Measured by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) homicide dataset, the countries with the lowest crime rates are Qatar (0.07 intentional homicides per 100,000 people in 2022), Oman (0.14 in 2023) and Singapore (0.17 in 2024), followed by Bahrain, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates and Italy. That list holds a few surprises: three Gulf states sit above Japan, Indonesia with more than 280 million people makes the top ten, and Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Canada, which often top "safest country" lists, all miss it.
Why the UNODC homicide rate is the yardstick here
"Crime rate" sounds simple, but countries record theft, assault and fraud in very different ways. Sweden, for instance, counts some violent offences once for every instance, so a single case can appear in the statistics several times, while other countries record only the most serious charge. Reporting habits differ too: a burglary that is always reported in one country may go unreported in another where people expect nothing to come of it.
Intentional homicide is the exception. A killing is hard to hide, it is recorded by both police and public-health systems, and the UNODC itself uses the homicide rate as its proxy for overall violence because it is one of the most accurately reported and internationally comparable crime figures. The definition excludes deaths in war between states, suicides, killings in legitimate self-defence and deaths caused by negligence. For comparison, the UNODC put the global average at 5.61 per 100,000 in 2022.
The ranking below uses each country's latest UNODC figure, with three filters so that like is compared with like: sovereign states only, populations above one million, and data no older than 2022. That rules out Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican (whose latest recorded figures are zero, but whose populations are tiny), Macau (0.14) and Hong Kong (0.38), which are special administrative regions of China, and mainland China itself, whose latest vetted figure of 0.50 dates from 2020. Palestine's 2024 entry of 0.27 is also left out, because the UNODC definition does not count conflict deaths, which makes that figure impossible to compare with countries at peace.
| Rank | Country | Homicides per 100,000 (year) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Qatar | 0.07 (2022) |
| 2 | Oman | 0.14 (2023) |
| 3 | Singapore | 0.17 (2024) |
| 4 | Bahrain | 0.20 (2022) |
| 5 | Japan | 0.23 (2024) |
| 6 | Indonesia | 0.42 (2024) |
| 7 | South Korea | 0.49 (2024) |
| 8 | Switzerland | 0.50 (2024) |
| 9 | United Arab Emirates | 0.52 (2023) |
| 10 | Italy | 0.57 (2024) |
Singapore and Japan, the leaders nobody is surprised by
Ask people to name the safest countries and Singapore and Japan usually come first, and the numbers back them up. Singapore recorded 0.17 homicides per 100,000 people in 2024 and Japan 0.23, between a thirtieth and a twenty-fifth of the global average. Both are wealthy and densely populated, and gun crime is rare: as of 2012, Japan averaged about two gun homicides a year.
Japan's figure has also fallen a long way. In 1989 the country recorded 1.1 murders per 100,000 people, already low by world standards. Total recorded crime stood at 2,853,739 offences in 2002 and dropped to 915,042 by 2017, less than a third of the peak, and by 2013 murders and attempted murders had fallen to a post-war low. The most visible feature of Japanese policing is the kōban, the small neighbourhood police station staffed by uniformed officers at around 6,000 locations across Japan. Officers there give directions, handle lost property and take crime reports, which keeps police visibly present on ordinary streets.
Singapore borrowed the idea directly. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew suggested studying the Japanese system, and in 1982 three officers from Japan's National Police Agency arrived to help set up neighbourhood police posts. The first opened in Toa Payoh in 1983, there were 91 by 1989, and in 1986 the Delta constituency reported a 53.5 per cent drop in crime after its post opened. Singapore also imposes severe penalties, including the death penalty for drug trafficking, and total physical crime fell from 25,633 cases in 2018 to an average of about 19,750 a year between 2020 and 2023. You can read more about the city-state in these facts about Singapore.
Qatar, Oman and Bahrain: the Gulf surprise
The biggest surprise in the table is that the top spot does not belong to an East Asian or European country at all. Qatar's 2022 rate of 0.07 per 100,000 is the lowest of any sovereign state with more than a million people, Oman's 0.14 in 2023 is second, Bahrain's 0.20 in 2022 is fourth, and the United Arab Emirates (0.52 in 2023) is ninth. Kuwait (0.78) and Saudi Arabia (0.80) are not far behind.
