What Does a Crime Rate per 100,000 Mean?

The short answer

A crime rate per 100,000 is the number of crimes a police agency reported in a year, divided by the number of people it serves, times 100,000. It answers one question: if this place had exactly 100,000 residents, and crime were reported at the same pace, how many crimes would that be? It lets you read a town of 2,000 and a city of 2 million on one scale.

reported crimes ÷ population × 100,000 = reported crime rate

A worked example

In 2025, the Burlington Police Department in Vermont reported 214 violent crimes to the FBI. The FBI lists 44,354 people for the area it polices.

214 ÷ 44,354 × 100,000 = 482.5

So the reported violent crime rate is 482.5 per 100,000 people. The same department reported 1,808 property crimes that year, which works out to 4,076.3 per 100,000. The two are given as separate rates because they measure different things, and adding them together would hide the smaller one.

Why multiply by 100,000?

Dividing crimes by population gives a tiny decimal that is hard to read. Multiplying by 100,000 turns it into a whole-number scale. The FBI uses 100,000, so most crime figures you see use it too. It is only a scale. A rate of 482.5 does not mean 482.5 crimes happened. Burlington Police Department serves fewer than 100,000 people, and the count was 214.

What counts as a crime in the rate

The FBI groups the offenses it collects into two headline totals. Violent crime is murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Property crime is burglary, larceny-theft and motor vehicle theft. Arson is counted on its own. A figure called simply “the crime rate” with no category named is usually one of these two, or both added together, so check which before comparing it with anything.

Small places swing a lot

A rate is steady when the counts behind it are large, and jumpy when they are small. The Dover Police Department in Vermont serves fewer than 2,000 people.

The rate went from 54.0 to 379.6, and the whole change is the difference between 1 reported crime and 7. When you read a rate for a small agency, look at the count beside it and at several years, not one.

What the rate leaves out

• Crimes nobody reported. The rate counts crimes reported to police and passed on to the FBI. It is a reported crime rate, not a count of all crime.
• Your own risk. It describes the whole area one agency polices. It is not the chance that something happens to one person, on one street, or in one neighborhood.
• People who are not residents. Population counts people who live there. Commuters, tourists and students add to the crimes that can be reported without adding to the population, which pushes the rate up.
• Missing months. Not every agency reports all 12 months, and some report nothing. A yearly rate built on a partial year is wrong, which is why CrimeTally shows no rate for one.
• Why two places differ. The FBI lists more than a dozen things that shape crime from place to place, from population density to how readily people report crimes, and for that reason it advises against ranking places by rate.

What this guide does not cover

It does not cover how crimes are classified, arrest or clearance rates, or victim surveys, which estimate unreported crime by a different method. It also does not say whether any rate is high or low. That depends on what you compare it with, and the comparison has limits of its own.

Look up an agency

The Crime Rate Lookup shows this math for any US police agency in the FBI's data: the crimes it reported, the population it serves, the rate, and every year back to 2015 with the gaps marked.

This guide is for informational purposes only and is not professional advice. A reported crime rate describes what one police agency reported to the FBI. It says nothing certain about any one home, street or school.

Last reviewed: September 2026 · Against the FBI Crime Data Explorer, September 2026 refresh.