higher than it was at the same point in 2025, and the gap between the two years has widened over the Easter and Anzac Day periods. At midnight on 2 May, 97 lives had been lost on Victorian roads in 2026, against 89 by the same date in 2025 — an increase of around 8.2 per cent.
That figure is a snapshot. It will keep moving. But the direction of travel for the first four months of the year is now clear enough to write about, and clear enough for the agencies that work on road trauma — TAC, Victoria Police, the Department of Transport and Planning, RACV — to be talking publicly about it.
Where the 2026 number sits against recent years
The 12 months ending 31 December 2025 closed with around 290 lives lost, which was already a worse year than the long-term Towards Zero trajectory called for. The pre-pandemic five-year average sat in the high 250s. The 2024 toll was higher still. So the question heading into 2026 was whether the slow, painful drift upward since the lockdowns would reverse.
The early answer from the TAC’s year-to-date dashboard is no — at least not yet. Late March did look promising. As of 30 March, the year-to-date toll was tracking around 22 per cent below 2025. A run of fatal crashes through April changed that picture. By the end of the long Anzac Day weekend the gap had closed, and by 2 May the 2026 figure had crossed above 2025’s.
Our team has been comparing the running totals against what TAC publishes for prior years. The pattern of one bad fortnight wiping out two good months is consistent with what road safety researchers describe as the “small-numbers volatility” of fatal crashes. A handful of multi-fatality incidents — a single car with three or four occupants, a truck-and-car head-on, a regional crash with a passenger and a child — can shift the year-on-year reading by several percentage points overnight.
Motorcyclists are still the standout category
The 12-month period ending December 2025 closed with 61 motorcyclist deaths, around 21 per cent of all lives lost. The five-year average sits closer to 45. That over-representation is not a 2026 phenomenon — TAC and Victoria Police have been raising it since the post-lockdown riding boom — but the early months of 2026 have not produced the correction safety advocates were hoping for.
Motorcycle Riders Association of Victoria has been pressing for a wider rollout of motorcycle-specific safety treatments on the regional touring routes. The Black Spur, the Reefton Spur, the Great Ocean Road and the Otways have all featured repeatedly in TAC fatal data. Filtering rules, helmet standards and rider training all sit in the same conversation, but the engineering question — what we do to the road surface, the run-off zones and the barrier systems — is the one where the public agencies have the most direct lever.
Pedestrian and regional driver figures
Pedestrians made up around 17.9 per cent of the 2025 toll, with 52 lives lost. Older Victorians are over-represented in that group, particularly in inner-city Melbourne and in regional centres where active-transport infrastructure has not kept pace with traffic volume. The Department of Transport and Planning has continued its program of 40 km/h zones and raised pedestrian crossings in commercial centres, but coverage remains patchy across the state.
The regional-versus-metropolitan split also continues to skew toward the country roads. In the 12 months to December 2025, regional Victoria recorded a 6 per cent rise in hospitalised claims (from 1,884 to 2,004), and metropolitan Melbourne rose 7 per cent (to 3,613). Fatalities don’t track those hospitalisation numbers in lockstep, but they tell our newsroom the same story: more crashes, more serious crashes, and a public-health load that is not coming down on its own.
What’s actually changed in 2026
Three things our team has been watching closely:
- The mobile road-safety camera program continues to expand, and the Department of Justice and Community Safety has signalled further site additions through 2026. The intersection-camera and average-speed enforcement programs are part of the same suite.
- The Road Safety Strategy 2021–2030 mid-term review is due. The original target — halve deaths by 2030, with a stretch goal toward zero — depends on the next four years bending the curve. The 2026 numbers feed straight into that review.
- TAC’s communications team has shifted the campaign tone in 2026 toward fatigue, distraction and regional driver behaviour. The advertising is one of the few things TAC controls directly, and the agency has consistently said it would lean harder into the categories where the data is moving against it.
The single-incident effect
One of the harder things to write about in this space is the role of single, severe crashes in the year-to-date number. Mei has been pulling the public TAC and Victoria Police statements from January through April, and several incidents involving multiple fatalities have lifted the running total in a single day. We don’t republish the names of the people involved unless those names are already on the public record through coronial findings, court matters or family-released material; in most cases the incidents are still under investigation and the families are still in the early days of grief.
What we will say is this: the year-to-date number is not a smooth line. When you see a 22 per cent drop turn into an 8 per cent rise in five weeks, it usually means a small handful of catastrophic crashes have moved the figure, not that road behaviour across Victoria has suddenly deteriorated.
What we’ll be watching through winter
Three things sit on our newsroom’s calendar for the next few months:
- The TAC mid-year review, which usually drops in July with a fuller breakdown by user category, age and region.
- The June quarter Crime Statistics Agency release, which carries drink-driving and drug-driving offence trends — both of which feed back into the trauma picture.
- The Road Safety Camera Commissioner’s annual reporting, which often surfaces issues with how detection sites are operating in practice.
If the trend through May and June continues as it has through April, the 2026 toll is on track to land somewhere between the 2024 and 2025 totals — neither the breakthrough year that road safety advocates have been calling for, nor a return to the worst pandemic-era figures. Our team will keep updating this page through the year as the TAC dashboard refreshes.
If you have been affected by a road crash
The TAC operates a 24-hour client services line for people injured in transport accidents, and the Coroners Court of Victoria’s family liaison service supports families through inquest processes. For immediate counselling support after a road trauma, Lifeline is available on 13 11 14, and Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636. If you have witnessed a crash and want to speak to investigators anonymously, Crime Stoppers is 1800 333 000.
Mei Calloway covers road safety, family violence and community safety for Victoria Crime News.
