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To probably nobody's surprise, 2025 was a down year for sales of new motorcycles in the United States. According to the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC), the major manufacturers sold 486,468 units last year, a sales decline of 7.6%.
It's not hard to identify contributing factors to the decline. Persistent inflation has squeezed budgets for households in the lower half of the income range. Interest rates, while not unusually high by historical standards, remain higher than they have been in recent years. Consumer confidence levels at some points in 2025 dropped to near historic lows. All of those are reasons a rider might decide to hang on to a current motorcycle instead of replacing it with a new one.
The MIC splits motorcycles into four major segments and, as shown in the chart below, all four registered declines last year. Scooter sales, in particular, have been dropping rapidly in recent years as many buyers looking for convenient urban transportation have opted for electric bicycles instead.
| 2025 U.S. motorcycle sales | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Category | 2024 | 2025 | Change |
| Scooter | 15,720 | 11,104 | -29.4% |
| On-highway | 292,763 | 273,612 | -6.5% |
| Dual-sport | 77,685 | 69,638 | -10.4% |
| Off-road | 140,457 | 132,114 | -5.9% |
| Total | 526,625 | 486,468 | -7.6% |
Of course sales of new units aren't the only metric by which to measure the health of the industry. Some prefer to look at sales of motorcycle tires, because that's a better indicator of how much we're riding our motorcycles, whether we're buying new ones or not. And the used motorcycle market remains active as inflationary pressures have pushed more shoppers to consider less expensive alternatives.
While sales were weak in the United States, that wasn't the case in many other countries around the world. In my view, that points to an important factor when assessing the state of the industry in the United States, and that's the nature of our motorcycling culture.
Why sales are stronger in other countries
Periodically, Common Tread readers ask why the U.S. market isn't getting models that are available in Europe, or why there are so few American riders at the world championship level in road racing, or why motorcyclists don't have the political clout to keep off-road riding areas open or get lane-filtering legalized, or why some manufacturers aren't bothering to develop new models aimed at our market and tastes. It all comes back to the same answer: numbers.
You don't have to make overly stretched comparisons to motorcycle-heavy countries such as India, Indonesia, or Vietnam, which have very different economies than the United States. As I did several years ago, I'm going to use Spain as a comparison, because its economy is not radically different.
The recent history of the Spanish motorcycle market in many ways mirrors that of the U.S. market. Sales in Spain peaked in 2007, before being derailed by the Great Financial Crisis, which cut U.S. sales roughly in half, from more than a million to around half a million. But while U.S. sales have lingered in that range, Spain has recovered more. In 2025, sales of motorcycles and scooters rose 6.9% in Spain, hitting the highest level since 2008, according to ANESDOR, the industry group in that country.
The key difference is that Spain is a country where motorcycling is fully integrated into society. Riding a small motorcycle or scooter is something many people do or have done, not something done by less than 10% of the population, as in the United States. And, motorcycling is not seen almost exclusively as a recreational activity, a hobby, or a "lifestyle" for adding some spice to your Instagram account. Motorcycles and scooters are a significant part of the transportation system and motorcycle racing is a popular sport.
With a population of 49.5 million and registration of 265,200 new motorcycles, scooters, and trikes in 2025, that's a per capita rate of one motorcycle sold for every 187 residents in Spain. In the United States, with a population of 342.3 million and sales of 486,468 motorcycles, that's one motorcycle sold for every 704 residents.
I believe those numbers help explain why sales have largely recovered over the past 18 years in one country, where they are an integral part of society, and continue to lag in the other, where they are (largely) an optional, recreational "toy." The same is true in other developed countries, not just emerging economies, and that cultural difference, in my opinion, explains a lot.
