M60 Clockwise Traffic

Live traffic news for the clockwise carriageway of the M60 — the direction in which the junction numbers count up. Current clockwise incidents and roadworks are below, followed by what the official counts say about the road you are driving.

Going clockwise, the junction numbers count up

The M60 is numbered 1 to 27 all the way round, and clockwise is the direction in which those numbers increase. From Junction 2 you reach Junction 3, then 4, and so on. The only oddity is at the top of the count: after Junction 27 the sequence wraps straight back to Junction 1, because the road is a closed ring with no beginning and no end.

That single fact is the most useful thing to hold on to on this carriageway. If the number on the sign ahead is higher than the one behind you, you are travelling clockwise. If it is lower, you are on the anticlockwise carriageway and reading the wrong page.

The Department for Transport measures the M60 at 40 count points, which resolve to 35 distinct measured stretches once the sections counted twice at local authority boundaries are set aside. Taken together they average 126,393 vehicles a day.

The road changes character between Junctions 12 and 18

Clockwise drivers meet something on the north-western side of the ring that does not exist anywhere else on the M60: a continuous run of seven stretches where lorries make up between 8.7% and 12.0% of all traffic. Across the rest of the motorway, every single measured stretch is under 6%.

There is no gradual build-up. The lorry share jumps from under 6% to 8.7% at one junction and drops back again seven stretches later. Going clockwise you drive into it and out of it, and for that stretch of the journey roughly one vehicle in nine around you is an HGV.

The heaviest point is Junction 14 to 15, which carries 20,368 lorries and 42,468 vans a day — more of both than any other stretch of the M60.

The busiest point you will pass

The single busiest measured stretch of the entire M60 sits inside that same arc: Junction 13 to Junction 12, at 201,196 vehicles a day over one mile. Nowhere else on the ring exceeds 182,000. If a clockwise journey is going to be held up by sheer volume rather than by an incident, this is the most likely place for it.

About the traffic figures on this page

The counts above are Department for Transport annual averages covering both carriageways together. The DfT records the M60 by compass direction rather than by clockwise and anticlockwise, so a separate clockwise-only figure is not published in the data we use. We would rather tell you that than split a combined number in half and present the result as a measurement. The live incidents and roadworks at the top of this page are filtered to the clockwise carriageway; the historic counts are not.

Traffic counts: Department for Transport road traffic statistics, 2025, annual average daily flow, both directions combined. Live incidents: Powered by National Highways’ Transport Data Feeds.