Part of the explanation is who lives there. Qatar's 2020 census counted 2,846,118 people, but only about 340,000 were Qatari citizens; most residents are migrant workers, most of them men, and women make up only about a quarter of the population. A population dominated by working-age migrants whose residence depends on employment is very different from the mix of ages and incomes in most countries, and that difference shapes the figures. These are reported homicide figures, not a measure of every form of harm, but on the one crime that is hardest to conceal the Gulf states rank among the world's lowest.
Indonesia, South Korea and Italy: big populations, small rates
Small, rich states are expected on a list like this, so the three large countries that make it are more striking. Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country, with more than 280 million people, spread across thousands of islands and with a GDP per head far below Switzerland's. Yet its 2024 homicide rate of 0.42 per 100,000 is lower than that of every country in the European Union. About 56 per cent of Indonesians live on Java, the most populous island in the world, so the figure is not the product of an empty countryside; it covers megacities such as Jakarta and Surabaya as well as rural provinces from Sumatra to Papua.
South Korea, with 0.49 in 2024, sits just above Switzerland. Italy, in tenth place at 0.57, is the one that surprises visitors most, because the country is so closely linked with organised crime groups such as the Sicilian Mafia and the 'Ndrangheta. Its 2024 rate is nonetheless lower than those of Germany (0.92), the United Kingdom's England and Wales (0.93 in 2023), Austria (0.99) and France (1.33). Spain (0.73), Portugal (0.71) and Slovenia (0.71) are also close to the top ten.
Iceland, Norway and Sweden: the Nordic near-misses
The most famous name missing from the top ten is Iceland. The Institute for Economics and Peace placed Iceland first again in its 2026 Global Peace Index, ahead of New Zealand, Switzerland, Slovenia, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Singapore, Finland and Japan. But the Peace Index blends 23 indicators, including military spending, relations with neighbours and political stability, whereas the UNODC table measures killings alone, and Iceland's 2024 homicide rate was 2.03 per 100,000.
That number says more about small populations than about Iceland. With fewer than 400,000 people, a handful of cases in a single year is enough to move the rate sharply, and the GPI's own vice-president once conceded that results for very small countries such as Iceland could be misleading beside those of large ones. In most recent years the same UNODC series has shown Iceland well below 1 per 100,000, which is why averaging several years is a better guide for very small countries than any single year.
Norway (0.70), Denmark (0.84), Sweden (0.87) and Finland (0.93) all have 2024 rates well below 1 but above the top ten. Sweden is the most discussed case. Gang conflicts brought a rise in shootings and bombings during the 2010s, with 162 explosions recorded in 2018 alone, yet reported homicides fell to 92 in 2024, the lowest level in a decade and 29 fewer than in 2023.
The United States, Canada and New Zealand: where the gaps open up
Among wealthy countries, the clearest outlier is the United States, with 5.76 homicides per 100,000 in 2023, roughly the global average and about 25 times Japan's rate. Canada recorded 1.98 in 2024, about a third of the American figure but still roughly double that of Germany (0.92) or Austria (0.99). New Zealand, second in the Global Peace Index, had a UNODC rate of 1.46 in 2022, and Australia 0.94 in 2024.
At the other end of the scale, rates in parts of Latin America are many times higher: Mexico recorded 25.6 per 100,000 in 2024 and Brazil 18.7, which puts the world's lowest and highest national rates hundreds of times apart. Russia (7.8) and Chile (6.1) also sit above the global average.
Two cautions apply to every figure on this page. First, homicide captures lethal violence, not burglary, fraud or online crime, and a country can do well on one and badly on another. Second, the UNODC itself notes that the quality of national data varies and that some rates may be under-reported, which is why the figures here carry their year and are not adjusted beyond what the dataset shows. For travellers, the practical point is that the ten countries in the table, plus most of Europe and East Asia, all record fewer than one homicide per 100,000 people a year. If Japan is on your list, our guide to the best time to visit Japan covers the seasons, and for the Gulf leader there is a guide to the best time to visit Qatar.