The Best-Selling Motorcycles of 2025: The First Year the Music Stopped

The 2025 category leaders were the Harley-Davidson Street Glide, the Indian Scout, the Honda Rebel 500 and the BMW R 1300 GS Adventure. Same four names for a sixth straight year, but for the first time in this run two of the four companies shipped fewer motorcycles than the year before, and BMW's winner was not the bike that had won every year prior.

A Note on Where These Numbers Come From

The standard disclosure, with one genuine improvement this year. Harley-Davidson publishes no model-level unit sales. Polaris publishes none for Indian. American Honda publishes none for the US. Those three report shipments by product family, brand-level share, and claims scoped to segments they define themselves.

BMW Motorrad is the exception, and 2025 is the year it got better. This is the first report in which BMW split individual models rather than reporting the GS and GS Adventure as a combined pair. That is why the BMW section below contains two hard numbers and the other three sections contain none.

So the Harley, Indian and Honda picks remain consensus rather than measurement: supported by family-level shipment data and the manufacturers' own marketing language, not by a count anyone outside those companies has seen. One further caution specific to this year. Harley's FY2025 release names no models at all, so the US touring share figure the company published for 2024 does not carry forward. We are not going to reuse it here.

Harley-Davidson: The Street Glide, In a Bad Year

Mechanically the Street Glide was unchanged from its 2024 redesign: Milwaukee-Eight 117 at 1,923cc, 130 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm, 811 lb, laden seat at 26.1 inches. The price went the other way. Base MSRP rose to $27,749, up $1,750 on the year, which erased most of the cut that had made the redesigned bike so notable.

That is worth sitting with, because of what Harley said in the same period. The company flagged weakness in the Touring category in the first half of the year, as customer traffic declined and affordability became more of a focus. Then it raised the price of its touring volume model by $1,750. Those two facts belong next to each other.

The lineup expanded upward regardless. A Street Glide Ultra arrived at $30,749, and four CVOs were on sale, topping out with the CVO Street Glide and CVO Road Glide at $45,999. A Pan America 1250 ST joined at $19,999, and the Sportster S got 60% more rear travel at $15,999. Jochen Zeitz announced his retirement in April.

The shipment data is the story. Harley shipped 124,477 motorcycles worldwide in 2025, down from 148,862. Grand American Touring fell to 69,252, Cruiser to 41,172, Sport and Lightweight to 9,638, Adventure Touring to 4,415. Global retail was 132,535, down 12%, with North America at 89,132, down 13%.

The Street Glide is still the pick, and we would still make it. But our confidence is softer this year than last, because Harley published nothing at model level and the segment it dominates was the one it identified as weak.

Indian: The Scout, Finally New

Indian's redesigned Scout reached buyers as a model year 2025 machine, and it is a genuine ground-up job: new steel-tube frame, new engine, new bodywork. The SpeedPlus 1250 displaces 1,250cc and makes 105 hp at 6,300 rpm and 82 lb-ft at 6,300, which Indian puts at 11% more power and 14% more torque than the 1,133 it replaced. The Scout Bobber is $12,999 and 522 lb as shipped, with the 25.6-inch seat carried over. Indian claims the lowest seat height in the industry.

The range is now five models, each offered in Standard, Limited and Limited with Tech, running from the Scout Bobber up through the Super Scout at $16,499 and the 111 hp 101 Scout at $16,999. Below all of it sits a new Scout Sixty family on a 999cc SpeedPlus, three variants starting at $9,999.

Scout remains a platform claim, not a model claim. Indian's own language is about the platform, and nothing public establishes which individual Scout leads. Our confidence that the family is Indian's best seller is high. Our confidence about which SKU inside it is zero, and we would rather say that than pick one.

One structural note that will matter more than any spec here: Polaris has agreed to sell a majority stake in Indian to Carolwood LP, spinning the brand into a standalone company.

Honda: The Rebel 500, Still Doing Nothing

Honda's changes to the Rebel 500 for 2025 amounted to a revised seat and handlebar position. Ergonomics. The 471cc parallel twin, the 27.2-inch seat and the $6,499 base price all carried over, with $6,799 for ABS and $6,999 for the SE, and curb weights of 408, 414 and 419 lb. The Rebel 1100 line was updated alongside it.

This is the year the sales evidence for the Rebel 500 becomes the strongest of any bike on this list, but the quote comes from a document dated after the year in question. Honda's 2026 release calls the Rebel 500 the industry's best-selling cruiser, singling out the 500 rather than claiming it as a pair with the 300, which Honda had done every previous year. That is the clearest single-model statement any of these four manufacturers has made. It is also retrospective, and we are flagging it as such rather than pretending it was published in 2025.

One thing we still cannot tell you: whether the Rebel 500 outsells the Grom, and therefore whether it is Honda's best-selling US street bike at all. No public source resolves it.

For 2026 Honda drops the non-ABS Rebel 500 entirely, making ABS standard at $6,799, and puts its E-Clutch automated clutch on the Rebel 300.

BMW: The R 1300 GS Adventure Overtakes the GS

Here are real numbers, for the first time in this series. The R 1300 GS Adventure sold 33,570 units globally against 32,555 for the base R 1300 GS. That is the first year the Adventure variant has outsold the standard GS, after more than a decade of the standard bike leading.

The Adventure is the bigger, more expensive, less accessible bike. It weighs 593 lb against the standard bike's 523. Base seat height is 34.3 to 35.0 inches, with the full options range spanning 31.0 to 36.0. It costs $22,745 plus $695 destination, against $19,495 for the base GS. Both share the 1,300cc boxer, 145 hp and 110 lb-ft. Buyers paid roughly $3,000 more for a bike that is 70 lb heavier and taller, and enough of them did it to change the order.

BMW Motorrad's global total was 202,563, down from 2024's record 210,408. US volume was 14,869. This is the first year in this six-year window that BMW's total fell.

2025 in Context: The First Year the Music Stopped

For five years the pattern was growth or at least stability. In 2025 it broke in two places at once. Harley's shipments fell to 124,477 with global retail down 12%, and BMW came off an all-time record. Neither collapsed, but both went backwards, and Harley named the cause in its own filings: declining traffic and affordability pressure in exactly the category it depends on.

The responses tell you what each company believes. Harley raised prices and added a $30,749 Street Glide Ultra and a $45,999 CVO. Indian delivered a genuinely new midsize cruiser and put a $9,999 Scout Sixty underneath it, which is the only meaningful move toward affordability anyone on this list made. BMW watched its buyers migrate to the heavier, pricier version of its best seller. Honda revised a seat.

The other 2025 development is easy to miss because it happens above the model level: Kawasaki passed both Honda and Harley-Davidson to become the US number one. The brand hierarchy that had held through this entire period moved while everyone was arguing about touring share.

Six years, four winners, no changes to the list. That is either remarkable stability or a market that stopped generating new answers, and 2025 makes the second reading harder to dismiss. The bikes that won this year were an 811 lb bagger that cost $1,750 more than it had, a cruiser platform whose parent company is being sold, a 408 lb twin that got a new seat, and an adventure bike nobody expected to lead. The names did not change. Almost everything underneath them did.

Cover photo: "Harley-Davidson Museum May 2024 06 (The AMF Years--1981 Nova Touring non-functional prototype--OHV V-Four)" by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.