M6 Motorway

The M6 Motorway

The M6 is the longest motorway in Britain, running from Rugby past Birmingham, Stoke and Warrington, and on through Lancashire and Cumbria to the Scottish border. Our M6 website is the newest of our large motorway sites and is growing fast.

Our M6 Website

Everything you need for the M6 is on m6traffic.co.uk, updated every five minutes, 24 hours a day, from official National Highways data. It includes:

• the latest M6 traffic news
• accidents and incidents
• roadworks
• what the overhead signs are saying
• the variable speed limits in force now
• separate northbound and southbound pages
• closures tonight
• M6 junction maps
• M6 traffic statistics

It is one of a family of websites from UK Traffic News, each one given over to a single road so that the news you see is about the road you are actually driving.

Information About the M6 Motorway

How long is the M6 motorway?

The M6 motorway is 226.7 miles (364.8 km) long and runs up a large section of western England.

Where does the M6 go?

The M6 motorway runs from its southern end in Catthorpe in Leicestershire to its northern end near Gretna, at the Scottish border.

What are the main towns or main destinations off the M6?

M6 Primary destinations include Catthorpe, Rugby, Coventry, Nuneaton, Birmingham, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Stafford, Stoke-on-Trent, Warrington, St Helens, Manchester, Liverpool, Preston,Lancaster, Kendal, Penrith, Carlisle, Gretna.

when was the M6 motorway built?

The M6 was constructed between 1958 and 2008. Britain's first Toll paying motorway, the Toll (fee charging) section runs around Birmingham which was opened in December 2003.

Was the M6 the first motorway built in the UK?

The actual first motorway built was the M1 but the first UK road to be built to motorway standard was the Preston Bypass which later became part of the M6.

The M6 in numbers

Traffic on the M6 as counted by the Department for Transport.

about 94,000

vehicles a day

on an average stretch of the M6. The busiest stretch carries about 188,000 a day.

1 in 7

vehicles is a lorry

and about 1 in 5 is a van, so a large share of M6 traffic is people at work.

Source: Department for Transport road traffic statistics, 2025. Averages across the whole road; rounded.

See also: M6 traffic reports · all the motorways we cover.