What Burglary Data Says About Entry Points and Timing

Search for burglary statistics and you will find the same handful of numbers repeated across hundreds of pages, almost always without a source, and usually traceable to a security company's own survey rather than to any government data collection. The federal numbers are public, they are more careful, and on at least one widely repeated point they say something close to the opposite of the popular claim.

Two Federal Sources, Two Different Questions

The United States measures burglary twice, and the two measurements are not interchangeable.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics runs the National Crime Victimization Survey, which asks a nationally representative sample of households what happened to them, including incidents never reported to police. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program counts offenses that law enforcement agencies recorded. The survey captures unreported crime and is limited to households; the police data covers commercial as well as residential structures but only sees what was reported. Comparing a number from one against a number from the other is the most common error in this subject.

What the Victimization Data Shows

BJS reported in Household Burglary, 1994-2011 that U.S. households experienced about 3,394,700 burglary victimizations in 2011, down from 6,353,700 in 1994. The rate fell 56% over that period, from 63.4 to 27.6 victimizations per 1,000 households. The long decline is the single most important fact in this subject and it is almost never mentioned in security marketing.

The entry method breakdown is where the popular story falls apart. In 2011, of those roughly 3.39 million household burglary victimizations, the survey estimated about 1,618,800 completed unlawful entries, meaning entry without force by someone with no legal right to be there; about 1,226,700 completed forcible entries; and about 549,200 attempted forcible entries. BJS states plainly that across the whole 1994 to 2011 period, the largest proportion of household burglaries involved completed unlawful entry, without force.

That is worth restating. In the federal household survey, the most common single category is not a broken door. It is an unlocked one.

What the Police Data Shows, and Why It Differs

The FBI's summary of reported crimes for 2024 reports that estimated property crime fell 8.1% from 2023 to 2024, with burglary specifically down an estimated 8.6%. Among the 15,060 agencies reporting method of entry, forcible entry was the most common category in both 2023 and 2024, with 397,867 forcible entry offenses reported in 2024 against 275,270 unlawful entries and 48,696 attempted forcible entries.

So the two sources disagree about which entry method dominates. Both are correct within their own scope. The police data includes commercial burglaries, where forcing an entry after hours is the norm, and it only counts what was reported, and a forced entry is far more likely to be reported than one that left no damage. The victimization survey sees the unreported no-force entries that never reach a police blotter. BJS found that 58% of completed household burglaries were reported to police in 2011, which means a large share of household incidents are simply absent from the FBI's count.

Occupancy, and a Note on Timing

BJS examined occupancy in Victimization During Household Burglary, which found that of an average 3,713,000 household burglaries per year from 2003 through 2007, a household member was present in 27.6%, and 7.2% of all household burglaries involved some form of violent victimization of a household member. Within that, someone was present in 15.5% of forcible entries but 33.3% of unlawful entries, which fits the picture of no-force entries occurring while a home is occupied and casually unsecured.

On timing, the widely circulated claims about specific hours of the day generally do not come from these publications. The federal reports cited here do not present a time of day breakdown, so this article does not assert one. If you see a precise hourly figure quoted online, check whether its source is a federal collection or a vendor survey before acting on it.

What This Implies for Hardware

Read honestly, the data supports a fairly unglamorous set of priorities.

• Habit before hardware. If the largest single category of household burglary involves no force at all, then consistently locking doors and ground floor windows is the highest return action available, and it costs nothing.
• Make locking effortless. The failure is behavioral, so the fix is a lock that engages without a decision, and a door that shuts and latches reliably on its own.
• Then buy delay, at the frame. Forced entry is still over a third of household incidents and the majority of reported offenses, and frame and strike reinforcement is where delay is cheapest to add.
• Do not plan around occupancy. A household member was present in more than a quarter of burglaries. Security measures that only apply when the house is empty cover the wrong quarter.
• Include outbuildings. The survey definition of burglary includes illegal entry of a garage, shed, or other structure on the premises.

The overall trend is favorable and the marketing does not reflect that. Spend accordingly.