Countries With the Lowest Crime Rates in the World (2025)

Ask which country is the safest and you will get a different answer depending on the yardstick. Iceland leads the Global Peace Index, but on reported homicides per 100,000 people it is beaten by Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and several Gulf states. This ranking uses the most comparable crime statistic available across countries, intentional homicide, then sets it beside two broader measures of safety and explains why the three lists disagree and what each one can and cannot tell you.

Key takeaways

• On reported homicide rates, Singapore (0.069 per 100,000 in 2023) and Japan (0.229 in 2023) are among the lowest in the world; only tiny Tuvalu reports zero in the dataset used here.
• Iceland's homicide rate has ranged from 0 to 1.78 per 100,000 between 1994 and 2023, so a single year says little about a country that small.
• The Global Peace Index mixes violence with conflict and militarization, which is why Iceland, Ireland, and Austria rank above countries with lower homicide rates.
• The gap inside the wealthy world is large: the United States reports 5.763 per 100,000 against 0.911 in Germany and 0.229 in Japan.
• Portugal's decriminalization of drug possession is a famous case study in drug policy, but it is not evidence that the policy lowered homicide.

How do you measure a "low-crime" country?

There is no single crime rate that can be compared across 190 countries. Police record a burglary in one country and ignore it in another, define assault differently, and vary in how much citizens trust them enough to report. A country with an energetic police-reporting culture can look more dangerous on paper than a country where crimes go unrecorded.

That is why researchers lean on intentional homicide. Our World in Data describes homicide as people intentionally and illegally killing others for personal reasons, and it notes that figures from different providers, including the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), and the World Health Organization (WHO), can differ for the same country and year because their methods differ (Our World in Data, Homicides). A body is hard to hide and almost always triggers an official response, so homicide is the least bad cross-border yardstick.

Think of it as a smoke alarm rather than a thermometer. It reliably detects the worst events, but it does not measure the everyday temperature of a neighborhood: pickpocketing, fraud, harassment, or the feeling of walking home alone at night. Two other measures fill part of that gap.

Three yardsticks used in this article

Measure	Who produces it	What it captures	Limits
Homicide rate per 100,000	UNODC data, compiled by Our World in Data	Intentional killings	Misses non-lethal crime; very small countries swing wildly
Global Peace Index (GPI)	Institute for Economics and Peace	Peacefulness across 23 indicators, including conflict, societal safety, and militarization	Not a crime index; includes military spending and conflict
Law and Order Index	Gallup	Perceptions and experience: feeling safe, trust in police, theft, assault	Survey of about 1,000 or more adults per country; sampling error of roughly 3 to 5 points

The lowest reported homicide rates in the world

Table 1 lists the 20 lowest reported homicide rates in the latest UNODC-sourced figures published by Our World in Data. The "data year" is the year the underlying figure refers to, which is often a year or two behind the date the dataset was published. Lower is safer.

Rank	Country	Homicides per 100,000	Data year
1	Tuvalu	0.000	2019
2	Singapore	0.069	2023
3	Qatar	0.069	2022
4	Oman	0.139	2023
5	Bahrain	0.196	2022
6	Japan	0.229	2023
7	Kuwait	0.250	2020
8	Indonesia	0.304	2022
9	Vanuatu	0.335	2020
10	South Korea	0.477	2023
11	China	0.502	2020
12	Malta	0.563	2023
13	Slovenia	0.566	2023
14	Italy	0.568	2023
15	Switzerland	0.597	2023
16	Maldives	0.615	2019
17	Palestine	0.622	2022
18	Ireland	0.654	2023
19	Croatia	0.667	2023
20	Spain	0.691	2023

Source: UNODC homicide data as published by Our World in Data, retrieved October 2026. The Netherlands ties Spain at 0.691 (2023).

Reading the table sensibly

Several patterns jump out, and several warnings come with them. Tuvalu's zero reflects a very small population, where a single case would swing the rate from nothing to a high number. The same logic applies to Vanuatu, Malta, and the Maldives.

The Gulf states (Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait) appear near the top, and some of the data are several years old. The underlying figures also depend on how each country defines and reports homicide, which is a reason to treat the exact order of countries between 0.06 and 0.3 as soft. A difference between 0.139 and 0.229 per 100,000 is the difference between a handful of cases in a given year, not a decisive gap in safety.

East Asia is strongly represented, with Japan, South Korea, and China, while Europe's entries cluster between 0.55 and 0.7 per 100,000: Slovenia, Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, Croatia, Spain, and the Netherlands. The table makes one thing clear: the safest countries are not all wealthy democracies in northern Europe, and they are not all authoritarian city-states. They are a mixed group.

