Hate Crime Statistics in UK 2026 | Offences, Victims & Facts

Hate Crime in the United Kingdom 2026

Hate crime is any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or anyone else, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone because of a personal characteristic. In the United Kingdom, police forces centrally monitor five strands of hate crime: race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, disability, and transgender identity. An offence can be flagged under more than one strand at once, for example when an attack is motivated by hostility towards both a victim’s race and their religion. The definition covers everything from graffiti and online abuse through to assault, and it applies whether the hostility is based on the victim’s actual identity or simply the offender’s perception of it.

Two very different sources measure hate crime in England and Wales each year, and they tell noticeably different stories. Police-recorded figures show how much hate crime-related demand reaches force control rooms and custody suites, while the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) asks the public directly about their experiences, including incidents that were never reported. Because police recording practices have changed substantially since 2014, the two datasets move in different directions over time, and both are needed to build an accurate picture. This guide breaks down the latest UK hate crime statistics from official Home Office and Office for National Statistics data, covering offence numbers, victim characteristics, outcomes, and how the picture has shifted over the past year.

Interesting Facts About Hate Crime in the UK 2026

Hate Crime in England and Wales, Year Ending March 2025
Offences recorded (excl. MPS)     |█████████████████████ 115,990
Offences recorded (all forces)    |██████████████████████████ 137,550
Public order + violence share     |███████████████████████████████████ 93%
Charge/summons rate               |███ 8%

Source: Home Office, Hate Crime, England and Wales, Year Ending March 2025, published 9 October 2025.

The headline numbers show a system recording more hate crime while resolving very little of it through prosecution. Police in England and Wales recorded 115,990 hate crimes in the year ending March 2025, excluding the Metropolitan Police Service, a 2% rise on the previous year. Include the MPS and the national total climbs to 137,550 offences. Race remains by far the largest category, accounting for 71% of every hate crime recorded, and the offence mix is heavily skewed towards public order and violence against the person, which together make up 93% of the total. Despite that scale, only 8% of flagged hate crime offences ended in a charge or summons, a gap that shows up repeatedly across the more detailed breakdowns below.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales tells a calmer story than the police figures alone suggest. Based on the combined surveys from 2022 to 2025, the CSEW estimates 176,000 hate crime incidents occur each year, and just 0.3% of adults say they were a victim of any hate crime in the past 12 months, compared with 10.2% for crime overall. That gap between a rising police count and a broadly stable survey estimate is not a contradiction: police recording of hate crime has improved substantially since 2014, and the two measures capture different things. The sections below unpack each strand, offence type, and outcome in detail, using data compiled entirely from the Home Office’s official 2025 hate crime bulletin.

Police Recorded Hate Crime Statistics in the UK 2026

Police-Recorded Hate Crime, England and Wales
YE March 2025, excl. MPS      |███████████████████████ 115,990
YE March 2024, excl. MPS      |██████████████████████ 113,166
YE March 2025, incl. MPS      |███████████████████████████ 137,550

Source: Home Office, Hate Crime, England and Wales, Year Ending March 2025.

Police-recorded hate crime in England and Wales reached 115,990 offences in the year ending March 2025, once the Metropolitan Police Service is excluded for comparability reasons. That figure is 2% higher than the 113,166 offences recorded the year before. The MPS is excluded from these year-on-year comparisons because it changed its crime recording system in February 2024, moving to a new platform called CONNECT that creates a separate crime record for every victim rather than nesting several offences under one report, which means MPS totals from before and after the change are not directly comparable. Once MPS figures are added back in, the full national total for the year reaches 137,550 hate crime offences across all 44 territorial forces plus the British Transport Police.

Hate crime remains a small but consistent share of overall police work, accounting for 3% of all notifiable offences recorded during the year. That proportion has held steady even as the raw number of hate crimes has grown substantially since the early 2010s, which the Home Office attributes mainly to improvements in how officers identify and flag hate-motivated offences rather than to a genuine surge in underlying hostility. The Home Office is explicit that police-recorded figures should be read as a measure of demand on the police, not as a reliable measure of how common hate crime actually is in society, since a meaningful share of hate crime never comes to police attention at all.

Hate Crime by Strand Statistics in the UK 2026

Hate Crime by Strand, England and Wales (excl. MPS), YE March 2025
Race                |██████████████████████████████████████████ 82,490
Sexual orientation  |██████████ 18,702
Disability          |█████▌ 10,224
Religion            |███▊ 7,164
Transgender         |██ 3,809

Source: Home Office, Hate Crime, England and Wales, Year Ending March 2025, Table 2.1.

