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This report analyzes murder rates in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, and other U.S. cities with high homicide rates.
Local databases and Chicago Police Department (CPD) press releases were used for city- and neighborhood-specific murder rates, which exclude justifiable homicides and involuntary manslaughter. The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer was used to extract homicide rates from cities across the U.S.
The CDC WONDER database was used to collect homicide rates between 1968 and 2025. However, the WONDER database reports only county-level data.
Comparing Chicago’s homicide rates to those of other jurisdictions is challenging, as per capita calculations can skew the reality of homicides in smaller jurisdictions. For example, Memphis, TN reported 249 homicides in 2024, whereas Chicago reported nearly twice that many (461) in the same year.
Memphis has a population of 613,207; Chicago, 2,638,698. When one homicide is recorded in Memphis, the per capita rate equals 0.16 per 100,000. Conversely, when one is recorded in Chicago, the per capita rate equals 0.038 per 100,000.
We use per capita rates to explain how likely someone is to be affected by crime across varying population sizes. But Chicago is one of our nation’s most populous cities and must be compared to other large cities to provide an accurate picture of the effects of crime.
According to the press release, ‘2025 in Review’ (Jan. 5, 2026), issued by the Chicago Police Department, the murder rate in the city in 2025 was 15.2 per 100,000 with 416 murders. This figure is provisional and may change in future press releases.
The homicide rate from the CDC WONDER Provisional database in 2025 was 10.6 per 100,000 with 550 deaths reported in Cook County, Illinois. This database includes justifiable and negligent homicides. As with the CPD figure above, this number is provisional. The final 2025 homicide totals will likely be higher once all cases are fully coded in the database. 4
According to Chicago Police Department year-end press releases, the city’s murder rate increased from 2019 to 2020, peaked in 2021, and then began a gradual decline in 2022. Although 2025 data is provisional, and death counts will likely be higher than what is currently available in future press releases, the CPD is reporting the lowest murder rates in more than a decade.
According to the CDC WONDER Database, which does not rely on local law enforcement reporting; rather, it draws upon data from medical examiners, homicide rates (which include justifiable homicides) followed a similar pattern in Cook County. Homicide rates rose from 2019 to 2020 (12.5 to 18.7 per 100,000), peaked in 2021 (20.5 per 100,000), and began a gradual decline in 2022 (18.2 per 100,000).
The CPD counts above are the department’s own year-end totals. The FBI Crime Data Explorer figures used elsewhere in this report come from a separate, submission-based collection, so the two sets are not directly comparable.
Chicago compares differently to other cities depending on their population sizes.
When compared to smaller cities, Chicago looks much safer despite having roughly two and a half times as many homicides. Conversely, when compared to cities with larger populations, Chicago’s homicide rates appear more normalized.
Chicago is the most dangerous city among its peer cities. Of the 11 U.S. cities with populations over 1,000,000 people in 2024, Chicago’s homicide rate ranges from roughly on par with Philadelphia’s to nearly seven times higher than San Diego’s, with most peer cities falling somewhere in between.
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