Figuring Out Last Year's Crime Counts with Help From Rent

May 18, 2026

The FBI did a new thing last week when they published a first look at 2025’s crime counts and trends over on the Crime Data Explorer. This new report is just one page and primarily gives information in the form of a crime clock, but if it provides a ton of information about the state of crime in the United States in 2025.

Four things stand out to me from the FBI’s first look.

First, violent crime fell 9.3 percent while property crime fell 12.4 percent in 2025 which matches the Real-Time Crime Index sample covering all of 2025 (released in mid-February) extremely closely. The RTCI had violent crime down 10.4 percent and property crime down 12.6 percent.

Second, we can use the one (crime) every X minutes/seconds to give us the exact number of each crime type using musical theater and math. To figure out how many murders, robberies, burglaries, etc there were in 2025 we just have to divide the number of minutes in a year by the number of minutes between crimes. Thanks to Rent we know that there are 525,600 minutes in a non-leap year…

There was a murder every 37.3 minutes in 2025 which works out to a murder total between 14,073 and 14,110 (depending on rounding) and a murder rate of 4.1 per 100,000. Back patting time again — this take from March is holding up pretty well!

There Were 14,000 Murders In The United States Last Year

Jeff Asher

Mar 9

Read full story

We can work backwards for each crime type and get the below ranges. The FBI’s data confirms that 2025 had the lowest murder rate ever recorded — surpassing the reported 4.4 per 100,000 in 2014.

It’s not just murder. The FBI’s first look gives a pretty close total for every UCR Part I offense type, with some margin of error to account for rounding.

The first look also gives the precise number of violent and property crimes enabling us to do the math and produce a violent crime rate of 327.6 per 100,000 (even lower if you eventually use the revised definition of rape for a pure apples-to-apples comparison) and a property crime rate of 1,534.8 per 100,000. Those figures work out to the lowest violent crime rate in the United States since 1968 and the lowest property crime rate ever recorded.

The third thing that stands out is that the 2024 violent crime count has clearly been revised upwards by a decent amount. The FBI tells us violent crime fell 9.3 percent, but the reported number of violent crimes is only 8.3 percent below the initially reported 2024 figure.

There will likely be about 13,000 more violent crime in the 2024 revised number when it is released with the 2025 figures later this year.

The 2024 murder count will almost certainly be revised upwards by a fair amount too as part of that. There were 16,935 murders in 2024 in the FBI’s initial report, which would mean a 16.8 percent drop from 2024 to 2025. All evidence is that the decline will be bigger than that, so expect an upwards revision in the neighborhood of 700 or so more murders added to the 2024 estimate.

Before we get to the last point, I would like to note that the crime clock isn’t new to FBI crime reporting. Here’s one from 1961 as proof of just how long they’ve been doing them:

Fourth and finally, agency participation was a very normal 96 percent. The “of course reported crime is falling, fewer agencies are reporting” folks haven’t been as loud in the last year or so, but the myth still persists from time to time. Here’s another strong datapoint showing that crime is falling because crime is falling, not because it isn’t being reported.

This first look has some important information about how many crimes there were in 2025, but it doesn’t quite tell us exactly how many there were in 2025 and what the revised counts for 2024 will be. And it creates the somewhat humorous position of having a better idea how how many murders the FBI estimates there were in 2025 than they estimate were in 2024.

Still, we know all of this in May now and could accurately predict basically all of it as it was happening in 2025.

I’ve been doing this type of work for more than a decade now, and it’s incredible to see how the battle over describing trends has basically been won. If only we could better and quicker explain the why...

New on the Jeff-alytics Podcast (Now Back on YouTube!)

The numbers of falling crime are fairly clear, the reasons behind it are not. To get at some of the reasons why crime has trended as it as I’m turning to Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who focuses on crime, disorder, and what he describes as the public policy of antisocial behavior.