Congestion trends
When should I go?
Right now the roads are about 19% busier than a typical weekday afternoon.
Typically the calmest hour left today is 21:00.
Relative shape, not an absolute percentage — the two lines share one scale so they can be compared. Typical curve from 28 recorded days; hours with fewer than 5 samples are left blank.
By day of week
53–67 readings per day · bars vs an average day
Across the last 28 recorded days, Tue is the heaviest — on average about 35% busier than an average day. Sun is the lightest, and the single worst reading of the period landed on a Thu.
Worst centres · weekly · 2026-w40
- Paola+59%
- Regional Rd+45.4%
- Fgura+41.2%
Average delay vs free flow · bar scale 0–60%
Week by week
All reports →The week of 28 Sept ran 14% busier than the week before it.
8 weeks · average index · 95–256 readings each · tap a bar for that week's report
How this is measured
Everything else on this site shows you the roads right now. This page is the memory: we continuously record our island-wide Malta Traffic Index and publish what it adds up to — how congestion actually behaves by hour of day and day of week, measured rather than guessed. As far as we know, nobody else publishes this data for Malta.
The Malta Traffic Index is a single 1–100 number summarising how slow the island's main road network is compared to free-flow conditions. It blends two measurements taken from a fixed panel of monitoring points on Malta's motorway, primary and secondary roads: the weighted Travel Time Index (how much longer journeys take right now versus an empty road) and the congested segment ratio (what share of the monitored points are currently slowed or blocked).
The home screen shows a different number on purpose: the share of Malta's main and secondary roads that are congested right now, weighted by road length, alongside the average speed across them. That one answers “how much of the network is stuck at this moment”. The index behind this page is the longer memory — it is the series we have been recording continuously since July, which is why the charts and the weekly reports are built on it. The chart above deliberately shows no absolute number: the two series would be measured on different scales, and the useful answer here is the comparison, not the level.
Samples are recorded continuously through the day, roughly every half hour, using the same TomTom Flow Segment data that powers the live map — the difference is that here we keep it. Each sample stores the index, the raw Travel Time Index and the congested ratio; the charts above aggregate them by hour and by weekday. Days with too few samples are shown but weighted only by what was actually measured — we never interpolate or invent readings.
Two honest caveats. First, sampling density follows site usage, so overnight hours can have thinner coverage than daytime — a missing bar means no measurements in that hour, not zero traffic. Second, the index describes the main network, not every side street: a village feast can paralyse one locality while the island-wide index barely moves. For locality-level detail, see the area pages and cameras.
See what the index reads right now on the live map, or read Best and Worst Times to Drive in Malta for the practical conclusions. Each month is written up in the monthly Malta Traffic Index report.
Gaps shown as gaps — never interpolated.