Where Europe, North America, and Latin America fall

Table 2 widens the lens to countries many readers ask about, using the same dataset. It shows how far the spread runs, from below 1 killing per 100,000 to nearly 50.

Country	Homicides per 100,000	Data year
Portugal	0.720	2022
Hungary	0.723	2023
Norway	0.725	2023
Czechia	0.768	2023
Denmark	0.841	2023
Australia	0.854	2023
Austria	0.876	2023
Germany	0.911	2023
Finland	0.982	2023
United Kingdom	1.119	2021
Sweden	1.147	2023
Iceland	1.290	2023
New Zealand	1.461	2022
Canada	1.980	2023
Rwanda	3.612	2020
United States	5.763	2023
Chile	6.348	2023
El Salvador	7.898	2022
Venezuela	12.647	2022
Brazil	19.275	2023
Mexico	24.859	2023
Colombia	24.913	2023
Honduras	31.442	2023
South Africa	43.720	2022
Jamaica	49.440	2023

Source: UNODC homicide data as published by Our World in Data, retrieved October 2026.

The arithmetic of the gap

Ratios make the spread concrete. The United States rate of 5.763 is about 25 times Japan's 0.229, about six times Germany's 0.911, and about three times Canada's 1.980. Brazil's 19.275 is roughly 84 times Japan's. Jamaica's 49.440 is nearly 40 times Iceland's 1.290.

These are reported rates, and they are comparisons between averages of whole countries. Within any country, a handful of neighborhoods or regions can account for most killings, so a national average can make a country sound uniformly safe or uniformly dangerous when it is neither. For the other end of the spectrum, see countries with the highest murder rates.

Why a small country's rate bounces around

Iceland is the clearest example of why one year of homicide data misleads. Its rate, per the same UNODC series, was 0.00 in 1994, 1995, 1998, 2006, and 2008, then 1.78 in 2000, 1.36 in 2020, and 1.29 in 2023. Meanwhile 2012, 2013, and 2014 each came in at 0.31 and 2019 at 0.28. With a population under 400,000, a rate of 1.29 corresponds to only a handful of killings.

An analogy helps. Flip a fair coin ten times and you will not always get five heads; sometimes you get two, sometimes eight, and none of it means the coin changed. Small countries behave like short coin-flip runs. A single case moves Iceland from "perfect" to "average," which means that a headline such as "Iceland had no murders last year" is true some years and says very little about underlying safety.

Larger countries show less noise. Japan's rate drifted down in an orderly way from 0.31 in 2014 to 0.23 in 2023, passing through 0.29, 0.28, 0.24, 0.26, 0.25, 0.25, 0.23, and 0.23 in the years between. That is a trend, not a coin flip.

The Global Peace Index: a different question

The Global Peace Index (GPI), published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, answers a broader question than "how likely am I to be a victim?" The 2024 edition, the 18th, ranks 163 independent states and territories. The index uses 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators across three domains: ongoing conflict, societal safety and security, and militarization.

Table 3 shows the top ten in the 2024 edition, with each country's homicide rate for comparison.

GPI 2024 rank	Country	Homicides per 100,000	Data year
1	Iceland	1.290	2023
2	Ireland	0.654	2023
3	Austria	0.876	2023
4	New Zealand	1.461	2022
5	Singapore	0.069	2023
6	Switzerland	0.597	2023
7	Portugal	0.720	2022
8	Denmark	0.841	2023
9	Slovenia	0.566	2023
10	Malaysia	0.734	2023

Sources: Vision of Humanity, 10 most peaceful countries (GPI 2024); homicide figures from Our World in Data.

Rankings differ by edition. The index's own site currently shows Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Austria, and Switzerland in its top five, a slightly different order from 2024, so check the latest release before quoting a position.

Why Iceland is first even though its homicide rate is not the lowest

Iceland ranks second in the safety and security domain and first in both the ongoing conflict and militarization domains, according to the index's analysis of the 2024 edition. Put differently, Iceland's lead comes from the near absence of war, weapons, and military spending as much as from low violence. It has held the top position since the index began. Its overall score fell by 1.55% in the latest year because of a small rise in violent demonstrations.

This matters when you compare lists. A country that spends heavily on its military or sits near a conflict can score badly on the GPI while its streets are very safe. Japan and Qatar illustrate the opposite mismatch: both report very low homicide rates, yet neither appears in the 2024 top ten of an index that also counts militarization and other factors.

