The Crime Statistics Agency released the Victorian recorded crime data for the year ending 31 December 2025 on 19 March 2026, and our newsroom has been working through the postcode and local government area tables ever since. The state-level top line — total recorded offences up year on year — is the number that gets the headlines, but the LGA-by-LGA picture is more useful if you are trying to make sense of what is actually happening in the place you live. The increases are not evenly distributed, the largest movements are in the high-growth corridors, and the falls are real where they appear.
How the CSA data actually works
A note on what the data is and isn’t. The Crime Statistics Agency is an independent statutory body. It receives raw incident data from Victoria Police and processes it into the published tables. The numbers are recorded offences — incidents that came to police attention and were classified — not the underlying volume of crime, which is always larger because not everything gets reported.
The CSA publishes data four times a year, in March, June, September and December. The Crime by Location tool on its website lets you pick an LGA or a postcode and look at the offence rate, the year-on-year change and the five most common offence categories. For most people that’s the most useful entry point.
The state-level picture
The 2025 calendar year closed with the highest total offence volume on record. The drivers are familiar:
- Theft from a motor vehicle and theft from a retail store dominate the property-crime numbers.
- Aggravated burglary, while a smaller volume category, has continued to rise off a low base.
- Assault has lifted in the under-25 cohort and in licensed-venue precincts.
- Family violence-related offences remain a structurally large category and have continued to climb in line with the long-term reporting-rate increase.
- Cybercrime and identity offences are recorded inconsistently because so much of the activity is reported to ScamWatch or AFP rather than to Victoria Police, but the local volumes are still rising.
Where rates rose hardest
Our team’s read of the published tables points to the same broad pattern road safety researchers describe: the biggest year-on-year movements are in the high-population-growth municipalities in Melbourne’s outer west and outer north. Wyndham, Melton, Hume and Whittlesea continue to record significant rises in absolute offence numbers, although the per-capita rate growth is more moderate when you account for population.
The City of Melbourne LGA — the CBD and the immediately surrounding inner ring — recorded another year of high volumes driven by retail theft and motor vehicle theft. Some of that volume is structural (the LGA has a large daytime working population, a large entertainment precinct and a high concentration of retail) and some is the lingering effect of the pandemic-era shift in inner-city occupancy patterns.
Casey, in Melbourne’s south-east, recorded a notable rise in aggravated burglary and motor vehicle theft. Greater Geelong continued its long upward drift in property crime alongside its population growth. Mildura recorded another year of elevated offence rates per head, driven primarily by family violence and assault.
Where rates fell
The good news is that several LGAs recorded year-on-year decreases. The list of declines is more diverse than the list of rises and tends to include:
- Several inner-bayside LGAs that had recorded sharp lockdown-era movements and have since reverted toward the long-run baseline.
- A handful of regional LGAs where targeted operations on a small repeat-offender cohort produced visible drops in residential burglary and motor vehicle theft.
- Some inner-northern Melbourne LGAs where the assault category has eased back as licensed-venue activity has settled into post-pandemic patterns.
The CSA’s own analysis is more cautious about declaring trend changes off a single year. Reading two and three-year rolling averages tends to be more reliable than the year-on-year jump.
Reading the postcode tables
If you want to understand a specific suburb, the postcode-level tables are usually more informative than the LGA tables, because LGAs frequently combine areas with very different profiles. The City of Melbourne LGA, for instance, includes the CBD, Docklands, Carlton, Kensington and parts of the Royal Park area — and the offence patterns in each are different.
A few practical pointers our newsroom uses:
- Look at the offence rate per 100,000 residents, not just the raw number, when comparing suburbs of different sizes.
- Check what the top five offence categories are. A high-rate suburb dominated by retail theft is a very different lived experience to one dominated by aggravated burglary.
- Look at the three-year trend, not just the year-on-year jump. A single year can move 20 per cent up or down on small numbers without telling you anything about the direction.
- Pay attention to family-violence-related offences when looking at residential suburbs. The CSA flags those incidents in its “FV-flagged” series.
The youth offender story sits underneath the postcode story
The postcode-level rises in residential burglary, aggravated burglary and motor vehicle theft are concentrated in the same outer-suburban corridors as the youth-offender data. The CSA reported around 25,275 child-offender incidents for the year — the highest since electronic recording began in 1993. A small repeat cohort within that group accounts for a disproportionate share of the serious matters.
That cohort is mobile. Vehicles taken in one suburb are often used in offences in another, and a single offending group can lift the recorded numbers across multiple postcodes in a few weeks. When our team interprets a sudden spike in a particular suburb’s residential burglary number, the question we ask first is whether it reflects a localised pattern or an active operation tied to a small cluster of offenders.
What the data does and doesn’t tell you about safety
Crime data is one input into how safe a place is. It is not the only one. Lighting, design, transport access, retail mix, demographic stability and community cohesion all matter. A suburb with a high theft-from-motor-vehicle rate but a low assault rate is a very different walking experience than the inverse.
Our newsroom is also wary of the property-market secondary use of crime statistics. There is a long history of postcode crime numbers being deployed in ways that disadvantage already-disadvantaged areas. The CSA explicitly cautions against using its tables for that purpose.
Where to find the data yourself
The Crime Statistics Agency’s Crime by Location tool is the easiest way in: search your LGA or postcode and read the summary. The full data tables are published on the CSA website on each release date. For LGA-level summaries with a longer commentary, Community Crime Prevention Victoria publishes its own digest of the quarterly figures.
If you’ve been a victim of crime
The Victims of Crime Helpline is on 1800 819 817 (24/7). Crime Stoppers takes anonymous information on 1800 333 000. For immediate threats, dial 000. If you’ve experienced a residential break-in and want practical advice on next steps, Neighbourhood Watch Victoria publishes free guidance and runs local-area programs that can help connect you with support.
Jack Renton covers police rounds and major incidents for Victoria Crime News.
