This page brings together the latest M60 traffic news — current incidents, accidents, road closures, lane closures and planned roadworks along the M60 motorway, refreshed throughout the day. Check here before you travel to plan your route and avoid the worst of the queues.

For a specific type of report, see M60 Roadworks or M60 Accidents & Incidents, or find your junction on the M60 junction map.

What these M60 traffic reports cover

The reports above are the current M60 traffic news as it stands right now — live incidents, accidents, road closures, lane closures, slip road closures and both active and planned M60 roadworks. They come from National Highways’ own Transport Data Feeds and are refreshed every few minutes throughout the day, so what you are reading is today’s position on the motorway rather than a summary written this morning.

The M60 is Manchester’s orbital motorway and the ring road for a conurbation of around three million people, so an incident on one side of it is felt across Greater Manchester within minutes. That is why these latest M60 updates are worth a glance before you set off rather than after you have joined the queue.

Anything showing as active is affecting the M60 now. Anything marked planned has a start time still to come — usually overnight works, which is why the M60 closures tonight page is worth a look before an early start or a late run home.

How to read an M60 traffic report

The wording in these live updates comes from National Highways and is more precise than it first looks. It is worth knowing what each phrase actually means for your journey:

What it says	What it means on the road
Lane closed	One or more lanes shut, the carriageway itself still open. Expect queuing rather than a diversion.
Carriageway closed	That side of the motorway is shut. You will be taken off at a junction and diverted.
Slip road closed	The motorway is running, but that particular entry or exit is unavailable — check which junction before you set off.
Contraflow	Traffic running on the opposite carriageway past the works, usually with a reduced speed limit.
Clockwise / anticlockwise	Which way round the ring is affected. On the M60 the junction numbers count up going clockwise and down going anticlockwise.

Each report carries the time it was reported and, where National Highways have given one, the time they expect it to clear. That expected end time is theirs, not our estimate — we publish it as they state it.

If nothing is showing on the M60 right now

An empty list here means nothing is currently reported to us on the M60. That is genuinely useful information before you travel, and it is the honest limit of what any traffic service can tell you — ours, National Highways’ own, or anybody else’s. A queue that has just started, or a slow-moving stretch with no incident behind it, may not appear in any feed for some minutes. “Nothing reported” is not the same as “the M60 is clear”, and we would rather say so than let a quiet page imply a promise we cannot keep.

Where to look next

This page carries everything together. For one type of M60 travel news at a time:

• M60 roadworks — lane closures, overnight closures, contraflows and speed restrictions
• M60 accidents and incidents — collisions, breakdowns, spillages and other unplanned M60 delays
• M60 closures tonight — what is planned on the M60 this evening and overnight
• M60 clockwise and M60 anticlockwise — by carriageway
• M60 junctions and maps — find your junction, and the official traffic counts for that stretch

How busy is the M60?

The Department for Transport counts traffic on the M60 at 40 separate points around the ring. Between Junction 13 and Junction 12 it carries 201,196 vehicles a day — the fourth-busiest stretch of road in the whole of Great Britain. Only three sections of the M25 are busier.

It is not evenly loaded. On the northern side, around Junctions 14 to 15, lorries are 12.0% of all traffic; on the quieter side of the ring that falls to about 4%. Same motorway, two very different roads — which is why a lane closure in one place behaves nothing like the same closure in another.

See the full M60 traffic statistics » · The M60 junction by junction »

Traffic count figures on this page are from the Department for Transport road traffic statistics, 2025.