Race is, and has consistently been, the largest of the five monitored strands, accounting for 82,490 offences and 71% of all police-recorded hate crime. Race hate crimes rose 6% over the year, driven mainly by a 7% increase in public order offences and a 21% rise in racially or religiously aggravated harassment, though the total still sits below the peak of 87,905 offences recorded in the year ending March 2022. Religious hate crime, the second-smallest strand by volume, rose 3% to 7,164 offences, the highest annual total ever recorded for that category, driven largely by events discussed in the next section.

The remaining three strands all fell over the year. Sexual orientation hate crimes dropped 2% to 18,702 offences, the third consecutive annual fall and 16% below the year ending March 2022 peak, driven mainly by a 36% drop in malicious communications offences following 2023 changes to Home Office counting rules for conduct crimes. Disability hate crimes fell 8% to 10,224, and transgender identity hate crimes fell 11% to 3,809, both continuing a second consecutive year of decline. The Home Office links part of these falls directly to the same counting rule change, which removed a requirement to record two separate crimes when one of them was a conduct offence like stalking or harassment.

Hate Crime by Offence Type Statistics in the UK 2026

Hate Crime by Offence Type, England and Wales, YE March 2025
Public order offences        |██████████████████████████████████████████ 52%
Violence against the person  |██████████████████████████████ 41%
Criminal damage & other      |███████ 7%

Source: Home Office, Hate Crime, England and Wales, Year Ending March 2025, Section 2.3.

Just over half of all hate crimes, 52%, are recorded as public order offences, with a further 41% classed as violence against the person. Together these two categories make up 93% of everything recorded as a hate crime in England and Wales, a distribution that looks nothing like overall crime, where public order offences make up only 9% of the total and theft dominates instead. Over half of all hate crime, 56%, is recorded as one of five specific racially or religiously aggravated offences defined in statute, including aggravated assault, harassment, criminal damage, and causing public fear or distress, which by definition are treated as hate crimes.

That offence mix explains much of the gap between what police record and what the Crime Survey can measure. Public order offences frequently involve no single identifiable victim, someone shouting abuse in the street, for example, which means the CSEW’s household victimisation survey structurally cannot capture them the way it captures a burglary or an assault. It also explains why hate crime trends are so sensitive to specific events: racially or religiously aggravated offences spiked to 10,097 in a single month, August 2024, the highest monthly total ever recorded, coinciding with the Southport murders and the disorder that followed across several English towns and cities.

Victim Ethnicity Statistics in the UK 2026

Victim Ethnicity, Racially/Religiously Aggravated Offences, YE March 2025
Asian/Asian British                   |█████████████████████████████████ 33%
White                                 |██████████████████████████████ 30%
Black/African/Caribbean/Black British |███████████████████████ 23%
Mixed/multiple groups                 |████████ 8%
Other ethnic group                    |█████ 5%

Source: Home Office, Hate Crime, England and Wales, Year Ending March 2025, Table 2.3.

Of the 84,374 racially or religiously aggravated offences recorded in the year ending March 2025, victim ethnicity was known in only 34,072 cases, roughly 40% of the total, with Leicestershire Police excluded from this collection entirely. Where ethnicity was recorded, Asian/Asian British victims made up the largest share at 33%, followed by White victims at 30% and Black/African/Caribbean/Black British victims at 23%. The Home Office notes that offences against White victims are likely to include xenophobic abuse directed at people not born in the UK, so this category should not be read as purely reflecting attacks unconnected to race or nationality.

Because ethnicity was unrecorded for 60% of aggravated offences, the Home Office is explicit that this breakdown should be treated as indicative only rather than a precise national picture. The proportions also vary by specific offence type: racially or religiously aggravated assault without injury showed a higher share of Asian/Asian British victims at 36%, while criminal damage offences were more evenly split between White and Asian/Asian British victims at 37% and 36% respectively. Data quality in this area has improved gradually since ethnicity recording became mandatory for these offences from April 2021, but the incomplete coverage remains a genuine limitation on what conclusions can safely be drawn from it.

Religious Hate Crime Statistics in the UK 2026

Religious Hate Crime by Targeted Religion, All Forces, YE March 2025
Muslim      |█████████████████████████████████████████ 45%
Jewish      |███████████████████████████ 29%
Other       |██████ 6%
Christian   |█████ 5%
Unknown     |███████████ 11%

Source: Home Office, Hate Crime, England and Wales, Year Ending March 2025, Table 2.2.

Religious hate crime rose 3% over the year to 7,164 offences (excluding MPS), the highest annual total on record for this strand. Within that total, hate crimes targeting Muslims rose 19%, from 2,690 to 3,199 offences, with a clear monthly spike in August 2024 that coincides with the Southport murders and subsequent disorder. Hate crimes targeting Jewish people fell 18%, from 2,093 to 1,715 offences, though the Home Office urges caution here because the MPS, which is excluded from this year-on-year comparison, recorded 40% of all anti-Jewish religious hate crimes nationally, meaning the true national trend could look very different once London is included. Once all forces are counted together, Muslims and Jewish people are the two most frequently targeted groups by a wide margin, accounting for 45% and 29% of all religious hate crime respectively. Readers wanting fuller context on the community behind that second figure can find detailed demographic data in the Jewish population statistics in UK report.

