Murder Victims Are Skewing Older

Digging into the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Report data.

The average murder victim in 2025 is older than any year since at least before 1976, at least that’s what the FBI’s data appears to be showing. No, I don’t really know why, but walking you through the data and what it shows makes for an interesting story.

So let’s do that.

The best source of data on murder victims is the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). SHR is a collection of data on every homicide victim reported to the FBI in a given year. Agencies report details on the month, victim and offender age, race, and gender, circumstances behind the slaying, and what kind of weapon was used.

One description of SHR from 1987 — which I found kind of humorous to read today — says:

Despite its unmatched coverage and quality, the SHR data have been greatly underutilized because of problems of data management and accessibility. First, for each year there are approximately twenty thousand records, each of over 100 bytes, making the database too cumbersome for many potential users. Even if a user has sufficient storage, the computer time for each run through the data is substantial. Second, the data are in a form which is too complex for many who are computer novices.

SHR is something of a pain to deal with. Not every state participates (c’mon, Florida) and not every agency reports each year. Many computers these days are able to handle a 20,000 row, 100 byte spreadsheet, but the SHR is produced in ASCII format that is incredibly user-unfriendly.

Fortunately (and that’s an understatement), Jacob Kaplan has taken all the old SHR data dating back from 1976 through 2024 and made it reasonably easy for anyone to access. Typically between 80 and 90 percent of the number of estimated murders each year show up in SHR though that figure has been increasing in recent years thanks to Florida starting to sort of report again. The uptick in 2024 probably reflects that year’s estimate needing to be revised up by a few hundred, but well over 90 percent of last year's murders appear in SHR.

The analysis of 2025 data needs to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt because the data’s not totally complete. Obviously the year isn’t over, but even the agencies that have reported haven’t all done so completely. It's a huge win, however, that the FBI's monthly reporting includes SHR.

Taking SHR back to 1976 shows the trend that I teased in the title of this piece: the average murder victim is getting older.

The average murder victim so far in 2025 is nearly 36 years old, older than any of the past 50 years of SHR collection. Last year, the average murder victim was slightly younger though it’s certainly possible that this year’s average age will come down when the data is fully reported. Either way, murder victims in 2024 and 2025 were the oldest in more than a half century.

It’s not just a function of the funkiness in the FBI data. The CDC homicide data shows a similar rise in the age of the average murder victim, lining up nearly exactly with the FBI average age pretty much every year since 2001 (higher due to 9/11 being included in the CDC data).

Breaking down the share of murder victims per year by age ranges shows how just over 60 percent of murder victims the last two years have been between 18 and 44, down a fair amount from just five years ago.

Quick aside — did you listen to the Jeff-alytics podcast episode 3 yet? It’s with Philip Bump about the data behind why perceptions of crime rarely meet reality. It’s definitely worth a listen!

Yes, this is a shameless plug for my podcast in the middle of a piece, but it’s also a segue to talking about a great piece that Philip wrote last week about this data.

Many of my newsletters originate from me messing around with random datasets and seeing what looks interesting. I skeeted an early draft of some of the graphs above and Philip reached out to ask where the data came from.

I gave him what I had and he did a really interesting assessment of the data by generations relative to each generation’s share of the country’s population. Bump writes:

When we directly compare victimhood with population, we see something interesting. While members of the Silent generation (pre-baby boom) made up more of the population than murder victims by the late 1980s and boomers made up more of the population by the late 1990s, Gen X hasn’t made up significantly more of the population than the population of murder victims since its members were little kids. Gen X has, for now, settled in as about the same percentage of murder victims as it is of the population, despite getting older.

In other words, the average murder victim is getting older because Gen Xers are being victimized at roughly the same level as their share of the US population. They should be aging out of murder more completely than they are. Boomers, by contrast, made up a considerably smaller share of murder victims when they were the same age as Gen Xers are now.

It’s hard to say anything with a ton of certainty, especially when using such an imperfect data source to draw broad, generational conclusions. Still, the conclusion that the average murder victim is getting older seems fairly solid even if the ‘why’ of it all is beyond my capability to answer with much confidence.

Lastly, I'll note that this quick assessment is another good example of what can be done with the FBI’s new monthly crime data. It’s exciting to be able to say things about 2025 without having to wait another 9 or 10 months even if certainty in the conclusion is far from total.