The steep decline in the U.S. national homicide rate is poised to persist through the remainder of 2025, but the large drop will be harder to sustain, let alone outpace in the coming years, especially amid the Trump administration's changes to federal policies and drop in federal support for gun violence prevention. On Aug. 5, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, released its annual report on crime from the past year, finding that the national homicide rate in 2024 fell approximately 15% compared to 2023. The FBI's finding aligns with those from other organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, (-12%); the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a group of police executives from the largest cities (-16%); the Center on Public Safety and Justice at NORC, a nonpartisan research organization at the University of Chicago (-20%); AH Datalytics, a data analytics firm (-14%); and the Council on Criminal Justice (-16%), a nonpartisan think tank. Notably, all these entities — barring the CDC, which has yet to publish mid-year estimates for 2025 — have also reported approximately 16-20% declines in the national homicide rate in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2024.

• Given the size of the United States and significant variations among different cities, nationwide averages can obscure major local differences. Moreover, collecting and evaluating data about U.S. crime rates is difficult because, among other things, many crimes (though not generally homicides) go unreported. Policing is decentralized, involving thousands of individual departments that vary significantly in size, capabilities and how they report information. This means there is generally a time lag and some variability in figures, especially from the FBI, which relies on a complex system for police departments to report data.
• In 2021, the FBI changed the way it collects data, which has also made it more difficult to make comparisons in data before and after the change. However, this challenge is easing as more data is published. The FBI plans to start releasing monthly reports soon. Meanwhile, in recent years, a number of private organizations, including the Center for Public Safety and Justice and AH Datalytics, have built real-time crime monitors, or, in the case of organizations like the Major Cities Chiefs Association and Council on Criminal Justice, have published reports more frequently than merely annually.
• Data from multiple sources also indicate that, nationwide, other violent crimes (namely rape, robbery and aggravated assault) and property crimes (namely burglary, theft and motor vehicle theft) also continue to decline — though not by as much as homicides.

The continuing decline in the national homicide rate comes after a major uptick in 2020-2021, which most experts blame on the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic for the aberration, despite caution over the precise causality. In 2018-2019, before the pandemic, the homicide rate was just over 5 per 100,000 people — a rate far lower than in the 1970s to 1990s, when it peaked at over 10. In 2020-2021, however, the figure spiked to about 6.8, a level not seen since the late 1990s. The trend began to reverse in 2022, followed by dramatic drops in 2023-2024, with estimates indicating the national homicide rate has now fallen below its pre-pandemic peak. While experts caution that it is extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to identify clear causal variables for crime rates in a country as large and diverse as the United States, most respected crime-focused organizations and individual analysts point to the unique circumstances of the pandemic to account for the spike in homicide rates. Some theories — for instance, that there was both a surge in firearms purchases and a decline in proactive policing during the pandemic that, in turn, enabled a rise in homicides — capture trends that probably had some impact. However, many experts have coalesced around the argument that the main driver was a combination of severe disruptions to daily life at a local level, ranging from school closures and unemployment spikes in low-income areas disproportionately at risk of violent crime to a collapse of local government and community services that either directly or secondarily affect crime rates. By contrast, once the health emergency began to calm in 2021 and the vast sums of money the federal government provided in 2020-2021 to states and localities began to be disbursed, these trends helped reverse the surge in homicide rates.

• Two leading crime researchers — John Roman, who heads the Center on Public Safety and Justice, as well as Jeff Asher, who heads AH Datalytics — have been at the forefront of asserting local community dynamics as the most significant factors behind the rise and subsequent fall in homicide rates. Both have also pointed to research indicating that nonprofits and other local community interventions focused on reducing crime were major drivers behind the steep fall in homicide rates in the 1990s to 2010s.
• Some commentators, often with political motives, have argued that developments like the elimination of cash bail and/or the presence of undocumented immigrants drive homicide rates, but most well-regarded studies find little to no evidence for such theories as explanatory variables for nationwide crime shifts outside of temporary periods in specific locations.

