Safest Cities in Texas (2024 FBI Data)

These are the Texas 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.

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

Texas cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 245 cities qualified; the 25 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	Fair Oaks Ranch	11,955	0.0	619.0	A
2	Memorial Villages	11,170	9.0	492.4	A
3	Trophy Club	13,644	14.7	395.8	A
4	Helotes	10,247	29.3	1,073.5	A
5	Southlake	31,095	32.2	1,000.2	A
6	Corinth	24,056	33.3	706.7	A
7	Melissa	27,831	35.9	341.3	A
8	Colleyville	25,630	39.0	538.4	A
9	Murphy	20,867	47.9	474.4	A
10	Lumberton	14,304	48.9	489.4	A
11	Canyon	16,609	54.2	674.3	A
12	West University Place	14,720	54.3	991.8	A
13	Prosper	46,065	54.3	998.6	A
14	Hutto	43,212	57.9	1,034.4	A
15	Flower Mound	80,455	58.4	582.9	A
16	Wylie	62,210	65.9	860.0	A
17	University Park	25,241	67.4	1,434.2	A
18	Leander	87,740	69.5	988.1	A
19	Whitehouse	10,034	69.8	378.7	A
20	Sachse	34,574	72.3	737.5	A
21	Highland Village	16,150	74.3	1,071.2	A
22	Keller	46,523	77.4	655.6	A
23	Sugar Land	107,757	78.0	1,383.7	A
24	Lakeway	19,170	78.2	1,220.7	A
25	Santa Fe	13,055	84.3	735.4	A

What the Texas data shows

The typical Texas city against the national baseline

The median ranked Texas city reports 228.6 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 40% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,525.3 per 100,000. 75.1% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 245 cities: 72 grade A, 79 B, 72 C, 18 D and 4 F. That puts 29.4% of Texas's ranked cities at an A, against 38.5% of comparable cities nationally — below 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

Two groups of Texas places are absent from the ranking, because each would otherwise take a top place without being a safe city (why):

91 county and sheriff agencies — county-wide averages are diluted by everything outside the urban core, so they outrank real cities without being cities.
1 city 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 Texas moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 245 ranked Texas cities with a comparable prior year, 128 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 77 reported a higher one, with 40 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. 101 of 245 ranked Texas cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in Texas

12 of Texas's 245 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 Texas: 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 Texas

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 Texas cities in the same data, ordered by population rather than by crime, so you can see where they actually land.

The largest Texas 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
Houston	2,319,160	1,148.3	4,293.5	F
San Antonio	1,514,458	595.3	4,623.6	D
Dallas	1,321,500	660.5	3,351.9	D
Fort Worth	997,476	458.7	2,699.8	C
Austin	984,613	467.5	3,241.9	C
El Paso	678,860	279.0	1,494.0	B
Arlington	399,840	483.7	2,412.7	C
Corpus Christi	316,108	864.9	3,011.3	D

Why no small towns are on this list. Texas has 444 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 54.3% of them are graded A, and 15.1% 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.

SafeNest city reports in Texas

These are full SafeNest reports for Texas cities — crime, flood history, schools and offender data. They are the state's larger cities, which is why most of them do not appear in the ranking above: a safest-cities list and a biggest-cities list are not the same list.

Is El Paso safe? — grade B, 278.0 violent per 100,000

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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