Comparisons of crime rates across countries often focus on homicides or murders. In 2025, the U.S. murder rate will be about 4 per 100,000 people—roughly twice Canada’s 2024 homicide rate of 1.91 per 100,000.
However, homicides represent only a tiny share of violent crime. In 2024, homicides accounted for just 0.21% of violent crimes in the United States, based on National Crime Victimization Survey estimates of rape/sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. By comparison, Canada’s most recent General Social Survey (GSS) on Safety and Victimization, from 2019, shows that homicides accounted for only about 0.022% of a comparable measure of total violent crime.
Although homicides make up a very small share of violent crime in both countries, they account for a much larger share in the United States. Specifically, homicides represent 9.5 times the share of violent crime in the U.S. as they do in Canada. This difference reflects not only the higher U.S. homicide rate but also the dramatically lower overall violent crime rate reported in the United States.
Canada, like the United States, uses two measures of crime: crimes reported to the police and total crime. In the United States, the Bureau of Justice Statistics measures total crime through the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). In Canada, Statistics Canada measures total crime through the General Social Survey (GSS), which it typically conducts every five years. We have previously done a similar comparison with Australia.
Although the media and most public discussions focus on crimes reported to the police, victims report only a small share of violent crimes. This distinction becomes especially important when making international comparisons because reporting rates can vary dramatically across countries. For example, Statistics Canada found that victims reported only 29% of violent crimes to the police in 2019. In the same year, the comparable reporting rate in the United States was 41%. In 2024, 48.1% of violent crimes in the US were reported to the police. Everything else being equal, the higher reporting rate in the United States would make its violent crime rate appear 41% higher than Canada’s in 2019 (41%/29%=1.41), even if both countries experienced exactly the same level of violent crime.
There are reasons to believe that the gap between the GSS estimate of violent victimization and police-reported violent crime may be even much larger than this comparison suggests. As shown below, the Canadian police-reported violent-crime rate of 801.2 per 100,000 equals only 9.65% of the GSS violent-victimization rate of 8,300 per 100,000. Because the GSS excludes victims under age 15 while police-reported crime includes victims of all ages, the age mismatch alone even biases this percentage upward. All else equal, restricting the comparison to the GSS population would reduce the police-reported share below 9.65%.
Compare this to the US data. The NCVS measure of total violent crime is 21 per 1,000 people and the FBI measure of total reported violent crime is 1,190.2 per 100,000 people. That implies that police-recorded violent-crime rate equals about 57% of the NCVS violent-victimization rate. All together these calculations imply that Americans report crime to the police at a rate 5.9 times the rate that Canadians do. But whether one assumes that the rate that Americans report crimes are 41% higher than Canadians or whether it is 5.9 times or something that may be in between those numbers, It is clear that it is a mistake to assume that differences in police-reported crime rates directly reflect differences in underlying crime rates.
As a result, comparisons either across countries or even over time within the same country based solely on police-reported crime can create a misleading picture of differences in violent crime rates across countries. Table 1 uses the data from the US DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2019 and 2024 as well as the data from the Canada’s GSS survey for 2019.
There are some problems making comparisons using these surveys because they define some crimes differently. The Canadian GSS measures sexual assault more broadly than the NCVS because it includes a wider range of unwanted sexual touching and sexual contact offenses. Conversely, the NCVS’s overall violent-crime measure is broader than the GSS’s assault measure because the NCVS includes threats of violence (simple assault without physical contact), while the GSS assault category generally requires physical contact.
Because assaults account for most violent crimes in both surveys, the NCVS’s inclusion of threatened and attempted assaults affects total violent-crime rates more than the GSS’s broader sexual-assault definition. Consequently, a direct comparison of the published NCVS and GSS violent-crime rates tends to make the United States appear relatively more violent—and Canada relatively less violent—than would be the case under harmonized definitions.
Still, even with this relative bias against the US, Canada’s total violent crime rate in 2019 was 295% higher than the rate in the US. Even removing rape/sexual assault to remove the bias agains the Canadian numbers but leaving assault so that there is still the bias against the US numbers, the Canadian violent crime rate is still 175% higher than the rate in the US.
