Violent crime fell 25% in the United States in 2025, the largest one-year drop ever recorded in the federal government's flagship crime survey, according to preliminary estimates released by the Department of Justice on Monday, October 26, 2026. The Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) found that serious violent crime — rape or sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault — dropped from 9.9 victimizations per 1,000 people aged 12 and older in 2024 to 7.4 per 1,000 in 2025, a decline the Trump administration immediately claimed as proof that its public safety agenda is working, six days before the November 3 midterm elections.
The figures, drawn from interviews with people in households across the country rather than from police reports alone, paint a picture of a measurably safer year: roughly 2.2 million serious violent victimizations in 2025, down from about 2.8 million in 2024. Property crime fell too, by 19%. But the survey also carries important caveats that its own authors and analysts stress — the numbers are preliminary, they do not count homicides, and a survey on its own cannot prove which policies, if any, caused the fall.
On October 26, 2026, the Justice Department's Office of Public Affairs announced preliminary estimates from the 2025 National Crime Victimization Survey, the Bureau of Justice Statistics' annual household survey of criminal victimization in the United States. The headline finding was stark: the rate of non-fatal violent crime excluding simple assault fell by a quarter in a single year.
Serious violent victimization, the survey's term for rape or sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault combined, fell from 9.9 per 1,000 persons aged 12 or older in 2024 to 7.4 per 1,000 in 2025. In raw numbers, that translates to about 2.16 million serious violent victimizations in 2025, down from about 2.83 million in 2024 — roughly 670,000 fewer incidents.
Every major component moved in the same direction. Aggravated assault, the largest component of serious violent crime, fell 31%, from 4.5 to 3.1 per 1,000 people, representing about 390,000 fewer assaults. The White House's summary of the same survey put the fall in robberies at 27%. Property victimization fell 19%, from 138.0 per 1,000 households in 2024 to 111.2 per 1,000 in 2025. Within that category, burglary or trespassing fell 25%, or about 460,000 fewer cases, motor vehicle theft fell 30%, or about 349,000 fewer vehicles stolen, and other types of household theft fell 19%.
The broader violent crime measure, which includes simple assault, fell more modestly: from 28.7 to 25.7 per 1,000 people, or 7.5 million victimizations in 2025. Simple assault itself changed little, from 18.8 to 18.3 per 1,000, and accounted for about 5.3 million of the 2025 victimizations. That distinction matters, because the celebrated 25% figure applies specifically to serious violent crime, not to all violent crime.
The National Crime Victimization Survey is the nation's primary source of information on criminal victimization, including crimes reported to police and crimes never reported. Each year, the Bureau of Justice Statistics collects information from a nationally representative sample of about 240,000 people aged 12 or older in about 150,000 households, using data from the US Census Bureau. The 2025 preliminary report was based on 101,980 household interviews, with 53% of eligible households completing interviews, according to a summary of the report.
Because it interviews victims directly, the NCVS captures a different picture from the FBI's police-reported crime statistics. The FBI's report released in May found a smaller decline in police-reported crime — aggravated assault down by more than 7% and overall violent crime down about 9.3%. The two measures are not contradictory: many crimes are never reported to police, and survey estimates and police counts can move at different speeds. The NCVS also cannot measure homicide, since it gathers information through interviews with living victims.
The survey has been compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics since 1973, which is why the Justice Department could describe the 2025 decline as the largest single-year reduction in the survey's history. The comparison is against the final 2024 NCVS report, and the 2025 figures are preliminary estimates, meaning they could be revised when the final 2025 report is published.
Crime has been a central theme of the 2026 midterm campaign. The Trump administration has made public safety a signature issue of the president's second term, deploying National Guard troops in Washington, DC, and other major cities, pushing to end cashless bail policies, tightening border enforcement and stepping up deportations of people with criminal records. Those policies are now being debated against the backdrop of the new survey — and against a rival set of claims from Democratic mayors and officials in cities where crime also fell.
The numbers behind the headline tell a story of broad, not narrow, improvement. Serious violent crime fell by a quarter. Aggravated assault fell by nearly a third. Property crime fell by nearly a fifth. Motor vehicle theft, which surged during the pandemic years and has been a visible frustration in cities across the country, fell by 30% — about 349,000 fewer vehicles stolen in a single year.
Burglary and trespassing fell by a quarter, about 460,000 fewer cases. Other household theft fell 19%. Taken together, households suffered roughly 3.5 million fewer property crimes than in 2024, according to reporting on the survey. Those are not small statistical wobbles; they are large, consistent movements across almost every category the survey tracks.
There are two important limits to keep in view. First, simple assault — the most common form of violent victimization, including threats and minor attacks without a weapon or serious injury — barely moved, from 18.8 to 18.3 per 1,000. So while the most serious violence fell sharply, lower-level violence remained common. Second, the survey measures victimization, not offending, and it cannot by itself say why crime fell. Economic conditions, demographic shifts, local policing, changes in reporting behaviour and national policy can all move the numbers, and disentangling them takes far more than one year's survey.
