Arson in the United States
Law enforcement agencies reported 32,752 arson offenses in 2025, a rate of 9.8 per 100,000 residents of the population those agencies covered.
American Factbook Research
2025
- 32,752
- Offenses reported
- 9.8
- Rate per 100,000
- 10,408
- Offenses cleared
- 31.8%
- Share cleared
- 332,920,308
- Population covered
- 96.4%
- Reporting coverage
The rate denominator is the population the reporting agencies served, not the population of the United States, so the rate here is the rate the FBI computes. A clearance is an offense an agency closed by arrest or by exceptional means. The FBI clears an offense by arrest once a person has been arrested, charged, and turned over to a court for prosecution, which is where the record ends; on our reading that makes the share cleared a measure of cases closed, not of cases that ended in a conviction. The FBI also notes that a clearance recorded in one year may close an offense reported in an earlier one.
1985 to 2025
The figures behind this chart
| Year | Arson rate |
|---|---|
| 1985 | 45.3 |
| 1986 | 48.3 |
| 1987 | 44.5 |
| 1988 | 45.9 |
| 1989 | 43.4 |
| 1990 | 44.2 |
| 1991 | 44.6 |
| 1992 | 43.7 |
| 1993 | 40.3 |
| 1994 | 43.0 |
| 1995 | 41.4 |
| 1996 | 39.7 |
| 1997 | 36.9 |
| 1998 | 33.6 |
| 1999 | 32.2 |
| 2000 | 27.5 |
| 2001 | 30.6 |
| 2002 | 29.0 |
| 2003 | 27.3 |
| 2004 | 25.2 |
| 2005 | 24.8 |
| 2006 | 25.5 |
| 2007 | 23.4 |
| 2008 | 22.4 |
| 2009 | 20.1 |
| 2010 | 18.5 |
| 2011 | 17.9 |
| 2012 | 18.0 |
| 2013 | 15.3 |
| 2014 | 14.9 |
| 2015 | 14.0 |
| 2016 | 14.5 |
| 2017 | 13.5 |
| 2018 | 12.2 |
| 2019 | 11.4 |
| 2020 | 14.4 |
| 2021 | 11.7 |
| 2022 | 12.6 |
| 2023 | 11.7 |
| 2024 | 11.0 |
| 2025 | 9.8 |
The FBI has also published 9 months of 2026. That year is not plotted and is not compared with a full year here, because a part-year total is smaller for the reason that it is shorter.
By state · 2025
Every jurisdiction the FBI published a arson rate for in 2025, ranked from the highest rate. The coverage column is the share of each state’s population living in a reporting agency’s jurisdiction; below 90%, both the count and the rate describe part of the state.
1 more column on a wider screen
| Rank | State | Rate per 100,000 | Offenses | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oregon | 27.1 | 1,134 | 98.0% |
| 2 | Alaska | 21.1 | 155 | 99.7% |
| 3 | Hawaii | 20.9 | 299 | 100.0% |
| 4 | Colorado | 20.5 | 1,219 | 99.1% |
| 5 | California | 18.7 | 7,350 | 100.0% |
| 6 | Kansas | 14.8 | 418 | 94.8% |
| 7 | New Mexico | 14.0 | 280 | 93.9% |
| 8 | Oklahoma | 14.0 | 577 | 99.9% |
| 9 | Nevada | 13.3 | 436 | 99.6% |
| 10 | Missouri | 12.6 | 780 | 98.7% |
| 11 | Alabama | 12.2 | 628 | 99.3% |
| 12 | Montana | 12.0 | 137 | 100.0% |
| 13 | Washington | 11.8 | 923 | 97.5% |
| 14 | North Carolina | 11.6 | 1,259 | 96.6% |
| 15 | Maine | 11.5 | 160 | 98.6% |
| 16 | Michigan | 11.2 | 1,097 | 96.9% |
| 17 | Arkansas | 11.0 | 337 | 98.4% |
| 18 | Nebraska | 10.9 | 219 | 99.4% |
| 19 | Mississippi | 10.5 | 252 | 81.5% |
| 20 | Tennessee | 10.3 | 750 | 99.6% |
| 21 | Pennsylvania | 9.9 | 1,277 | 99.2% |
| 22 | Illinois | 9.6 | 1,158 | 94.7% |
| 23 | South Carolina | 9.4 | 503 | 96.4% |
| 24 | Minnesota | 8.7 | 505 | 99.8% |
| 25 | Arizona | 8.6 | 642 | 97.8% |
| 26 | Indiana | 8.5 | 521 | 87.6% |
| 27 | Delaware | 8.5 | 90 | 100.0% |
| 28 | West Virginia | 8.4 | 129 | 87.3% |
| 29 | Utah | 8.3 | 292 | 98.9% |
| 30 | Texas | 8.0 | 2,513 | 99.1% |
| 31 | Rhode Island | 7.8 | 86 | 98.8% |
| 32 | Ohio | 7.3 | 807 | 93.2% |
| 33 | Kentucky | 7.3 | 335 | 100.0% |
| 34 | North Dakota | 7.2 | 57 | 98.8% |
| 35 | South Dakota | 7.2 | 60 | 89.7% |
| 36 | Vermont | 6.8 | 44 | 99.8% |
| 37 | Iowa | 6.6 | 209 | 97.1% |
| 38 | New York | 6.4 | 1,269 | 98.8% |
| 39 | Maryland | 6.1 | 382 | 100.0% |
| 40 | New Hampshire | 6.1 | 86 | 99.9% |
| 41 | Wyoming | 6.1 | 33 | 92.5% |
| 42 | Georgia | 6.0 | 617 | 90.5% |
| 43 | Idaho | 5.7 | 114 | 98.6% |
| 44 | Virginia | 5.7 | 502 | 100.0% |
| 45 | Louisiana | 5.6 | 201 | 78.0% |
| 46 | Wisconsin | 5.3 | 309 | 97.1% |
| 47 | Connecticut | 4.7 | 172 | 100.0% |
| 48 | Massachusetts | 4.5 | 320 | 99.8% |
| 49 | New Jersey | 3.2 | 295 | 97.6% |
| 50 | Florida | 3.1 | 617 | 84.4% |
| 51 | District of Columbia | 0.4 | 3 | 100.0% |
How to read this
- Reporting to the FBI is voluntary. Coverage varies by agency and by year, so a change in a total can be a change in which agencies reported rather than a change in offenses.
- Rates on this page divide by the population the reporting agencies served, which is the FBI’s own population figure for the jurisdiction multiplied by the share of it those agencies covered. Dividing by the whole population instead would understate the rate by exactly the share that did not report.
- An annual rate is the annual count over that denominator. It is never the average of the FBI’s monthly rates, because averaging rates across months of differing coverage produces a number that belongs to no population.
Related
Sources
- FBI Crime Data Explorer API — Federal Bureau of Investigation, Criminal Justice Information Services Division · U.S. Government work, public domain (17 U.S.C. 105) · retrieved September 19, 2026
Data retrieved