US City Burglary Rates: The 15 Largest Cities Compared (FBI Data)

Burglary rates in the 15 largest US cities (2025)

The table below shows calendar-year 2025 burglary offenses reported by each city's primary law enforcement agency to the FBI, pulled from the FBI Crime Data Explorer's agency-level data. Rates are the FBI's own published agency rate series for the same period, not our arithmetic, and they use the agency jurisdiction population in the same FBI records. All 15 agencies reported a full 12 months of 2025 data. These are the newest figures the FBI has published, so treat every 2025 number here as provisional and subject to revision as agencies file corrections and late data.

For scale: the national burglary rate in 2025 was 193.6 per 100,000 (FBI estimated crimes data). Thirteen of the 15 largest cities ran above the national rate, which is normal; burglary concentrates in urban areas. One note on that comparison: the 193.6 national figure comes from the FBI's estimated crimes series, which fills gaps for agencies that did not report a full year, while the city figures are what those 15 agencies actually reported. The two are close enough to compare loosely (the FBI's reported national rate for 2025 works out to about 195 per 100,000) but they are not the same series.

The spread within the table is the striking part. Houston's rate is more than three times New York's, and the four largest Texas cities in the list (Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas) take the top four spots outright, with Fort Worth tenth.

Why we do not publish a "highest burglary rate in America" city ranking

Lists claiming to name THE highest-burglary cities in America usually bury four problems.

First, the FBI itself cautions against using its data to rank cities. Rankings ignore differences in population density, commuter inflows, poverty, policing, and how aggressively residents report crime. A city where residents report most burglaries will look worse on paper than one where they do not.

Second, small-city noise. If you rank every US city, the top of the list fills with small cities where a few hundred burglaries produce an enormous per-capita rate. One active burglary crew can move a small city 50 places. Rankings restricted to large cities are more stable, which is why we compare the 15 largest.

Third, agency boundaries are not city boundaries. FBI data is reported per agency. Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD covers most of Mecklenburg County, not just Charlotte proper. Jacksonville's consolidated city-county sheriff's office covers nearly all of Duval County. Rates are accurate for each jurisdiction but not perfectly comparable to a census city boundary.

Fourth, reporting completeness varies year to year. Since the FBI's 2021 switch to NIBRS reporting, some agencies have reported partial years. All 15 agencies in our table reported all 12 months of 2025, which we verified in the underlying data, but any wider ranking would need the same check city by city.

Within those limits the table is still useful: it is real, current, federally reported data, and the differences between a 480-rate city and a 150-rate city are far too large to be a reporting artifact.

What a city rate means for your own home

A citywide rate is a base rate, not your risk. Burglary clusters block by block; criminology research consistently finds that a small share of addresses accounts for a large share of burglaries. In one police-record study summarised by the US Department of Justice COPS Office, 10,828 burglaries reported in a single city in 1990 were spread across about 300,000 addresses, and the 18 percent of victim addresses hit two or more times accounted for 39 percent of all burglaries in that jurisdiction. A citywide average tells you nothing about which side of that split your address sits on.

The other thing a city rate hides is time. These are calendar-year 2025 counts, and burglary has been falling nationally for four decades, so a city that looks high against the current national rate would have looked unremarkable against the national rate of the 1990s. Use the table to compare cities with each other in the same year, which is what it is good for, and not as a verdict on whether a city is dangerous in some absolute sense.

Practical reading of the table: if you live in one of the higher-rate cities, the case for layered security (locks, lighting, visible deterrents, and an alarm) is stronger on base rates alone. What that should cost is covered in our guide to home security cost per month, and the honest breakdown of whether professional monitoring is worth it applies the math. If you decide you want a professionally monitored system, we can fetch real quotes from monitoring providers via a short questionnaire at /quote.