US Burglary Statistics: The Numbers and Where They Come From

How many burglaries happen in the United States each year

Two federal datasets answer this question and they do not agree. Understanding why matters before you quote either one.

The FBI's estimated crime data counts offenses known to law enforcement. The file we used, estimated_crimes_1979_2025.csv, is published through the FBI Crime Data Explorer and was updated in August 2026 with 2025 data. For 2025 it reports 661,800 burglaries nationally, a rate of 193.6 per 100,000 residents. That follows 785,533 burglaries (231.0 per 100,000) in 2024 and 852,963 (253.3 per 100,000) in 2023. The 2025 figures are the newest release and should be treated as provisional: FBI crime figures move in later updates as agencies submit corrected and late data.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics runs the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which asks a national sample of households what happened to them, whether or not they called police. In its Criminal Victimization, 2024 report BJS counted 1,103,790 burglary victimizations, a rate of 8.2 per 1,000 households. Its broader burglary and trespassing category, which adds incidents where the offender did not commit or attempt a theft, came to 1,609,650 victimizations, or 12.0 per 1,000 households.

The survey number is larger than the police number for two reasons. Many burglaries are never reported to police, and the survey captures them anyway. The definitions also differ. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program defines burglary as the unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or theft, which includes commercial structures. BJS defines burglary as unlawful or forcible entry, or attempted entry, of a residence or other structure such as a garage or shed, and counts household victimizations rather than police incidents. Neither number is wrong. They are answers to different questions, so never average them or present one as a correction of the other.

The long decline, and the reporting break in the middle of it

US burglary has fallen for four decades. These are national totals and rates from the same FBI estimated crime file, so they are directly comparable to each other.

Two cautions come with that table.

First, the gap is real. The FBI file carries no national total row for 2017 through 2020, which is why the series jumps from 2016 to 2021. For 2019 the FBI's legacy publication, Crime in the United States, 2019, reported an estimated 1,117,696 burglaries, a 9.5 percent decrease from 2018.

Second, and more important for anyone drawing a trend line, the reporting system changed. The FBI's last annual Crime in the United States publication in the legacy format covered 2019, and on January 1, 2021 the UCR Program began shifting from the Summary Reporting System to a NIBRS-only collection, the incident-based system. Agency participation shifted substantially through that transition and has been recovering since. That means part of any apparent change across roughly 2019 to 2022 reflects which agencies were reporting, not how much burglary occurred. Anyone who shows you a dramatic single-year national jump or drop across that window is probably showing you a reporting artifact. The FBI's estimated series fills gaps for agencies that did not report a full year using its own estimation procedures, which smooths the problem but does not erase it. The safest comparisons are within the 2021 to 2025 stretch, or across long spans such as 1980 to 2025 where the direction dwarfs the noise.

What a burglary involves, by the published breakdowns

The most detailed national breakdown of burglary characteristics comes from the legacy UCR program, and its last full year in that format was 2019. Those percentages are dated. They are also the most authoritative published national split we could find, so we use them with the year attached rather than substituting something newer and weaker.

From Crime in the United States, 2019:

• 55.7 percent of burglaries involved forcible entry, 37.8 percent were unlawful entries where no force was used, and 6.5 percent were attempted forcible entry.
• Burglaries of residential properties accounted for 62.8 percent of all burglary offenses.
• Burglary accounted for 16.1 percent of estimated property crimes.
• Victims suffered an estimated $3.0 billion in property losses, an average of $2,661 per burglary offense.

The victimization side fills in what police counts cannot, starting with how much never reaches police at all. In its Criminal Victimization, 2024 report, BJS found that 40.7 percent of burglary victimizations were reported to police in 2024, against 42.2 percent in 2023. Read the other way, close to six in ten burglaries in the survey data never became a police report, which is the single biggest reason the two federal series disagree.

An older BJS report goes deeper on households specifically. In Household Burglary, 1994-2011, US households experienced about 3,394,700 burglary victimizations in 2011, a rate of 27.6 per 1,000 households, down 56 percent from 63.4 per 1,000 in 1994. In that 2011 data, 58 percent of completed burglaries were reported to police, up from 51 percent in 1994. Do not line that 58 percent up against the 40.7 percent above and call it a collapse in reporting: the 2011 figure covers completed household burglaries only, while the 2024 figure covers all burglary victimizations including attempts, and attempts are reported far less often. They are different measurements, a decade apart. Among completed burglaries that were reported, 10 percent resulted in an arrest in 2011, against 8 percent in 1994. The median value of items and cash stolen in a completed burglary rose 54 percent between 1994 and 2011, from $389 to $600 in 2011 dollars.

Low clearance is the constant across every era of this data. The COPS Office problem-oriented policing guide on burglary of single-family houses, published in 2002, reported an average US burglary clearance rate of 14 percent and noted that about 65 percent of burglary investigations produce no information or evidence about the crime. That guide is dated and we could not find a current published national clearance figure stated as plainly, but nothing in the newer data suggests burglary became easy to solve.

Using these numbers for your own decision

National statistics set context and almost nothing else. A national rate of 193.6 per 100,000 tells you burglary is rarer than it was in 1980. It does not tell you the risk on your street, which varies far more between neighborhoods inside one city than between states.

Three rules when you meet a burglary statistic in the wild:

1. Ask which system it came from. Police-reported (FBI) and survey-based (BJS) national numbers differ by roughly a factor of two, so a source that cannot name its dataset is not usable.
2. Ask for the year. Many widely circulated burglary claims trace back to legacy UCR breakdowns that stopped in 2019, or to victimization reports covering 1994 to 2011.
3. Distrust sharp national swings dated around 2020 and 2021, for the reporting reasons above.

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