How many privately owned e-scooters are there in the US and Canada?

About 3 million, likely between 2 and 5 million.

Published
Updated
By
United Mobility

Summary

By e-scooter we mean a stand-up electric kick scooter owned by a person rather than a rental company. Mopeds, e-bikes and mobility scooters are not counted.

  • Import records give 2.9 million and a comparison with Germany gives 3.8 million. Their 80% ranges overlap.
  • Ownership surveys suggest more, but may count children’s and mobility scooters, so we treat them as an upper bound.
  • Injury records suggest only about 600,000 are ridden regularly, which would mean most owned scooters sit unused.

  • Imports2.9M (2.1–3.8M)

  • Germany3.8M (2.8–5.0M)

  • Surveys, US11.8M (8.1–18.2M)

  • Injuries, US580K (190K–1.9M)

Estimates by method, on a log scale. Dots are central estimates. Bars are 80% ranges for the two main methods; thin lines are low-to-high bounds for the two checks. The green line marks our figure, 3 million.

Import records

In 2024 the US imported 3.5 million electric two-wheelers and Canada about 500,000, under trade code HS 8711.60.1 The code also covers e-bikes, so we subtract published e-bike counts2–5 and assume 40% to 70% of what remains are kick scooters, applying the same mix to Canada. We then remove scooters bought for shared fleets6 and count only those likely still in use, assuming a private scooter lasts 2.5 to 5 years on average. That lifespan is our assumption; shared scooters, which are ridden far harder, are modeled at 0.5 to 2 years.7 The result is 2.9 million, with an 80% range of 2.1 to 3.8 million.

Germany’s count

Every e-scooter in Germany needs an insurance plate, so the country has a direct count: 1.37 million privately owned in 2025,8 or 1.64 per 100 people.9 We assume the US rate is 30% to 100% of Germany’s. For Canada, where cities are less dense and winters longer, we assume 20% to 75%. We apply each rate to the country’s population.10,11 That gives 3.8 million, with an 80% range of 2.8 to 5.0 million.

Surveys

Surveys put the number higher. About 8% of Americans say there is an e-scooter in their household,12 and 12% of adults in another survey say they own one.13 Converted to households,14 that implies 8 to 18 million in the US alone. The questions may include children’s and mobility scooters, so we treat this as an upper bound.

Injury records

Injury records suggest far fewer are ridden regularly. US emergency rooms treated about 40,400 e-scooter injuries in 2023; 60% involved scooters that were not rentals, or were not recorded as rentals.15 At the injury rate seen on 63.9 million shared trips,6 and assuming private riders are hurt at half to one and a half times that rate and make 100 to 250 trips a year, that implies 200,000 to 1.9 million private scooters in regular use, roughly 600,000 at the center. If so, most owned scooters sit unused.

How we got to 3 million

The two main methods give 2.9 and 3.8 million, and their 80% ranges together span 2.1 to 5.0 million, which we round to 2 to 5 million. We report that span rather than a pooled interval because the methods share assumptions. By country, the central estimates put 2.5 to 3.4 million in the US and roughly 300,000 to 360,000 in Canada. For the headline we use 3 million, the import figure rounded to one significant figure. It sits below the German estimate, so if anything it errs low. For scale, that is about 20 times the 154,000 shared e-scooters deployed on an average day in 2023.6 Every estimate on this page comes from a short model you can download and run.16

Limitations

The trade code doesn’t separate kick scooters from e-bikes, and the two published e-bike counts for 2025 differ by 0.9 million. How long private scooters last, and how ownership here compares with Germany’s, are our judgments. We found no Canadian survey that measures ownership. We’ll revise the estimate when one appears, or when trade data separates kick scooters from e-bikes.

Sources

Web sources accessed October 26, 2026.

  1. United Nations Statistics Division. UN Comtrade Database: HS 871160, imports reported by the United States and Canada, 2017–2025. comtradeplus.un.org
  2. Toll, M. (2022, February 8). US electric bikes set to pass 1M sales annually, globally tracking to $40B. Electrek. electrek.co
  3. Vosper, R. (2024, March 11). Vosper: E-bikes step up in a down market. Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. bicycleretailer.com
  4. Frothingham, S. (2025, February 5). Non-electric bike imports increased 17% last year. Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. bicycleretailer.com
  5. Frothingham, S. (2026, March 10). Did e-bike imports exceed the value of non-electric bike imports last year? Maybe. Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. bicycleretailer.com
  6. North American Bikeshare and Scootershare Association. (2024). 2023 Shared Micromobility State of the Industry Report. pedbikeinfo.org
  7. Hollingsworth, J., Copeland, B., & Johnson, J. X. (2019). Are e-scooters polluters? The environmental impacts of shared dockless electric scooters. Environmental Research Letters, 14(8), 084031. doi.org
  8. Gesamtverband der Deutschen Versicherungswirtschaft. (2026, August 18). FAQ: So werden E-Scooter versichert. Die Versicherer. dieversicherer.de
  9. Statistisches Bundesamt. (2026, June 16). Bevölkerung Deutschlands sinkt im Jahr 2025 um 0,1 % (Pressemitteilung Nr. 203). destatis.de
  10. U.S. Census Bureau. (2026, January 27). Vintage 2025 national and state population estimates. census.gov
  11. Statistics Canada. (2026, September 23). Table 17-10-0009-01: Population estimates, quarterly. www150.statcan.gc.ca
  12. Statista Research Department. (2025, December 17). E-scooters in the United States: statistics & facts. Statista. statista.com
  13. Insurance Journal. (2026, April 17). Nationwide: Consumers say insurance should evolve for micromobility vehicles. insurancejournal.com
  14. U.S. Census Bureau. (2025). Total households (TTLHH). Retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. fred.stlouisfed.org
  15. Tark, J. (2024, September). Micromobility products-related deaths, injuries, and hazard patterns: 2017–2023 (Table 3.3). U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. cpsc.gov
  16. United Mobility. (2026). estimate.py: the model behind this page. Python, standard library only. Download

How to cite

United Mobility. (2026, October 26). How many privately owned e-scooters are there in the US and Canada? utdmobility.com/estimate