Across 7–13 September 2026 the Malta Traffic Index averaged 20.3 — moderate by the standards of our own monitoring. That figure is the mean of 113 readings taken across 7 days on the island's motorway, primary and secondary network.

That is effectively unchanged from the previous week (21.3). Weeks that sit this close together usually mean nothing unusual happened — no major closure, no weather event, no holiday distorting the pattern.

The single worst reading of the week was 91, recorded on Friday 11 September 2026 around 09:00.

Friday was the heaviest day of the week, averaging 32.4 with a peak of 91. Tuesday was the calmest at 4.7. The gap between the two — 27.7 index points — is the practical difference between planning your week around the roads and ignoring them.

The weekday–weekend split was pronounced: 22 on working days against 10.9 at the weekend. That is the commute signature — Malta's congestion is overwhelmingly generated by people travelling to work and school, not by leisure traffic.

The heaviest hour of the average day was 18:00, at 32. The opposing peak — 09:00 — reached 31.

The two peaks were close to each other in weight, meaning the day had two comparable pressure points rather than one dominant rush.

Measured corridor by corridor, Paola — Ħal Luqa Rd carried the heaviest average delay of the week: journeys through that segment took 35.4% longer than they would on an empty road, across 109 readings. At its worst moment the same segment was running 150% over free-flow.

Behind it came Manuel Dimech — Sliema (34.7%) and Kappara Junction (27.4%). These are averages across the whole week including empty night hours, so the peak-hour experience on each is considerably worse than the headline figure suggests.

We also recorded 68 readings where a monitored segment was reported fully closed. Closures are counted separately from delay because a closed road has no travel-time ratio — it simply removes capacity and pushes the load onto whatever runs parallel.

Three corrections apply to this section. Until 19 September 2026 our Coast Rd — Salina monitoring point was returning the same stretch of road as Ħamrun Bypass, so the two showed identical figures and one road was counted twice. The 109 Coast Rd — Salina readings taken before that date are left out of this report.

Until 18 September 2026 our Fgura — Triq Hompesch monitoring point was returning the same stretch of road as Paola — Ħal Luqa Rd, so the two showed identical figures and one road was counted twice. The 109 Fgura — Triq Hompesch readings taken before that date are left out of this report.

3 readings from Ħal Luqa — Airport showed a travel time more than 5 times the free-flow time and are left out as unknown. That monitoring point sits on a very short stretch of road, so a queue of a few minutes there reads as a delay of well over a thousand percent and does not describe the corridor. The week's highest index reading of 91 was itself driven by one of these readings; the index figures in this report are shown as they were recorded at the time.

No fixed national holidays or dated events fall in the week ahead, so the recurring commute pattern should dominate. Village feasts and short police closures are announced separately and do not appear on our annual calendar — the live closures page is the place to check those.

On the evidence of this week, Friday is the day worth planning around, and the evening peak is the window to avoid if your journey is flexible.

Every figure above comes from our own continuous measurement of Malta's road network — the same Malta Traffic Index shown live on the map, recorded and kept. The index blends the weighted Travel Time Index across a fixed panel of monitoring points on motorway, primary and secondary roads with the share of those points currently running slow or closed.

This report is compiled automatically from those recorded readings at the close of each week. The numbers are measurements, not estimates: nothing here is modelled, interpolated or predicted, and weeks with insufficient coverage are not published at all. Sampling density follows real site usage, which is why overnight coverage is thinner than daytime coverage and why we state coverage gaps explicitly rather than smoothing over them.