Every UK Driver Risks a £590 Repair Bill as Pothole Reports Triple, RAC Says

• The RAC’s Report on Motoring 2026 found 51 percent of drivers now rate potholes their biggest worry on the road, up from 47 percent last year, with 34 percent saying they have suffered vehicle damage from poor surfaces.
• Garage data shared by the RAC puts the typical repair bill for pothole damage beyond a simple puncture at up to £590.
• RAC patrols logged 225 pothole mentions a day from broken-down drivers in February 2026, more than three times the 66 a day recorded in the same month last year.

Potholes have become the thing drivers fear most

For the first time, more than half of UK drivers now name potholes as their single biggest worry on the road, ahead of other drivers’ standards, speeding and road rage. The RAC’s annual Report on Motoring, based on a survey of thousands of UK motorists, found 51 percent cite potholes as their top concern, up from 47 percent in 2025. Two thirds, 66 percent, say the condition of local roads has got worse over the past year.

The numbers behind that worry are getting harder to ignore. The RAC says 83 percent of drivers now hit a pothole on most journeys, and 54 percent say they encounter one on every single trip they make by car. More than a third, 34 percent, report their vehicle has actually been damaged by a poor road surface in the past year, up from 29 percent in 2025.

What a pothole actually costs you

RAC head of policy Simon Williams says the organisation’s own garage data shows repairing anything more serious than a straightforward puncture is likely to cost up to £590. That figure covers the parts most commonly wrecked by a hard pothole strike: shock absorbers, suspension springs, control arms, bushings and steering components, plus the labour to fit them. New tyres, which the RAC says are expensive enough on their own, come on top of that if the impact has also damaged the sidewall.

The RAC’s own patrols give a sense of scale. In 2025 the breakdown service was called out 26,048 times to members with damaged shock absorbers, broken suspension springs or distorted wheels, the faults most closely linked to poor road surfaces. That figure excludes simple punctures, which the RAC tracks separately because they can also be caused by debris unrelated to road quality, such as nails and screws. Even so, puncture callouts are also climbing, up 20 percent year on year.

Why this winter has been worse

The RAC’s Pothole Index, a rolling measure the organisation has tracked since 2006, recorded 225 pothole mentions a day from broken-down drivers in February 2026. That is nearly three and a half times the 66 a day logged in the same month in 2025, and more than five times the 43 a day averaged across the whole of 2025. In total, 6,290 RAC members mentioned potholes when logging a breakdown in February alone, against 1,842 the year before. Reports peaked at 336 in a single day on 6 February, more than double the worst day of the previous winter.

Met Office figures cited by the RAC show February 2026 had nearly 19 days of rain, one of the wettest Februarys in 126 years. Simon Williams says that volume of standing water has been hiding defects in the road surface rather than simply flowing off it, catching out drivers who had no way to see the hole beneath a puddle until their wheel hit it. He points to poor drainage, rather than rainfall alone, as a long-term cause, suggesting councils have pulled back on the maintenance work that normally keeps water off the carriageway.

What you can actually do about it

If you hit a pothole hard enough to suspect damage, the RAC recommends checking for an immediate pull to one side when braking, a vibration through the steering wheel, or a new noise from the suspension when going over bumps, all signs that a wheel, tyre or suspension component may have been knocked out of alignment. Driving on regardless risks turning a cheap repair into a much larger bill, since a bent wheel or a damaged tyre sidewall can fail suddenly at speed.

Councils in England and Wales are required to maintain the roads they are responsible for, and drivers can claim compensation for pothole damage under the Highways Act 1980 if they can show the council knew about the defect, or should have known, and failed to repair it within a reasonable time. Successful claims typically need photographs of the pothole showing its depth and location, the date and time it was hit, and a repair invoice or quote. Councils can defend a claim under what is known as the Section 58 defence by showing they had a reasonable system of road inspection in place, which is why many claims are rejected even when the damage is genuine.

Reporting a pothole, even one that has not caused you any damage, also matters. Every local authority has an online reporting tool, and a hole that gets logged and repaired quickly is one that cannot catch out the next driver, or form the basis of someone else’s much larger repair bill.

A problem drainage, not just funding, has to fix

Mike Hansford of the Road Surface Treatments Association, which represents companies that carry out preventative road maintenance, says water pooling on a road surface does more than create an immediate hazard, it actively accelerates the formation of the next pothole by getting into existing cracks and undermining the structure beneath. He argues councils, the Environment Agency and nearby landowners all need to work together on drainage rather than treating potholes purely as a resurfacing problem.

For drivers, the practical reality is that until that joined-up work happens, hitting a hidden pothole remains a matter of when rather than if. Checking tyre pressures regularly, slowing down over standing water where a hole could be hiding, and knowing how to spot the signs of hidden damage are the cheapest insurance any driver has against a £590 bill.

Sources:

• RAC Drive, Potholes hidden in puddles wreak havoc with drivers in wet start to 2026