US States by Homicide Rate: Latest FBI State Ranking

Key figures from the 2026 snapshot

Overview: what the top of the homicide ranking shows

The upper end of the homicide-rate ranking is concentrated in the South, with Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas and Maryland all appearing in the first ten. New Mexico is the leading non-Southern outlier, while Missouri represents the highest-ranked Midwestern state. State averages can be influenced by local concentrations of violence, firearm exposure, socioeconomic conditions, emergency response and reporting practices, so the ranking should be read as a comparative signal rather than a single-cause explanation.

A high state homicide rate does not mean every community in that state is equally dangerous. It means the state’s reported homicide burden, standardized by population, is higher than elsewhere. Conversely, a low state rate can still contain local hot spots. For readers, the useful interpretation is comparative: the rate shows where lethal violence is proportionally heavier, but local city, county and neighborhood data are needed before drawing conclusions about personal risk.

Top 10 states by homicide rate

The Top 10 is not a list of the largest homicide counts. It is a population-adjusted ranking. That distinction is important because a smaller state can rank high if the number of homicide offenses is large relative to its resident population.

Chart: highest homicide rates by state

The chart uses the same Top 10 values as the table and makes the gap between the leading states easier to compare.

Methodology

The ranking uses the FBI homicide-rate field from the latest complete state-level 2024 crime table available through the Uniform Crime Reporting framework. In FBI UCR terminology, the field corresponds to murder and nonnegligent manslaughter. The rate is expressed as reported murder and nonnegligent manslaughter offenses per 100,000 residents, which standardizes reported offenses by population and makes states with different population sizes more comparable. The table is sorted from the highest homicide rate to the lowest; states with equal rounded rates are ordered alphabetically and kept as separate display ranks.

The 2026 label is treated as a latest-available-data edition, not as final 2026 data. Full-year state homicide data for 2026 are not complete at publication time, and crime data are revised as agencies submit, validate or correct records. For that reason, the article uses the latest complete official state-rate year rather than mixing partial monthly data with final annual state tables.

Homicide in this context follows the FBI UCR crime-reporting framework rather than public-health mortality records. That means it is based on law-enforcement reporting of offenses known to police, not death-certificate coding. The measure should therefore be interpreted as a reported-crime rate. It is excellent for comparing law-enforcement crime tables, but it is not identical to CDC homicide mortality rates, which are built from vital statistics.

Full ranking: 50 U.S. states by homicide rate

Use the controls to compare states by name, region, ranking group or rate order. The ranking itself remains based on the original homicide-rate order.

Insights from the state homicide ranking

The most important pattern is the concentration of high homicide rates in the South. This does not point to a single cause; homicide is usually shaped by several interacting conditions, including firearm exposure, localized retaliatory violence, socioeconomic conditions, domestic violence, law-enforcement clearance patterns and emergency medical response after shootings. State averages compress those conditions into one number, so they are best used as a starting point for deeper local analysis.

The middle of the table is more mixed. States such as Michigan, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Virginia sit near the national benchmark, but their internal geography is very different. A state with one large high-violence metro can rank similarly to a state with broader, lower-level violence spread across smaller cities. The rate alone cannot reveal that structure.

The lower end of the ranking is dominated by New England and several lower-density Western or Midwestern states. New Hampshire, Idaho, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Iowa, Maine and New Jersey all fall well below the national benchmark. Lower rates may reflect different combinations of demographics, settlement patterns, firearm exposure, policing practices, health systems and social conditions.

What this means for readers

For residents, the homicide rate is a signal of the state-level burden of lethal violence, not a personal safety forecast. A person’s practical risk depends far more on city, neighborhood, age, social network, domestic situation and daily routine than on the statewide average. For local decisions, pair the state rate with city-level FBI Crime Data Explorer data, local police dashboards, county health data and neighborhood-level context.

For policymakers and analysts, the rate is useful because it standardizes by population and makes year-to-year or state-to-state comparisons possible. The best use is not to label a state as safe or unsafe, but to ask why similar states diverge and which interventions reduce homicide without simply shifting violence across jurisdictions.

For researchers and readers comparing crime claims, the main rule is to separate rates from counts. California and Texas can have large numbers of homicide offenses because they are very populous, while smaller states can rank higher by rate if the burden is larger relative to population.

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