U.S. Homicide Rate on Pace for Historic 2026 Low, Report Finds
Homicides fell 18% in the first half of 2026 across 30 U.S. cities, putting the country on pace for its lowest annual homicide rate in more than a century if the decline continues, according to a Council on Criminal Justice report released July 23.
The decrease represented approximately 215 fewer homicides in the cities included in the analysis compared with the first half of 2025. The findings offer new evidence that the decline in lethal violence may continue through 2026, while also showing that crime trends remain uneven across cities and offenses.
The projected historic low is not a final national tally. The report’s figures cover a sample of 30 American cities, and the 2026 numbers are preliminary. Final annual totals have not yet been released.
Most tracked crime categories declined
Overall, nine of the 13 crime categories tracked in the report declined during the first half of the year. The report also found that the lethality of serious violent crime fell 23%.
Residential burglaries dropped 13% from the same period in 2025. Compared with 2019, residential burglary was down 50% in the cities examined.
Not every category moved in the same direction. Shoplifting increased 5% year over year, while drug offenses and some other categories rose slightly. Those differences underscore that a decline in homicides does not mean every form of reported crime is falling at the same pace.
The report uses data from different numbers of cities for different categories because of reporting gaps and differences in how offenses are defined. As a result, the category-by-category comparisons are not all based on the same geographic sample.
City-level results varied
About one-third of the cities in the homicide analysis recorded increases rather than declines. The report identified higher homicide totals in cities including Norfolk, Austin, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis in the comparisons it examined.
Norfolk recorded a 64% increase in homicides, while San Francisco recorded a 55% increase in the report’s specified comparisons. The increases illustrate why the broader trend must be read alongside local results: a national pattern of declining lethal violence can coexist with worsening conditions in individual communities.
The 30-city sample is intended to show a national public-safety trend, but it is not a complete nationwide crime count. The results therefore should not be treated as a definitive FBI total or as proof that every U.S. city experienced a decline.
What the findings show next
If the first-half trend holds through the rest of 2026, the annual homicide rate could reach its lowest level in more than 100 years once final figures are available. That outcome remains a projection rather than a completed result.
The report’s broader picture is mixed but consequential. Fewer killings and lower violent-crime lethality would mark continued progress in the areas most directly tied to loss of life, while increases in shoplifting, drug offenses and homicides in some cities point to problems that may require separate local responses.
Later reporting and final annual figures will determine whether the early 2026 decline persists. Until then, the strongest verified conclusion is narrower: across the 30 cities examined, homicides were substantially lower in the first half of 2026 than in the same period a year earlier, but the pace and direction of change differed by place and crime category.
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