The burglary and motor vehicle theft rates in Canada are also much higher than the rates in the US — 259% and 412% higher respectively. Only for the category of “other/household theft” is the rate 19% lower in Canada.
| Comparing Total Violent and Property Crime Rates in the US and Canada | |||||
| Category | US (NCVS 2024) per 1,000 people except for burglary | US (NCVS 2019) per 1,000 people except for burglary | Canada (GSS 2019) per 1,000 people except for burglary | How much higher is Canada’s Crime rate relative to the US’s in 2019 | Notes on Comparability |
| Overall total violent crime | 23.3 (age 12+) | 21.0 (age 12+) | 83 (age 15+) | 295% | includes all assaults, not just aggravated assaults for compatibility. Questionable Rape/Sexual assault differences |
| Overall total violent crime, excluding rapes/sexual assaults because they are measured differently | 21.3 | 19.3 | 53 | 175% | |
| Rape/sexual assault | 2 | 1.7 | 30 | Not comparable enough | Canada includes broader unwanted touching/grabbing |
| Robbery | 2.2 | 1.9 | 7 | 268% | Highly comparable |
| All assaults | 19.1 | 17.4 (agg. 3.7 + simple 13.7) | 46 (physical assault) | 164% | Canada’s physical assault ≈ US is much broader as in includes threats in total assaults |
| Overall Property Crime Rate | 97.6 | 101.4 | 172 | 69% | Canada total includes vandalism; US excludes personal theft and vandalism (reported separately or not at all) |
| Burglary | 8.8 per 1,000 households (incl. attempted) | 11.7 per 1,000 households (incl. attempted) | 42 per 1,000 households (incl. attempted) | 259% | Highly comparable |
| Motor vehicle theft | 6.3 | 3.9 | 20, including parts | 412% | Highly comparable; Canada’s rate includes vehicle parts. |
| Other / household theft | 79.3 | 80.2 | 65 | -19% | Direct analogue; US “other theft” is residual category. |
| Trespassing | 3.8 | 5.5 | N/A | N/A | US-specific; trespassing has no theft intent. |
| US 2024 from BJS Criminal Victimization, 2024 (Table 2); US 2019 and trends from BJS Criminal Victimization, 2023report comparisons; Canada 2019 from Statistics Canada GSS Juristat (Table 1 / Chart 1). All rates are for the past 12 months. | |||||
While not much weight should be placed on comparing the reported crime data because of the huge differences in the rates that crimes are reported in the two countries, it is still useful to see how much higher the USA looks in terms of reported violent crimes
| Table 2: Comparing Reported Violent and Property Crime Rates in the US and Canada | ||||
| Crime Category | United States (FBI) 2024 except for Homicides 2025 | Canada (StatsCan UCR) 2024 | How much higher is USA’s Crime rate relative to the Canada’s in 2019 | Comparability |
| All Violent Crime (first three categories and all assaults so that it is most comparable to the previous table) | 1190.6 | 801.2 | 49% | |
| Homicide | 4 | 1.9 | 111% | Very High. Definitions are nearly identical. Best cross-national comparison. |
| Robbery | 62.3 | 58.5 | 6% | High. Both require theft combined with violence/threats. Minor legal differences only. |
| Rape / Sexual Assault | 24.3 | 90.8 | -73% | Low. Canada includes a much broader range of sexual assaults; FBI rape definition is narrower. Rates are not directly comparable. |
| Aggravated Assault / Serious Assault | 267.7 | roughly 100–150 (Level 2 & 3 assaults only) | 114% | Moderate. Similar concept but Canada reports assault by levels and also includes many offenses elsewhere classified separately in U.S. data. |
| All assaults | 1,100 per 100,000* | roughly 600–700 per 100,000 | 69% | Moderate. That “all assaults” comparison is the most defensible way to compare assault prevalence across the two countries because it aligns the broad Canadian assault category, but the US number is still much broader as it includes threats of violence. |
| All Property Crime | 1,760 | ~2,842 | -38% | Moderate-Low. Broad categories contain somewhat different offense mixes and counting rules |
| Burglary / Break-and-Enter | 250 | ~314 | -20% | High. Very similar offenses involving unlawful entry. One of the better property-crime comparisons. |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 318 | ~342 | -7% | Very High. Definitions are extremely similar. |
| Larceny/Theft | 1,190 | ~2,186 | -46% | Moderate-Low. Canada includes some offenses that the FBI reports separately; reporting practices also differ. |
0 Comments