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Record · Offense

Motor vehicle theft in the United States

Law enforcement agencies reported 665,377 motor vehicle theft offenses, a rate of 199.8 per 100,000 residents of the population they covered, in 2025, according to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer.

2025

665,377
Offenses reported
199.8
Rate per 100,000
69,827
Offenses cleared
10.5%
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 motor vehicle theft rate is 71.4% below its 1991 peak

Motor vehicle theft offenses per 100,000 residents, using the FBI’s own population denominator for the agencies that reported. Only years reported in full are drawn; a gap is a year with no published rate, not a year of none.

The dashed line at 2021 is when the FBI retired summary reporting and the share of the population living in a reporting agency’s jurisdiction fell to 77.0%. A step in the line there can be a change in who reported rather than in how much crime happened.

The FBI has also published 9 months of 2026. That year is not drawn and is not compared with a full year here, because a part-year total is smaller for the reason that it is shorter.

Source: The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer

About this chart

The figures

The motor vehicle theft rate is 71.4% below its 1991 peak. Motor vehicle theft offenses per 100,000 residents, using the FBI’s own population denominator for the agencies that reported. Only years reported in full are drawn; a gap is a year with no published rate, not a year of none.
YearMotor vehicle theft rateOffenses reported
1985472.51,081,389
1986521.61,199,120
1987543.91,256,535
1988596.21,301,405
1989649.41,526,885
1990676.81,593,075
1991699.01,619,011
1992661.41,571,769
1993627.81,496,534
1994614.71,474,422
1995596.31,391,208
1996554.11,278,446
1997542.31,279,586
1998492.51,172,803
1999445.71,084,637
2000437.21,104,060
2001456.11,176,379
2002452.81,203,467
2003455.01,214,298
2004437.21,200,270
2005434.01,198,513
2006410.11,175,354
2007372.21,081,065
2008321.3944,535
2009263.8783,763
2010241.2729,035
2011232.1708,975
2012232.4715,900
2013223.9690,039
2014217.4674,711
2015222.7698,387
2016239.6756,353
2017239.0758,295
2018230.6742,504
2019220.6703,008
2020246.8786,735
2021239.8620,297
2022290.2926,342
2023325.91,058,186
2024257.6853,282
2025199.8665,377

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By state · 2025

Every jurisdiction the FBI published a motor vehicle theft 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.

3 more columns on a wider screen

Jurisdictions ranked by reported motor vehicle theft rate, 2025
RankStateRate per 100,000
1District of Columbia698.3
2Nevada400.9
3New Mexico334.3
4Maryland319.6
5California317.4
6Colorado314.5
7Missouri297.9
8Hawaii291.7
9Alaska280.9
10Washington258.8
11Texas250.9
12Illinois247.6
13Tennessee229.0
14Kansas224.6
15Oregon217.4
16North Carolina207.1
17Oklahoma196.1
18Kentucky192.8
19Ohio191.2
20Delaware190.7
21Pennsylvania190.3
22Michigan187.5
23Nebraska186.5
24Arizona183.3
25Indiana177.0
26Connecticut172.1
27Louisiana167.6
28Minnesota165.9
29South Carolina165.2
30Alabama162.9
31Georgia160.4
32North Dakota154.1
33New Jersey148.4
34South Dakota145.2
35Mississippi144.3
36Arkansas142.0
37Montana137.3
38Wisconsin134.8
39New York128.7
40Iowa119.7
41Virginia114.4
42Rhode Island105.5
43Utah97.0
44Massachusetts88.9
45Wyoming82.5
46West Virginia71.8
47Florida66.4
48Maine60.4
49Idaho53.8
50New Hampshire53.6
51Vermont49.4

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

Compiled automatically from FBI Crime Data Explorer API by a checked SQL query · Editor: Kian O'Connor · How this site is built

Data retrieved