U.S. murder rate approaches a record low

A police officer hangs yellow crime tape at Brown University in Providence, R.I., on Dec. 13, 2025, during the investigation of a shooting. Mark Stockwell/AP hide caption toggle caption Mark Stockwell/AP As the U.S. nears its 250th birthday, it's doing pretty well by at least one measure: the national murder rate. "The United States almost certainly had the lowest murder rate ever recorded in 2025, with the FBI having data back to 1960," says crime data analyst Jeff Asher. "And the available evidence suggests that we're going to go even lower this year." Asher published his prediction in late May, basing it in part on the early data he collects directly from about 600 police agencies for his site The Crime Index . That nationally representative sampling shows murders dropped 18.7% in the first four months of this year, compared to the same period last year. All violent crime dropped 6.4%. An important caveat is that this would be the lowest murder rate on record — meaning since the FBI started publishing national murder numbers in the 1950s. There are some older records of national rates of homicide (a larger category than criminal murder) kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . "They [the CDC] have good homicide data back to 1930 or so, and there's a few years in the 1950s that were slightly lower than 2025," Asher says. …