Florida Crime Rate: Violent, Property, and National Comparison

The Florida crime rate has been falling for more than a decade, and the trend held through the most recent reporting year. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement recorded an overall drop of roughly 5% between 2022 and 2023, extending a slide that reached a 50-year low in 2021.¹ Property crime did most of the work, but violent crime moved down as well. Statewide averages hide big differences between communities, so the breakdown matters more than any single number.

One timing note before the figures: crime data lags. As of mid-2026, the most complete official picture covers 2023, with some preliminary 2024 numbers coming through federal channels. FDLE publishes annual summary reports once each year’s data is compiled.²

Violent Crime

Federal estimates put Florida’s 2023 violent crime total at approximately 88,730 offenses across homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.³ Aggravated assault dominates the category by a wide margin. The 2023 breakdown looked like this:

Aggravated assault: roughly 65,270 offenses, about 73.6% of all violent crime
Robbery: roughly 13,190 offenses, about 14.9%
Rape: roughly 8,920 offenses, about 10.1%
Homicide: roughly 1,350 offenses, about 1.5%

The per-capita violent crime rate slipped from 2022 to 2023. Florida’s health tracking system logged a rate of 150.7 per 100,000 residents in 2023, down from 157.6 in 2022, a drop of about 4.4%.⁴ Different agencies land on slightly different numbers depending on which offenses they count and how they estimate population, and FDLE’s own figure runs higher because it covers additional categories. The direction is consistent across every source.

Preliminary 2024 data suggests the Florida murder rate kept falling, down to roughly 4 homicides per 100,000 residents. If that figure holds in the final reports, it would mark a meaningful improvement on 2023.

Property Crime

Property offenses make up most reported crime in any state, and Florida fits the pattern. FDLE put the 2023 property crime rate at approximately 1,516 per 100,000 residents. Larceny-theft alone accounted for about 80.6% of property offenses. The rest split roughly like this:

Burglary: about 10.8% of property crime
Motor vehicle theft: about 8.7% of property crime

Property crime fell faster than violent crime between 2022 and 2023, with the rate down roughly 5.6%. That is where most of the overall statewide decline shows up. Larceny-theft covers everything from shoplifting to package theft, so even small percentage movements translate into tens of thousands of incidents.

How Florida Compares to the Nation

The FBI estimated a national violent crime rate of 379.5 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, falling to 359.1 per 100,000 in 2024.⁵ A clean apples-to-apples comparison with Florida’s state-level rate is complicated because federal estimation methods differ from how FDLE and FLHealthCHARTS calculate state numbers. The longer view is clearer: between 2004 and 2024, Florida’s violent crime rate declined by more than 45%, among the steepest drops of any state over that period.

The 2024 national picture improved as well, with an estimated 1,221,345 violent crime offenses reported nationwide.⁵ Florida’s decline is part of that broader national movement, not an outlier.

Why Statewide Numbers Don’t Tell You About Your City

A statewide average is useful for tracking the trend over time. It is a poor tool for judging the safety of a specific neighborhood. Some smaller Florida cities report violent crime rates several times the state average, while many suburban communities post rates well below it. In smaller municipalities, a handful of incidents can swing the rate dramatically from one year to the next.

Larger urban centers and economically disadvantaged areas generally report higher crime rates, and many suburban and retirement-oriented communities rank among the state’s safest. If you’re researching a specific place, FDLE’s annual reports break the data down to the municipal and county level, which gives a far more useful picture than any statewide figure.²

What the Numbers Don’t Show

Reported crime rates only reflect offenses that reach law enforcement. If a crime isn’t reported, it doesn’t appear in the data. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that a substantial share of crimes go unreported each year, especially property crimes and certain assaults. Treat official crime rates as a floor, not a ceiling.

There is also a reporting-system wrinkle worth knowing. In 2021 the FBI phased out the older Uniform Crime Reporting summary system in favor of the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which captures far more detail per incident.⁶ The transition created reporting gaps in 2021 and 2022 as agencies adapted, so year-over-year comparisons spanning that window deserve some caution.

Where to Pull the Numbers Yourself

FDLE’s Uniform Crime Report pages are the best starting point for Florida-specific data, with historical files going back to 2000.⁷ For national context and state-by-state comparisons, the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer lets you filter interactively by state, year, and offense type.⁸ The Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes annual estimated counts by state that are useful for cross-checking FDLE’s figures against federal estimates.³ FLHealthCHARTS.gov tracks violent crime over a rolling ten-year window alongside public health indicators.⁴

1
Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Florida Crime Rate Drops for Record 50-Year Low
2
Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Annual State Summary Crime Data Reports
3
Bureau of Justice Statistics. Crime Known to Law Enforcement, 2023
4
FLHealthCHARTS.gov. Violent Crime Rate Per 100,000 Population
5
Federal Bureau of Investigation. UCR Summary of Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2024
6
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime/Law Enforcement Stats (UCR Program)
7
Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Uniform Crime Reports
8
FBI Crime Data Explorer. FBI Crime Data Explorer