A Murder (Clearance Rate) Mystery

Murders appear to be getting cleared at the highest rate in a long time this year. Are they?

Law enforcement agencies in the United States are clearing murders at a much higher rate than they have in quite a while according to data from the FBI, but the quality of the data provides significant uncertainty as to just how much better murder clearance rates are in 2025.

One of the challenges to evaluating crime and policing in America is the simple slowness of data releases. I’ve talked about this a ton, but it’s worth reiterating before diving in that understanding crime and policing trends takes a while.

The FBI’s annual report covering 2025 won’t come out until August/Septemberish of 2026, but we want to know how trends are changing now. In particular, I want to know whether murder clearance rates are continuing to rise after hitting a nadir in 2020/2021.

Fortunately, the FBI has begun publishing monthly data that they are receiving from agencies. This new dataset is wonderful, but it also comes with lots of caveats that users need to be aware of. Not every agency is reporting monthly data and the data that is being reported is incomplete, especially the most recent months.

The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer provides monthly data going back to 1985 in a easy-to-use format. This makes the CDE a good (albeit not perfect) source for evaluating the national murder clearance rate as it changes. Comparing the murder clearance rate for each year in the CDE to the annual estimates published by the FBI each year shows that the monthly data is generally reliable for figuring out what the annual clearance rate will be.

Going back to 1985 through July 2025, shows murder clearance rates in the CDE this year appear to be higher than any year since 1990.

But, of course, figuring out just how much this year’s murder clearance rate is rising is not quite that simple. The 2025 data is not yet complete (duh) while data for all of the other years is complete.

This can be a problem.

Take Kentucky, for example, which has a murder clearance rate over 80 percent so far this year compared to 60 percent in 2024. Kentucky’s clearance rate this year, however, is much higher because Louisville (45 percent murder clearance rate in 2024) has reported very little 2025 data.

This nuance is especially important given that some agencies still report their data all at once in December. For whatever reason — and I’m not digging into why for this piece — clearance rates reported in December tend to be much lower than the rest of the year, so you can’t accurately compare a year without December data to full previous years.

So we can probably reasonably guess that the large increase in murder clearances currently seen in the monthly data is an overstatement.

But the increase itself seems to be real.

There are other ways of looking at the CDE’s clearance data to show that murder clearance rates are increasing so far in 2025. Rolling clearance rates over 12 months — and stopping in July — removes the issue of December underreporting and shows clearance rates are higher now than they have been since 2014.

We can also account for the issue that some places with low clearance rates that reported 2024 may not have reported 2025 data (like Louisville). Taking only medium and large cities (50k+) that have reported at least 7 months of data for both 2024 and 2025 allows for an apples-to-apples comparison of clearance rates to see just how much they’re rising in 2025.

There are more than 600 such cities and murder clearance rates are up from 60.5 percent through July in those cities in 2024 to 64.5 percent in 2025. And breaking it down by month shows very strong consistency this year with murder clearance rates consistently higher in 2025 compared to 2024.

Where does that leave us in 2025? I wouldn’t confidently say what the US murder clearance rate will be this year, but all of the available evidence points to a large increase from 2024 this year. With around a 3.5 percentage point increase in the murder clearance rate this year (just a guess!) you'd have the highest murder clearance rate nationally since 2009.

Rising clearance rates in 2025 aren’t surprising given that fewer crimes usually means higher clearance rates and murder is falling fast again this year. That 2025 may potentially have the highest murder clearance rate in more than 15 years despite a substantially higher share of murders being committed via firearm is impressive though.

Ultimaty, the CDE’s monthly data helps to tell the tale of rising clearance rates though, as with most types of crime data, the full story cannot be told with confidence for quite a while.