6th safest major city in the world, per The Economist

Is Toronto Safe?

Toronto's reputation is safer than its headlines sometimes suggest — the actual crime statistics put it well below the Canadian national average and among the safest big cities in North America.

Toronto City Hall — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

A common question from anyone considering a visit or a move: is Toronto actually safe? The honest, statistics-backed answer is yes, comparatively — though "comparatively" is doing real work in that sentence, and it's worth looking at the actual numbers rather than headlines.

How Toronto ranks globally

In 2024, The Economist's Safe Cities Index ranked Toronto the 6th safest major city in the world and the safest major city in North America — ahead of most large U.S. and European cities on the index's combined measure of digital, health, infrastructure and personal security.

Toronto vs. the rest of Canada

Toronto recorded 2,977 police-reported Criminal Code incidents per 100,000 people in 2023 — well below the national Canadian average of 5,668, and lower than both Montreal (5,074) and notably Vancouver (7,545). Its homicide rate, around 2.1 per 100,000 in 2024, sits close to the national rate and far below cities like Winnipeg.

Toronto vs. U.S. cities

Compared to peer-sized American cities, Toronto's violent crime and homicide rates run substantially lower than New York's or Los Angeles's, a gap partly attributable to Canada's stricter gun-control regime. Property crime is one of the few categories where Toronto has recently run comparable to or higher than some U.S. peer cities.

What this means practically

Like any large city, safety in Toronto varies meaningfully by neighbourhood and time of day — see our general neighbourhoods guide for the lay of the land. But at the city-wide level, the data consistently supports Toronto's general reputation as unusually safe for a city of its size.

Sources

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