Average MPG of Motorcycles (2025)

Since a typical motorcycle owner spends nearly £500 a year on petrol, finding a bike with good fuel efficiency can make a big difference to the amount of money you spend on motorcycle-related expenses each year. How many mpg does your bike get—and how does this compare to other motorbikes?

We've calculated the average miles per gallon (mpg) for petrol motorcycles to give you a benchmark for understanding how fuel efficient any given motorbike is—as well as typical mpg figures for popular BMW, Honda, Kawasaki, Yamaha, Triumph and Piaggo motorbikes.

Average Miles Per Gallon for Motorcycles

The typical motorcycle gets around 58.1 miles per gallon—but fuel efficiency varies significantly depending on the type of gearbox on your bike. Motorbikes with continuously variable transmissions get the best gas mileage (80.3 mpg on average). Dual Clutch Transmissions (DCTs)—e.g. direct shift, automatic, semi-automatic—get around 75.7 mpg on average. The vast majority of bikes in the database are manual transmission which guzzle the most petrol, getting 48.6 mpg on average.

The type of transmission plays a significant factor in the fuel efficiency of your motorbike

In general, motorcycles are much more fuel efficient than cars—the average petrol car gets only 36 mpg compared to 58 mpg for a motorcycle.

Riding style has a massive impact on how quickly your bike guzzles petrol. Punch it? You know who you are. And you know you burn more fuel. Here are figures for self-reported minimum and maximum mpg statistics for a few popular motorbikes to show what a large range of fuel efficiencies riders actually experience in the real world:

Driving style can have a huge impact in the fuel efficiency of your motorbike

MPG for BMW, Honda, Kawasaki, Triumph and Yamaha Motorbikes

A few popular UK motorbikes stand out for getting particularly good gas mileage: the Honda PCX125 and the Honda CB125F scooters. Both get more than 115 miles per gallon on average due to their smaller 125cc engines. In contrast, bikes with larger engines tend to get worse gas mileage. For example, the (fantastic) new BMW R1300GSA gets around 54.2 miles per gallon in real-life riding; the Triumph Tiger 900 GT Pro gets around 55.6 mpg.

Below find fuel efficiency data for popular BMW, Honda, Kawasaki, Triumph and Yamaha motorbikes.

Popular Motorcycle MPG

Fuel efficiency of popular UK motorbikes

If you're researching motorbike fuel efficiency ahead of picking a motorcycle, keep in mind that fuel consumption is just of the many costs of motorbike ownership—the other big cost being motorcycle insurance premiums.

Also, as technologies improve vehicles tend to get better gas mileage. So if you drive an older motorcycle then upgrading to a newer model might save you on fuel at the pump. Those particularly concerned about running costs might want to consider an electric motorcycle, such as the Zero electric motorbike.

Methodology

To determine the average mpg for motorcycles we gathered data on two-wheeled vehicles from the Spritmonitor database, a site where users enter information on the gas mileage of their personal vehicle for a real-life representation of a vehicle's actual fuel efficiency. The resulting database contains over 20 million fuel ups for over half a million vehicles.

Entries are stored in a litres/100km format, so for use in the UK we converted these values into miles per gallon. Since there are 4.55 litres in a gallon and 1.609 kilometers in a mile, you can convert litres/100km to mpg (UK) by dividing 282.5 by the litres/100km value to get your mpg equivalent.

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