Understanding FBI crime grades — what the letter actually means

When you look up a US city on a crime data site, you'll usually see a letter grade — A, B, C, D, or F. That grade condenses the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting data into a single character, which makes it useful for quick comparison. Here's how the grade is actually calculated, what it does and doesn't measure, and how to use it.

Where the letter comes from

The letter grade is a national decile ranking of a city's violent crime rate per 100,000 population. Here's how it's built:

Pull the underlying data. The FBI publishes annual violent-crime totals for every reporting agency covering 25,000 or more people. That includes homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, and forcible sex offenses — the four crimes the FBI defines as "violent."
Normalize by population. A city with 200 murders and 500,000 people has a much lower rate than a city with 50 murders and 20,000 people. Rates per 100,000 residents let you compare cities of very different sizes.
Rank nationally. Sort every FBI-reporting agency by violent-crime rate. The city at the median is the 50th percentile; the safest is the 1st percentile.
Assign to a decile. Group by 10ths. Cities in the lowest 10% of violent crime nationally are in decile 1 (safest); cities in the highest 10% are in decile 10.
Map to a letter. Deciles 1-3 = A, 4-5 = B, 6-7 = C, 8 = D, 9-10 = F.

That means "Grade A" doesn't mean crime-free — it means the city is in the safer third of all FBI-reporting US cities. A city with a below-average violent-crime rate still gets a Grade A even if it has some violent crime.

Two grades: national and in-state

The letter you see is usually the national grade. But cities also get a state grade — where they rank within their own state.

Why both? Because states differ enormously in overall crime. A Louisiana city in decile 3 nationally might be in decile 1 within Louisiana — safer than most of the state but still meaningfully worse than the median US city. A Vermont city in decile 5 nationally might be in decile 10 within Vermont — average nationally but the highest-crime city in a very safe state.

For most purposes, the national grade is the right comparison. It tells you how a city compares to the whole country. The state grade adds context if you're moving within a state and want to know where the city ranks locally.

What the FBI does and doesn't count

The FBI's violent-crime definition covers four crimes:

Murder and non-negligent manslaughter. Intentional homicides.
Aggravated assault. Physical attacks with a weapon or intent to cause serious injury.
Robbery. Theft with force or threat of force.
Forcible sex offenses. Rape and closely-related crimes.

It does not count:

Property crimes (theft, burglary, arson) — these have their own separate FBI category
Traffic violations
Drug offenses (tracked separately in NIBRS)
Non-violent domestic disputes
Fraud, cybercrime, or white-collar crime

If you care about property crime — which most homeowners do — the FBI grade doesn't tell you about it directly. Some sites publish a separate property-crime grade; some don't.

The blind spots

Three limits you should be aware of:

Reporting gaps. Not every US law enforcement agency reports to the FBI. Coverage is very good for cities of 25,000+, uneven for smaller municipalities, and often thin for unincorporated areas covered by county sheriffs. If your address is in a small unincorporated area, you'll see the county-level grade, which averages out neighborhood variation.

Lag. FBI UCR data has a 9-12 month publication lag. When you look at a Grade A city in 2026, you're looking at 2025 data. The city could be experiencing a spike right now that won't show up in the grade until next year.

Population-based normalization can distort small cities. A college town of 15,000 with one homicide in a year has a rate of 6.7 per 100,000 — which puts it above the national median. That's a real number and a real risk, but it's driven by one incident, not a systemic pattern.

How to read the grade

Practical guidance:

Grade A + Decile 1-3. Safer than about two-thirds of US cities. Reasonable to feel comfortable about the city-level crime rate.
Grade B + Decile 4-5. Right around the national median. Below-average crime.
Grade C + Decile 6-7. Above the national median. Not disastrous but worth digging into block-level data before making decisions.
Grade D + Decile 8. Significantly above average. Look at whether the elevated rate is concentrated in specific neighborhoods (usually yes) or citywide (rarer).
Grade F + Decile 9-10. Among the highest violent-crime rates in the country. Almost always concentrated in specific neighborhoods; the average is pulled up by hot spots.

For any city C or worse nationally, don't stop at the letter. Pull block-level or ZIP-level incident data from the city's open data portal or from services like SpotCrime. Neighborhood variation within a single city is often larger than variation between cities.

How HomeStoop shows the grade

Every HomeStoop property page for a city with 25,000+ residents shows the FBI Crime Grade card. It displays:

Letter grade (A through F)
National decile (1-10)
In-state decile (1-10)
Violent crime rate per 100,000
FBI reporting year

The card cites the FBI Crime Data Explorer and links to the full SpotCrime crime-grade tables for the state.

For cities under 25,000 or unincorporated areas, the FBI doesn't publish agency-level data separately, so the grade card doesn't render. In those cases, HomeStoop's CrimeScore card (at the ZIP-code level) is the next-best signal.

What to check next

If you're evaluating a specific city:

Cross-reference the FBI Crime Grade with the CrimeScore percentile for the ZIP (both live on the same HomeStoop property page)
If the city has an open data portal, look at incidents in the last 90 days within a quarter-mile of your target address
Read a few recent articles about the city's crime trends — grade data is annual, but news is real-time

The letter grade is a fast heuristic. Use it for comparison. Don't use it as the final answer for any single address.