Safest Cities in New Hampshire (2024 FBI Data)

These are the New Hampshire cities with the lowest violent crime rates reported to the FBI, drawn from the same database that powers SafeNest. Every figure below is computed from 2024 FBI data by a script committed alongside this page.

26 New Hampshire cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Merrimack reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 0.0 per 100,000 residents.

New Hampshire cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 26 cities qualified; the 25 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	Merrimack	29,650	0.0	344.0	A
2	Hanover	12,421	0.0	450.8	A
3	Bedford	23,893	8.4	862.2	A
4	Amherst	11,922	8.4	931.1	A
5	Pelham	14,606	34.2	506.6	A
6	Milford	16,517	36.3	448.0	A
7	Exeter	16,203	37.0	543.1	A
8	Goffstown	18,517	37.8	459.0	A
9	Londonderry	26,974	40.8	444.9	A
10	Dover	33,696	47.5	786.4	A
11	Hooksett	15,454	71.2	569.4	A
12	Hudson	25,672	74.0	1,184.2	A
13	Rochester	33,831	76.9	1,143.9	A
14	Lebanon	15,709	95.5	1,604.2	A
15	Hampton	16,477	103.2	740.4	A
16	Salem	31,962	106.4	1,968.0	B
17	Derry	34,207	108.2	719.2	A
18	Laconia	17,217	145.2	2,532.4	B
19	Nashua	90,938	162.7	1,261.3	B
20	Keene	22,874	179.2	2,172.8	B
21	Somersworth	12,270	179.3	2,526.5	B
22	Concord	44,827	180.7	1,229.2	B
23	Portsmouth	22,969	191.6	1,284.3	B
24	Claremont	13,165	197.5	1,868.6	B
25	Conway	10,441	201.1	2,145.4	B

What the New Hampshire data shows

The typical New Hampshire city against the national baseline

The median ranked New Hampshire city reports 86.2 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 77% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,037.5 per 100,000. 100.0% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 26 cities: 16 grade A, 9 B, 1 C, 0 D and 0 F. That puts 61.5% of New Hampshire's ranked cities at an A, against 38.5% of comparable cities nationally — above the national rate. The grade is national-relative, not a curve within the state: a city at exactly the US average violent and property crime rate scores 50 out of 100 and receives a C, wherever it is.

What the ranking leaves out

One group of New Hampshire places is absent from the ranking, because each would otherwise take a top place without being a safe city (why):

3 cities reporting implausibly little crime — an agency can file a full year and report almost nothing in it. That is a reporting gap, not safety, and it would otherwise take first place.

Which way New Hampshire moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 26 ranked New Hampshire cities with a comparable prior year, 12 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 12 reported a higher one, with 2 roughly level. That is what the agencies filed for 2024 against their own previous year — it is a record of what changed, not a projection of what happens next. 21 of 26 ranked New Hampshire cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in New Hampshire

0 of New Hampshire's 26 ranked cities would print a different letter grade if their violent crime count changed by a single incident. That is not a flaw peculiar to New Hampshire: every threshold system has a boundary and some cities sit on it. It is the concrete reason to treat the gap between adjacent grades — and adjacent positions in the table above — as noise rather than a finding.

The largest cities in New Hampshire

The ranking above is dominated by suburbs, because that is what a violent-crime rate does: it sorts small and affluent places to the top. Here are the biggest New Hampshire cities in the same data, ordered by population rather than by crime, so you can see where they actually land.

The largest New Hampshire cities in the ranking, by population — not by crime. Big cities carry higher reported rates almost everywhere, which is why a safest-cities list and a biggest-cities list look nothing alike.
City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
Manchester	115,464	336.9	1,648.1	C
Nashua	90,938	162.7	1,261.3	B
Concord	44,827	180.7	1,229.2	B
Derry	34,207	108.2	719.2	A
Rochester	33,831	76.9	1,143.9	A
Dover	33,696	47.5	786.4	A
Salem	31,962	106.4	1,968.0	B
Merrimack	29,650	0.0	344.0	A

Why no small towns are on this list. New Hampshire has 161 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 91.3% of them are graded A, and 31.1% reported no violent crime at all. In a town of a few thousand people that is the expected outcome in a given year rather than evidence of anything, and a single incident would move the rate sharply. Ranking them against cities would put towns at the top of this page on the strength of a number that is mostly noise, so they are excluded from the ranking and reported here instead.

Method, in short

Rankings come from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data (2024), via the Kaplan agency panel (DOI 10.3886/E100707V22). A city's score is 100 / (1 + severity), weighing its violent rate against a national baseline of 381 per 100,000 (70%) and its property rate against 1,954 per 100,000 (30%) — the same code that grades cities in the SafeNest app. Every number here is computed by generate_state_rankings.py; the ranking is a sort, not an edit.

A grade is not a verdict. It is a city-wide average of reported crime — an informational opinion, not a statement of fact, and not a description of any street, block or address. It may not be used for tenant screening, hiring or lending (Terms). Full sources and data vintages: methodology.

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