What residents say: the Gallup Law and Order Index

Official statistics miss crimes that never reach the police. Gallup's Law and Order Index tries to fill the gap by asking people directly. It combines four questions: whether you feel safe walking alone at night where you live, whether you have confidence in your local police, whether money or property was stolen from you or a household member in the past 12 months, and whether you were assaulted or mugged in the past 12 months.

The world's 2024 score was 83 out of 100. Gallup's report covers 144 countries and territories and more than 145,000 adults, with roughly 1,000 or more respondents aged 15 and older per country and a sampling error between about 3.3 and 5.4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level (Gallup Global Safety Report). That error margin is worth remembering: two countries a couple of points apart are statistically hard to separate.

Perception and statistics can diverge. A country with very low homicide may still have high rates of theft, scams, or harassment, and a country with a noisy crime-news culture may feel less safe than its data justify. Using all three lenses, killings, peacefulness, and lived experience, produces a more honest picture than any one of them.

What the safest places have in common (and what they do not)

Researchers have long studied what low-violence societies share, and several themes recur in the literature: strong institutions, trust in police and courts, broad economic opportunity, and limited access to firearms. But the table above shows that these are tendencies, not formulas. The safest group contains Nordic democracies, Alpine and Mediterranean Europe, Gulf monarchies, a Southeast Asian city-state, and East Asian democracies and one-party systems. A single recipe would not produce that mix.

It also shows that national wealth does not guarantee low homicide. The United States is among the wealthiest large economies and reports 5.763 killings per 100,000, higher than every European entry in Table 2. Chile reports 6.348. The spread within the rich world is almost as wide as the spread between rich and poor.

Claims about single causes deserve caution. Inequality, drug markets, gun availability, policing style, organized crime, and demographics all interact, and the research on any one is contested. A useful habit is to ask what a claim would predict. If low inequality alone produced safety, countries with similar inequality should show similar homicide, yet comparable European countries still differ by a factor of two. For a data-driven look at one proposed driver, see countries with the highest income inequality.

Country profiles: three models of safety

Japan: a stable low, with several candidate explanations

Japan's reported rate of 0.229 per 100,000 in 2023 puts it among the lowest for a large country, and its slow decline since 2014 suggests a durable pattern. Commonly cited explanations include tightly regulated private firearm ownership, a network of neighborhood police boxes called koban that keep officers visible and local, and strong social norms against disturbing others. These are plausible and widely discussed, but they are hypotheses rather than proven causes. Isolating the effect of any one from the rest of a society is very difficult, and national statistics cannot tell you which factor does most of the work.

Singapore: deterrence, design, and trade-offs

Singapore reports 0.069 per 100,000, tied with Qatar for the lowest figure in the dataset used here apart from Tuvalu. The city-state is known for strict laws, including capital punishment for certain drug offenses, caning for some crimes, and heavy fines for minor infractions, together with visible policing and extensive camera surveillance. It also has a high-quality public housing system and a relatively compact state able to implement policy quickly.

That combination makes Singapore an example of a high-deterrence, high-surveillance model, and it comes with civil-liberties trade-offs that many democracies would not accept. Its record shows that very low violence is achievable in a dense, diverse city, but it does not prove that harshness is the cause, since other low-homicide countries rely far less on punishment. For how different countries use capital punishment, see countries that still use the death penalty, and for the scale of incarceration, see countries with the highest prison rates.

Iceland: small, cohesive, and noisy in the data

Iceland combines a small population, high social trust, and a society where most people are closely connected, a setting that sociologists call informal social control: bad behavior is noticed and reputations matter. Its yearly homicide figure, as shown above, varies between zero and about 1.8 per 100,000. Its top spot in the GPI rests as much on peace and the absence of military spending as on crime.

Portugal: what drug decriminalization does and does not show

Portugal is often cited in crime discussions because it changed its drug laws in 2001 to treat personal possession as an administrative matter rather than a criminal one. A 2019 integrative review of 21 articles on Portugal and Brazil described the broader direction in both countries as a shift to less punitive drug policies, with a clearer distinction between users and dealers and harsher penalties on dealers, while noting that research on how legal changes affect care is limited (Mendes et al., 2019). The same review found that worries about heroin had decreased in Portugal, even though opioid use rates remained well above Brazil's.

For this ranking, the important point is narrower. Portugal's homicide rate in the dataset is 0.720 per 100,000 (2022), comparable to its Iberian neighbor Spain at 0.691. Nothing in these figures shows that decriminalization lowered homicide, which is a different outcome from drug-related health harms. Drug policy can affect public health and the volume of low-level drug offenses without moving the homicide rate in any measurable way. The claim the evidence supports is a careful one: Portugal is an important drug-policy experiment, and the evidence on broader crime effects is mixed and contested.

