A traffic control system and method with flow control aggregation. The system includes a switching fabric and an ingress module. The switching fabric includes read counters that are associated with a plurality of queues. The read counters represent an aggregated number of cells dequeued from respective queues since a previous flow control message (FCM) was sent to the ingress module. The read counters are reset when a FCM is created. The ingress module includes write counters that are associated with the queues. The write counters are incremented each time a cell is sent to the respective queues. The write counters are decremented in accordance with the FCM when the FCM is received. Also, read counters for one or more queues are aggregated into a single FCM.