Safety
The Most Dangerous States to Live
Danger is not one number. A state can be calm on the streets but lethal on the highway or quiet most years then flattened by a tornado. This map combines four different risks into one composite and lets you pull them apart. Each hazard is ranked across the 50 states and DC, then averaged, so a state high on every list rises to the top. Green is safest and red is most dangerous.
Composite Danger (index 0-100). Average percentile rank across murder, officer, tornado and road deaths.
| Mississippi | 99 | 18.6 | 23.0 | 43.2 | 1.79 |
| Louisiana | 89 | 14.4 | 24.9 | 5.6 | 1.46 |
| Tennessee | 87 | 9.8 | 12.4 | 19.4 | 1.59 |
| Arkansas | 87 | 8.1 | 16.6 | 25.9 | 1.52 |
| Alabama | 86 | 12.6 | 15.3 | 62.5 | 1.35 |
| Kentucky | 85 | 6.9 | 12.9 | 28.0 | 1.66 |
| Oklahoma | 85 | 7.0 | 15.4 | 24.0 | 1.57 |
| South Carolina | 83 | 9.4 | 12.3 | 2.3 | 1.72 |
| Missouri | 77 | 9.0 | 12.3 | 36.1 | 1.23 |
| Georgia | 77 | 9.1 | 14.5 | 4.9 | 1.28 |
| New Mexico | 72 | 12.7 | 16.5 | 0.0 | 1.55 |
| Texas | 69 | 6.1 | 10.3 | 1.9 | 1.43 |
| North Carolina | 68 | 7.7 | 9.7 | 3.5 | 1.28 |
| District of Columbia | 64 | 25.3 | 14.5 | 0.0 | 1.26 |
| West Virginia | 63 | 5.5 | 8.9 | 0.6 | 1.63 |
| Delaware | 62 | 6.5 | 9.1 | 1.0 | 1.39 |
| Montana | 62 | 4.2 | 10.1 | 1.8 | 1.52 |
| Kansas | 59 | 5.3 | 9.9 | 3.1 | 1.22 |
| Indiana | 59 | 7.0 | 8.8 | 3.7 | 1.05 |
| Illinois | 57 | 8.4 | 7.0 | 2.6 | 1.21 |
| Arizona | 55 | 6.3 | 7.6 | 0.0 | 1.73 |
| Florida | 55 | 5.2 | 8.4 | 0.7 | 1.42 |
| South Dakota | 52 | 6.0 | 6.8 | 1.1 | 1.35 |
| Nevada | 50 | 6.9 | 8.1 | 0.0 | 1.40 |
| Iowa | 50 | 3.3 | 8.1 | 9.4 | 1.13 |
| North Dakota | 50 | 2.6 | 10.3 | 6.4 | 1.07 |
| Maryland | 49 | 8.6 | 7.4 | 0.3 | 1.08 |
| Alaska | 49 | 7.6 | 10.9 | 0.0 | 1.07 |
| Colorado | 48 | 5.2 | 8.5 | 0.2 | 1.32 |
| Virginia | 48 | 5.5 | 8.3 | 1.3 | 1.04 |
| Wyoming | 48 | 4.6 | 8.7 | 0.0 | 1.51 |
| Ohio | 48 | 6.3 | 6.8 | 1.3 | 1.10 |
| Michigan | 43 | 5.4 | 7.2 | 0.6 | 1.11 |
| Pennsylvania | 41 | 5.3 | 7.4 | 0.1 | 1.21 |
| Oregon | 35 | 4.0 | 3.5 | 0.0 | 1.59 |
| Washington | 34 | 4.4 | 6.2 | 0.0 | 1.35 |
| Nebraska | 34 | 3.0 | 6.6 | 1.0 | 1.07 |
| California | 31 | 4.5 | 5.5 | 0.0 | 1.28 |
| Wisconsin | 26 | 4.5 | 5.6 | 0.3 | 0.87 |
| Minnesota | 25 | 3.3 | 5.3 | 1.1 | 0.70 |
| New York | 25 | 3.5 | 5.2 | 0.5 | 0.93 |
| Idaho | 23 | 1.8 | 3.8 | 0.0 | 1.39 |
| Hawaii | 23 | 2.7 | 8.2 | 0.0 | 0.89 |
| New Hampshire | 20 | 1.3 | 4.4 | 0.7 | 0.96 |
| Maine | 19 | 2.4 | 7.3 | 0.0 | 0.91 |
| Massachusetts | 18 | 2.2 | 5.7 | 0.4 | 0.56 |
| Connecticut | 16 | 2.9 | 4.2 | 0.0 | 1.01 |
| Vermont | 15 | 3.2 | 3.1 | 0.0 | 0.96 |
| Utah | 14 | 2.4 | 6.4 | 0.0 | 0.81 |
| New Jersey | 12 | 2.8 | 5.2 | 0.0 | 0.78 |
| Rhode Island | 9 | 1.8 | 1.8 | 0.0 | 0.94 |
Murder
CDC death-certificate homicides per 100,000 residents, most recent full year.
See the full map →Officer Deaths
Police line-of-duty deaths per million residents since 2005, from the Officer Down Memorial Page.
See the full map →Tornadoes
Tornado deaths per million residents since 2008, from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center.
See the full map →The Road
Motor-vehicle deaths per 100 million miles driven (2023), from IIHS and NHTSA.
See the full map →Methodology
The composite is a rank-based index. For each of the four hazards we rank all 50 states and DC from safest to most dangerous, convert each rank to a percentile from 0 to 100 then average the four percentiles. Ranking rather than adding raw rates keeps any single hazard from dominating just because its numbers are larger and it handles the fact that the four measures use different units. A state with no value for a hazard (a few small states have homicide counts the CDC suppresses) is averaged over the hazards it does have.
The four hazards are not equally a matter of personal choice and they are measured over different windows, so read the composite as a broad signal rather than a precise score. Switch to any single hazard to see the real rates. On-duty COVID-19 and 9/11-related illness deaths are excluded from the officer measure by default because they are one-time-event tails that would otherwise swamp it and make New York stand out for a 2001 event; toggle either back on to include it.
Sources
- CDC NCHS homicide death-certificate rates by state.
- Officer Down Memorial Page line-of-duty officer deaths.
- NOAA Storm Prediction Center killer-tornado fatalities.
- IIHS and NHTSA FARS motor-vehicle deaths per 100 million VMT.