Current trends point to another major drop in the national homicide rate through the end of 2025, though it will be harder to sustain comparably large declines in 2026 and beyond. Crime data tends to become more predictive of future trends as a year progresses, as statistics in the first or even second quarters are more vulnerable to revision and not necessarily indicative of what will follow. By this point in the year, however, barring an unprecedented reversal, data indicate that the double-digit decline in the national homicide rate should continue through the end of the year. In fact, according to some estimates, the decrease in 2025 may be the largest annual decline ever recorded and could bring the national homicide rate close to, or even below, its nadir of 4.5 in 2014 — the lowest since data started to be collected in the mid-20th century. That said, it will be harder to replicate, let alone outpace, such massive annual reductions in the national homicide rate in the coming years. Among various natural factors that influence yearly swings in crime rates, many experts consider there to be something of a floor in how far and how fast the U.S. homicide rate can fall given the widespread availability of firearms that make lethal violence much more common in the United States than other wealthy, industrial countries. Nearly all other Western countries have much stricter gun control laws and much lower rates of gun ownership, which translate into much lower homicide rates. While local developments like changes to policing strategies could help further reduce U.S. homicide rates, outpacing the massive declines in 2023, 2024 and likely that in 2025 will be much harder in the coming years without massive and highly unlikely societal shifts, such as an intensive federal reversal of gun rights. Thus, while homicide rates may fall even lower in 2026 and beyond, they would likely do so at a slower pace than in recent years.

• According to statistics from 2023, the last year for fully available and confirmed data, the European Union's overall homicide rate was approximately 0.9, a slight increase from 2022; even Latvia, the highest at about 4.2, was lower than the United States. Moreover, Canada, which has comparatively laxer gun control laws and more widespread gun ownership, saw its homicide rate drop slightly to about 1.9 in 2024.

The Trump administration's policy changes and cuts in federal assistance for gun violence prevention are among the forces threatening to slow down the decline in the national homicide rate in the coming years. Since returning to office, U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has slashed federal support for programs designed to curb crime and support victims, most significantly by terminating more than $800 million worth of grants to support local organizations. According to a Reuters investigation, the cuts include about $158 million specifically designated for gun violence prevention — more than half of all federal funding for such programs. While some of those grants may be eventually restored or be replaced by the efforts of private organizations, experts warn that the scale of the cuts imperil the gains made in recent years by community interventions designed to prevent homicides. The administration is also scaling back federal funding to counter gun violence through other entities like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as well as the CDC, and it has reversed other federal initiatives, such as by watering down gun control rules and closing the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. Moreover, the recently passed federal spending and tax bill includes provisions that either directly or secondarily cut funding for key federal programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which benefit low-income individuals who, for a range of factors, are more at risk of both committing and being victims of violence. Furthermore, the White House has threatened to withhold federal funding for locations that do not cooperate on immigration enforcement, which could result in affected local governments losing significant sums of money. If the theory that broad disruptions at local levels drove the spike in homicide rates in 2020-2021 is accurate, then such cuts particularly threaten to weaken efforts to prevent gun violence. And even if these developments do not come to pass, the Trump administration's expanding efforts to carry out mass arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants threaten to erode trust between law enforcement and local communities disproportionately at risk of gun violence. To this end, numerous media leaks indicate that FBI and other federal law enforcement agents have been reassigned from various issues, including violent crime, to work on immigration enforcement. Taken together, these and other moves by the White House — the impacts of which may not be felt until at least next year — threaten to further complicate efforts to keep up the steep declines in the national homicide rate in the coming years.

• Estimates suggest that federal cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in the so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill" could total more than $1 trillion over a decade, increase by millions the number of people without health insurance and lead to more than 1 million job losses. While states may be able to pick up some of the burden, absent future changes to these they will be unable to replicate the scale of the federal government's assistance. Even if current estimates overstate the impacts, research indicates a link between funding such programs and lowering gun violence — in line with the theory that federal funding helped lower homicide rates in the wake of the pandemic.
• On Aug. 5, the Department of Justice released a list of three dozen states, counties and cities that the Trump administration has defined as "sanctuary jurisdictions" that allegedly do not cooperate with immigration enforcement. The list is much narrower than one released earlier in the year. Many locations on the new list have already sued the administration over threats to cut funding, with cases thus far favoring their claims. However, the White House has pledged to continue to pursue litigation against those locations and has continually found workarounds to unfavorable legal rulings, leaving the door open for future funding cuts in other areas, as seen with currently planned cuts to programs such as low-income housing assistance — precisely the type of aid that many crime researchers believe was helpful at local levels in recently bringing down homicide rates.