Houston’s Crime Score Explained: What Harris County’s Data Shows
By Sharon Ben-Moshe · July 23, 2026
Every scored Houston ZIP code shares an identical 25/100 crime rating — here’s the county-level FBI data behind it, how Houston compares to Texas and the U.S., and what actually separates its neighborhoods.
According to FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data aggregated at the county level, every one of Houston’s 98 actively scored ZIP codes carries an identical NeighborScore crime rating of 25 out of 100 — well below both the Texas state average of 62 and the national average of 63. The reason is methodological, not geographic: Houston’s crime score is set at the Harris County level, not neighborhood by neighborhood.
On NeighborScore’s four-tier label scale — Excellent, Good, Fair, and Below Average — a score of 25 falls solidly in the Below Average band, a rating shared by all 98 Houston ZIP codes regardless of individual neighborhood characteristics.
How NeighborScore Calculates a Houston ZIP Code’s Crime Score
NeighborScore scores crime in a four-tier cascade, using the highest-resolution data available for each ZIP code. The top tier is incident-level data, scored ZIP by ZIP against FBI Part I violent-crime rates -- but that tier currently exists for only four U.S. cities: Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Houston isn’t one of them, so its ZIP codes fall to the county tier: one FBI Uniform Crime Reporting rate, computed for all of Harris County and compared against the statewide county median, applied identically to every ZIP code inside the county line.
That’s why a ZIP code in the Texas Medical Center and a ZIP code in a quiet residential subdivision 20 miles away both show the same 25-out-of-100 crime score -- the underlying FBI data doesn’t break out crime by neighborhood for Harris County the way it does for the four incident-tier cities.
This isn’t unique to Houston. Most large Texas metros — San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and Fort Worth among them — show the same pattern: without ZIP-level incident data, every neighborhood inside a single county inherits that county’s one crime score. Only when a metro spans multiple counties, or a municipal police agency’s FBI-reported data cascades down, does the score begin to vary by ZIP code within a city.
How Houston Compares to Texas and the Nation
- Houston (Harris County): 25 / 100
- Texas statewide average: 62 / 100
- National average: 63 / 100
NeighborScore converts each county’s FBI violent-crime rate per 1,000 residents into a 0-to-100 band by comparing it against the median rate across similarly sized counties statewide. Harris County’s 25 reflects a rate meaningfully higher than a typical Texas county’s median — not a raw crime count, and not a claim about any single block or street.
A score of 25 puts Harris County’s violent-crime rate meaningfully above that county-median baseline — consistent with Houston’s standing as one of the most populous counties in the country. For the underlying county-level Uniform Crime Reporting figures directly, see the FBI Crime Data Explorer.
Why Houston’s Top-Scoring ZIP Codes Differ on Schools, Not Crime
NeighborScore’s overall rating weights crime at 53% and schools at 47% (affordability is shown separately as context, not folded into the score). Because every Houston ZIP code has the same crime input, the entire spread in overall scores across the city comes from the school component alone. The metro’s highest-scoring ZIP codes:
- 77030 (Texas Medical Center area): overall 53, school 84, median price $489,000 — view the 77030 profile
- 77024 (Memorial area): overall 52, school 82, median price $1,200,000 — view the 77024 profile
- 77005 (West University Place): overall 47, school 72, median price $1,904,025 — view the 77005 profile
At the other end, ZIP code 77094 (Energy Corridor) scores just 28 overall despite a $548,500 median price — well above the citywide median. Its school score of 32 is what pulls the overall rating down: in a metro where crime is a fixed input, a higher price tag doesn’t guarantee a higher NeighborScore rating.
For homebuyers relocating from a metro with ZIP-level crime scoring, this is the single most important thing to understand about Houston data: NeighborScore’s Houston crime number is a Harris County statement, not a block-by-block one. Use it to compare Houston against other metro counties — use the school score and price to compare neighborhoods within Houston itself.
Bottom Line
Don’t compare two Houston ZIP codes on crime — the data can’t tell them apart. Houston’s crime score is only useful for comparing the metro as a whole against other cities or the national baseline. To tell Houston neighborhoods apart, lean on the school score and price data instead. See the full methodology in how NeighborScore works, or browse more city guides on NeighborScore.
Philadelphia shows a similar pattern — see NeighborScore's comparison of Philadelphia's city and suburban ZIP codes.