Overview
New Jersey's annual "Click It or Ticket" campaign, a statewide high-visibility enforcement and public awareness effort to increase seat belt use and reduce preventable deaths and injuries on New Jersey roads, kicked off ahead of the Memorial Day Weekend.
Increased patrols will be conducted across the state from May 18-31 with $774,760 in grant funding to 113 law enforcement agencies by the Division of Highway Traffic Safety (DHTS). Officers will be looking for unbuckled drivers and passengers and checking that children are properly secured in appropriate car seats or booster seats or using seat belts. The campaign is part of a nationwide effort to emphasize that proper restraint use is effective and saves lives.
During the 2025 "Click It or Ticket" campaign, participating agencies issued 5,352 seat belt summonses, 2,624 speeding summonses, and 706 cell phone violations. Results reflect the broader safety focus of high-visibility enforcement efforts, which identify and deter dangerous driving behaviors and restraint violations that contribute to crashes, injuries, and fatalities.
Under state law, drivers and passengers are required to wear seat belts, and drivers are responsible for ensuring that passengers younger than 18 years old are properly restrained. Children younger than 8 years old and shorter than 57 inches (approximately 5 feet, 9 inches) must be secured in appropriate children passenger restraint systems, based on age, height, and weight.
Front seat belt use in New Jersey reached almost 95 percent after last year's "Click It or Ticket" campaign, about 4 percentage points above the national average, according to an annual observational study by the New Jersey Institute of Technology and funded by DHTS.
No matter the vehicle you drive, one of the safest choices you can make is to buckle up, whether you're a driver or a passenger. In 2024, 135 people killed in New Jersey crashes were not wearing seat belts, and unrestrained occupants accounted for 43 percent of all vehicle occupant fatalities. About one in four people killed were between the ages of 21 and 30. Nationwide, almost 10,000 passenger vehicle occupants killed in crashes were not wearing seat belts. Among young adults ages 18 to 34 killed while passengers of vehicles, 59 percent were unbuckled. That's one of the highest percentages for all age groups.