Does Crime Actually Lower Home Prices? We Checked 688 Counties

Ask any buyer what a high crime rate does to house prices and you will get the same answer. The raw data agrees with them, right up until you hold anything else constant.

We matched FBI crime figures for 688 US counties against 3.1 million home sale records from the last 12 months, plus Census income and education for every county. The counties cover 201 million people across forty-five states. Every price and rent figure below is a true median taken over the sales and listings themselves, and every crime figure is a county rate built only from the police agencies that actually reported, over the months they reported.

One thing to hold onto before the numbers: this is a county-level comparison. Studies that work at the scale of a census tract, a ZIP code or a block, where one side of a neighborhood can be far more dangerous than the other, consistently find that violent crime does lower nearby home values, typically by a few percent for every ten percent more crime. Those effects are real and this study does not test them. What it tests is the claim people actually make when they compare counties: that a county with a higher crime rate has cheaper homes because of the crime.

The comparison everyone publishes

Sort the counties by violent crime and compare the safest quarter against the highest-crime quarter, and the gap is exactly what you would expect.

A 31 percent price gap. Case closed, except for the income row. The safe counties also earn 31 percent more, and most of the price gap is sitting on top of that income gap. Rents show the same shape, 24 percent higher in the safe quarter.

Inside one state, the discount looks real

Comparing Mississippi counties with Connecticut counties tells you about Mississippi and Connecticut, so the next test compares each county only against the others in its own state. In the twenty-five states with at least 12 measurable counties, the highest-crime third of counties is 24 percent cheaper than the safest third in the median state, and twenty-four of the twenty-five run in that direction.

The income gap travels with it. In Illinois the safest third of counties has a median household income of $102,396 against $61,953 in the highest-crime third.

What happens when you hold income constant

Put income, education, density and both crime rates into one model of county home prices and you can see which of them is carrying the result. Every input is standardized, so the effects are directly comparable.

The model explains 56 percent of the variation in county prices, and income does the work. A one standard deviation rise in violent crime (200 offenses per 100,000) moves the expected price by +1.0 percent, with a 95 percent interval from -2.5 to +5.0 percent, which is a range that comfortably includes zero. Measured on a log scale instead, the coefficient is +0.072: positive, because crime tracks urban and urban is expensive. In no version of this model, with or without state effects, does a higher county crime rate go with significantly lower prices once income is in it.

Nine groups, no pattern

Split the counties into thirds by income, then thirds again by density, and only then compare high crime against low crime inside each of those nine groups. If crime discounted homes on its own, every group would lean the same way.

It does not. Across all nine groups, the gap between the highest-crime and the safest counties runs from 12 percent cheaper to 14 percent more expensive, and the high-crime counties are the more expensive ones in 5 of the 9 groups. None of the nine gaps is statistically distinguishable from zero. Once two counties earn alike and are built alike, their crime rates add no measurable information about what their houses cost.

Put plainly: the county-level discount is real in the raw numbers, and income and density account for it. That does not make crime harmless to home values. It means a county's crime rate is mostly a marker of its income, and the two cannot be separated at this scale.

Where it does show up: gross yield

For an investor the question is different. Gross yield is twelve months of asking rent over the closed price, and it moves opposite to price: cheap counties carry higher gross yields whatever their crime rate, because rents fall less than prices do. Inside each income third, here is the median gross yield of the safest third of counties beside the highest-crime third.

In the lowest-income third, the highest-crime counties return about 0.6 percentage points more than the safest ones. In the middle and highest-income thirds the two groups return about the same; the small differences there are inside the noise. Asking rent is the advertised figure on listings, not a lease figure, and gross yield ignores taxes, insurance, vacancy and repairs.

What this means if you are buying

A county crime rate tells you something about what homes cost there, but only because it tells you about the county's income. Two counties with the same income and the same density show no consistent price difference by crime rate. The rate is still worth knowing, because it describes the place you would live in, but a county-wide figure is not a discount you can bank on or a premium you are obliged to pay. Within a county, the block matters: the research at neighborhood scale finds that violent crime does lower the value of the homes nearest to it.

For a landlord the cheap end of the market does show a little more gross yield where crime is higher. The premium is small, it appears only in lower-income counties, it is mostly the arithmetic of low prices, and gross yield counts none of the vacancy, turnover or repair costs a landlord actually pays.

How this was built

Crime: FBI Crime Data Explorer, 2025, county level. Each rate divides the offenses the reporting agencies filed by the population those agencies serve, capped at the county population. Agencies that filed nothing, or filed one category and not the other, are excluded from both the numerator and the coverage figure. An agency serving several counties is placed by its own coordinates. A county is measured only when its agencies report on at least 90 percent of its population, it has at least 50,000 residents and at least 250 tracked closings, and its rates fall inside plausible bounds.

Prices and rents: the median over the closings and rental listings Resideline tracked in each county over the 12 months to September 2026. Income: Census SAIPE 2023 county median household income. Education: the share of adults with a bachelor's degree or higher from the Census ACS 2023 five-year estimates, weighted by population across each county's ZIP codes. Density: people per square mile, the same way. An agency that reported only part of 2025 is rated over the months it reported, and a county is included only when its reporting agencies cover at least 90 percent of its residents for the year. Counties left out for that reason include San Diego (CA), Suffolk (NY), Orange (FL), Denton (TX), Lee (FL), Brevard (FL), Monmouth (NJ), Clark (WA).

Every figure on this page is a county-wide figure. The spread inside a county is often wider than the spread between counties, so none of this describes a street or a neighborhood. The neighborhood-scale research we defer to includes Ihlanfeldt and Mayock (Miami-Dade census tracts), Pope and Pope (urban ZIP codes across the country) and Linden and Rockoff (block-level effects), all of which find that violent crime lowers nearby home values.