That is the honest reading of the data: a very large, broad-based decline in serious and property crime in 2025, measured by the most comprehensive victim survey in the country, with the causes still open to argument.
The Trump administration wasted no time claiming the results. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in the Justice Department's announcement: "This report is proof that President Trump's 'Make America Safe Again' agenda is working. Under President Trump and Attorney General Blanche, the safety of law-abiding Americans will always come first. This success reinforces our commitment to ensuring every American can live, work, and raise a family without fear."
The White House went further, declaring that Americans had seen "the largest one-year reduction in violent crime in the report's history" and crediting the president's record: securing the border, deporting dangerous criminal illegal aliens, respecting law enforcement officers and cracking down on drug trafficking. Its release listed the same headline figures — non-fatal violent crime down 25%, aggravated assault down 31%, robberies down 27%, burglary and trespassing down 25%, motor vehicle theft down 30% and property crime down 19% — and contrasted the results with what it called the lawlessness of the Biden administration.
Administration officials have attributed the reductions to specific policies, including efforts against illegal immigration, drug trafficking and gang violence, as well as ending cashless bail policies, deploying the National Guard in Washington, DC, and other major cities, and closing the southern border to illegal immigration, according to reports on the announcement.
Analysts and summaries of the report have urged caution on that leap from correlation to cause. The survey's reported changes alone do not establish how much any particular policy contributed to the declines, one summary noted — a standard warning for any single year of survey data, and one that applies whatever party is in power. Democratic mayors have also sought to claim credit for last year's declines in their own cities, a dispute that is likely to run through the final days of the midterm campaign.
Crime is one of the few issues that touches every voter personally, and it is now arriving in the final week of a midterm campaign with a striking new data point. If voters believe their streets are safer, that helps an incumbent president's party; if they believe the improvement came from their own mayor or governor rather than from Washington, the credit — and the votes — may go elsewhere. The fight over who owns the 25% drop is, in that sense, a fight over the story of 2025 itself.
The numbers also matter beyond politics. A 30% fall in motor vehicle theft and a 25% fall in burglary mean fewer insurance claims, fewer disrupted households and fewer small businesses hit by break-ins. Researchers estimate that crime costs America tens of billions of dollars every year; a decline on this scale, if it holds, would be an economic story as much as a public safety one, encouraging investment and activity in neighbourhoods that had felt the worst of the pandemic-era crime rise.
At the same time, the survey's own fine print should temper any victory lap. Simple assault barely budged, homicide is not measured by this survey at all, and the figures are preliminary. The final 2025 report, and the FBI's police-reported data for the same year, will either confirm this picture or complicate it. For now, the most defensible statement is the survey's own: serious violent crime and property crime fell sharply in 2025, by the largest margins the survey has ever recorded in a single year.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics will publish its final 2025 NCVS report, which could revise the preliminary estimates up or down. The FBI's full-year police-reported crime data for 2025 will provide a second, independent check on the survey's picture, and criminologists will dig into the detailed tables — by region, by age, by type of place — to see whether the decline was nationwide or concentrated in particular cities and states.
Politically, expect the numbers to feature heavily in the final six days before the November 3 midterms, with the White House and Republican candidates citing the 25% drop and Democrats pointing to local policing, city-level programmes and the limits of attributing a national trend to any single administration. Voters will also be watching whether the decline continues into 2026, when the next round of survey data begins to arrive.
For households, the practical question is simpler: does the neighbourhood feel safer? Surveys measure victimization, not fear, and the two do not always move together. If the 2025 decline is real and sustained, that gap should narrow — but one year of data, however dramatic, is a beginning, not a verdict.
Serious violent crime — rape or sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault — fell 25%, from 9.9 to 7.4 victimizations per 1,000 people aged 12 and older, according to preliminary estimates from the 2025 National Crime Victimization Survey. All violent crime including simple assault fell from 28.7 to 25.7 per 1,000.
It is the Bureau of Justice Statistics' annual household survey of criminal victimization, running since 1973. It interviews a nationally representative sample of about 240,000 people in about 150,000 households and counts crimes whether or not victims reported them to police. It does not measure homicide.
Aggravated assault fell 31%, motor vehicle theft fell 30%, robberies fell 27%, burglary or trespassing fell 25%, and other household theft fell 19%. Property crime overall fell 19%.
No. They are preliminary estimates compared with the final 2024 report, and they could be revised when the Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes its final 2025 report.
No. The survey measures victimization, and its reported changes alone do not establish how much any particular policy contributed. The administration credits its public safety agenda; critics and analysts note that many factors can move crime rates, and local officials have also claimed credit.
Related coverage: James Comey's third criminal case, as the DOJ accuses the ex-FBI chief of leaking in 2016; DOJ charges green card holders with illegal voting in 5 states ahead of the midterms; Cherokee High School shooting plot foiled as 3 are arrested in Georgia and California.
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