Rwanda: a middle-of-the-pack case worth understanding

Rwanda is sometimes listed among the safest countries, so it deserves a precise answer. In the latest UNODC-sourced figures, its rate is 3.612 per 100,000 (2020), which is above Canada's 1.980 and well below Brazil's 19.275. That places it in the middle of Table 2 rather than among the world's safest countries. It is better read as a country where state capacity and public order are often discussed as central to security. Because the most recent Rwandan figure in the dataset is from 2020, treat it as a snapshot rather than a current reading.

Why the rankings keep changing

Three things shift these lists from year to year. First, data lag: the latest homicide figure for Kuwait in the dataset is from 2020, while Singapore's is from 2023. Second, definitions and reporting: countries differ in how they count deaths in custody, conflict, or legal interventions. Third, population size: tiny countries leap up and down with a single case.

For readers comparing a country across sources, a few rules of thumb help:

• Use three or more years of homicide data before judging a small country.
• Check which year the figure refers to before comparing two countries.
• Remember that homicide ignores fraud, cybercrime, and many property crimes; see countries with the most cybercrime activity for that side of the picture.
• Treat indexes that mix violence with militarization as measures of peacefulness, not personal danger.
• Compare perceived safety against recorded crime; the two diverge more than most people expect.

What this means

The question "which country has the lowest crime rate?" has no single answer, but it has several honest ones. On reported homicide, Singapore, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and Japan sit at the bottom among countries with meaningful populations, with a European cluster just behind between about 0.55 and 0.7 per 100,000. On broader peacefulness, Iceland leads, followed by Ireland, Austria, and New Zealand. On how residents feel, Gallup's 2024 global score of 83 out of 100 is the baseline against which any single country should be read.

The deeper lesson is that safety is achieved in different ways in different places, and that numbers at this scale are noisy. Be suspicious of any list that gives a crisp rank 1 to 20 without telling you the data year, the source, and the definition. Compare the countries that interest you across several years, across at least two measures, and with an eye to how much one or two events can change a small nation's score. For a wider view of how nations compare on well-being, see countries with the best quality of life.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which country has the lowest homicide rate? A: In the UNODC-sourced data published by Our World in Data, Tuvalu reports zero (2019 data), but its population is tiny. Among larger reporting countries, Singapore and Qatar are lowest at 0.069 per 100,000, followed by Oman (0.139), Bahrain (0.196), and Japan (0.229).

Q: What is the Global Peace Index? A: It is an annual ranking by the Institute for Economics and Peace. The 2024 edition covers 163 independent states and territories using 23 indicators across ongoing conflict, societal safety and security, and militarization. Iceland has held the top spot since the index began.

Q: Why is Iceland ranked first if other countries have lower homicide rates? A: The Global Peace Index measures more than crime. Iceland ranks first in the ongoing conflict and militarization domains and second in safety and security. Its homicide rate has also swung between zero and about 1.8 per 100,000 because the population is so small.

Q: How does the United States compare with other wealthy countries? A: In the dataset used here, the United States reports 5.763 homicides per 100,000, against 1.980 in Canada, 0.911 in Germany, and 0.229 in Japan. Researchers debate the causes, and a national average hides large differences between regions.

Q: Does drug decriminalization lower crime? A: Portugal decriminalized personal drug possession in 2001, and reviews describe a move toward less punitive policy and a distinction between users and dealers. But Portugal's homicide rate of 0.720 per 100,000 (2022) does not show that the policy lowered homicide, and research on wider crime effects is limited.

Q: How reliable are cross-country crime comparisons? A: Homicide is the most comparable measure, but providers such as UNODC, IHME, and WHO can report different figures for the same country and year. Small countries, old data years, and differences in definitions all affect precision, so small gaps between countries should not be over-interpreted.

Sources

• Our World in Data. Homicides. https://ourworldindata.org/homicides
• Our World in Data. Homicide rate, UNODC data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-unodc
• Institute for Economics and Peace, via Vision of Humanity. 10 most peaceful countries in the world (Global Peace Index 2024). https://www.visionofhumanity.org/10-most-peaceful-countries-in-the-world/
• Gallup. Gallup Global Safety Report. https://www.gallup.com/analytics/356996/gallup-global-safety-report.aspx
• Mendes RO, et al. "Literature review on the implications of decriminalization for the care of drug users in Portugal and Brazil." Ciência & Saúde Coletiva. 2019. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31508758/

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