U.S. Murder Rate Approaches All-Time Record Low as 2025 Homicides Drop 18%

The data behind a historic turnaround

The United States almost certainly recorded its lowest murder rate in FBI history in 2025, and the decline is continuing into 2026. Preliminary FBI data shows homicides dropped an estimated 18.1% last year — the steepest single-year fall since 1937 — with overall violent crime falling 9.3% and robbery plunging 18.5%.stateline Crime data analyst Jeff Asher, drawing on his Real-Time Crime Index of more than 600 police agencies, projects murders fell another 18.7% in the first four months of 2026 compared to the same period in 2025, putting the country on track to break not just the FBI's record but potentially the CDC's homicide record stretching back to 1930.npr

The pandemic-era spike has been almost entirely reversed. In 2021, the murder rate hit 6.8 deaths per 100,000 — a 54% jump from the 2014 low of 4.4 per 100,000. Today, Asher estimates 2025 likely came in around 4.1 or lower, and 2026 could push that figure still lower.npr +1

City-level numbers underline the national trend

The scale of the improvement is sharpest in individual cities. New York City logged its fewest murders through April in monthly data going back to 1960 — a figure roughly 90% lower than the homicide total for the same four months of 1990.thetrace Philadelphia and Baltimore have similarly seen their lowest murder counts since the early 1960s, and cities from Chicago to New Orleans are recording historically low numbers in 2026.thetrace The Council on Criminal Justice had projected in January that 2025 could produce the lowest homicide rate in more than a century; the FBI's preliminary data has since validated that forecast.stateline +1

Even so, context matters. A rate of 4.0 or 4.1 per 100,000 is still roughly double Canada's murder rate of 1.9 per 100,000.npr Asher calculates there were still roughly 13,000 to 14,000 murders last year. "This is not a solved problem," he said.npr

Why it's happening — and why no one fully knows

Researchers point to a combination of factors: the post-pandemic return of in-person schooling and employment, re-engagement by police departments that pulled back after 2020, and the expansion of community violence-intervention programs such as Ceasefire and violence interrupters.npr +1 Jerry Ratcliffe, faculty director of the master of applied criminology program at the University of Pennsylvania, has argued the pandemic-era spike was closely tied to the social upheaval following George Floyd's murder in 2020, which disrupted policing strategies built up over decades — and that re-engagement has helped reverse the damage.npr

Asher is candid about the limits of the evidence. The decline is happening simultaneously across cities of all sizes, during a period of reduced police staffing, persistently high gun availability, and unresolved poverty and inequality — making any single explanation inadequate.thetrace He has called the question of causation "a national, research-based emergency" that policymakers from both parties have avoided confronting honestly. That urgency is compounded by cuts to the federal funding supporting the research and community programs most likely to hold answers.thetrace