CCJ report: U.S. murder rate drops 21%, on track for lowest level in modern records

OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
4:59 PM – Wednesday, July 1, 2026

The United States murder rate has plummeted to what experts project is its lowest level since at least 1900.

According to an extensive annual crime trends report released by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), homicides nationwide have fully reversed their staggering pandemic-era spikes.

Data analyzing major American municipalities suggest that murders plummeted by roughly 21% from 2024 to 2025, marking the single-largest one-year percentage drop recorded in modern U.S. history.

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Breakdown of Murder Stats

Although the CCJ report states that the projected 2025 rate of ~4.0 per 100,000 would be “the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900,” FBI data (uniform crime reports) provides the most commonly cited modern national homicide/murder statistics, and reliable, standardized national FBI estimates begin around 1960.

The previous modern low was 4.4 – 4.7 in 2014, and similar levels in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Pre-1960 data, going back to 1900, comes primarily from public health records.

These are not as complete or nationally representative as later FBI data — as early 20th-century coverage was limited to certain states and had underreporting issues. Adjusted historical estimates often put early 1900s rates higher than the raw reported figures, which sometimes looked artificially low.

Critics of the report have called the phrasing misleading since FBI’s consistent apples-to-apples national tracking starts later, and the true modern-era lows are in the 1950s–60s and 2014.

“The United States almost certainly had the lowest murder rate ever recorded in 2025, with the FBI having data back to 1960,” stated crime data analyst Jeff Asher. “And the available evidence suggests that we’re going to go even lower this year.”

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CCJ Report

The massive drop in lethal violence is part of a sweeping, broad-based decline across nearly every category of criminal offense. Alongside the historic drop in homicides, the CCJ data revealed that 11 of 13 tracked crimes fell significantly over the same period.

Gun assaults dropped by 22%, robberies declined by 23%, and carjackings fell by an astonishing 43%.

Criminologists note that the data signals a complete deflation of the sudden, chaotic crime wave that gripped the country between 2020 and 2022, when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted social institutions and pushed the national murder rate to a modern high of 6.8 per 100,000. The year 2020 also saw a significant surge in civil unrest, marked by widespread protests and outbreaks of violence tied to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

Nonetheless, public safety officials who previously feared that the country had settled into a permanently violent “new normal” are now looking at unprecedented peace across major hubs, with cities like Richmond seeing a 59% drop, Los Angeles down 39%, and Atlanta recording fewer than 100 homicides for the first time since before the pandemic.

While politicians across the ideological spectrum have been quick to claim credit for the positive shift, CCJ researchers argue that the record-low numbers are driven by a “complex, multifactorial web of social recovery and focused intervention” rather than a single policy.

While the drop to a 125-year low is a major achievement for public safety, crime data analysts remind the public that a rate of 4.0 per 100,000 residents still equates to roughly 13,000 to 14,000 preventable American deaths per year.

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