Measured against population size using 2021 Census estimates, the disparity becomes sharper still: there were 106 religious hate crimes per 10,000 population targeting Jewish people, the highest rate of any religious group tracked, compared with 12 per 10,000 for Muslims. That gap reflects the much smaller overall size of the Jewish population relative to the Muslim population in England and Wales, which means a comparatively smaller number of raw offences translates into a far higher rate per capita. Public order offences were the single most common offence type recorded against both Jewish and Muslim victims, accounting for roughly 50% of offences targeting each group, reinforcing the broader pattern seen across the hate crime data as a whole.

Hate Crime Outcomes and Prosecution Statistics in the UK 2026

Hate Crime Outcomes, England and Wales, YE March 2025
Offences with an outcome assigned      |████████████████████████████ 91%
Hate crime charge/summons rate         |████ 8%
Aggravated offence charge/summons rate |████▌ 9%

Source: Home Office, Hate Crime, England and Wales, Year Ending March 2025, Section 2.5.

Getting a hate crime recorded is one thing; securing a criminal justice outcome is another. Based on data covering 35 of the 44 forces that supply case-level information to the Home Office Data Hub, 91% of hate crime flagged offences had been assigned some form of outcome at the point the data was extracted, with the remaining 9% still under investigation. Only 8% of those offences had been dealt with by a charge or summons, though that is a small improvement on the 7% recorded the year before. For the specific category of racially or religiously aggravated offences, which is tracked across all 44 forces, the charge and summons rate reached 9%, up from 8%, reversing a long downward trend that saw rates as high as 30% for some offence types back in the year ending March 2015. Readers can find further context on how these figures compare with overall crime detection in the Crime Statistics for England report.

Hate crime investigations also take noticeably longer to resolve than equivalent non-hate offences. The median time to a final outcome for hate crime flagged criminal damage and arson offences was 22 days, compared with just 8 days for non-hate equivalents, and for violence against the person offences the gap was 40 days versus 23 days. The most common single outcome recorded for violent hate crime offences was “evidential difficulties as the victim does not support action,” which applied to 32% of hate crime flagged violent offences, a lower share than the 43% recorded for non-hate violent offences, suggesting hate crime victims are somewhat more willing to see a case through despite the longer, more demanding process.

Crime Survey Estimates and Hate Crime Prevalence Statistics in the UK 2026

CSEW Hate Crime Estimates, England and Wales
Combined 2022-2025 surveys   |███████████████ 176,000 incidents/year
Combined 2017-2020 surveys   |█████████████████▌ 190,000 incidents/year
Combined 2007-2009 surveys   |██████████████████████████ 307,000 incidents/year

Source: Home Office, Hate Crime, England and Wales, Year Ending March 2025, Section 3.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales offers a very different vantage point from police statistics, since it asks a representative sample of the public directly about crimes they experienced, whether or not they were ever reported. Combining three years of survey data, from the year ending March 2023 through the year ending March 2025, the CSEW estimates 176,000 hate crime incidents occur annually, a figure the Home Office says is not statistically significantly different from the previous estimate of 190,000, drawn from surveys conducted before the pandemic. Just 0.3% of adults reported being a victim of any hate crime in the year before their interview, compared with 10.2% across all CSEW crime combined, underlining how comparatively rare hate crime victimisation is at the individual level even though its impact on those affected runs deep.

Reporting behaviour differs from other crime types too. An estimated 44% of hate crime incidents came to police attention, a notably higher rate than the 37% recorded for all CSEW headline crime, which the Home Office attributes partly to the crime mix: hate crime incidents are more likely to be violent, and violent offences generally have higher reporting rates than theft, which makes up a much larger share of crime overall. The CSEW data also shows the internal make-up of hate crime differs from crime generally, with 51% of hate crime incidents being violent compared with just 20% of all headline crime, and personal crimes accounting for 64% of hate crime incidents against 40% for crime as a whole.

Victimisation Risk by Group Statistics in the UK 2026

Personal Hate Crime Victimisation Rate by Group, England and Wales
Gender identity different from sex at birth |████████████████████████████ 1.3%
Muslims                                     |██████████████ 0.6%
Asian/Asian British adults                  |██████████████ 0.6%
Men aged 16-24                              |███████████ 0.4%
White adults (comparison)                   |██▌ 0.1%

Source: Home Office, Hate Crime, England and Wales, Year Ending March 2025, Section 3.6.

The CSEW’s demographic breakdown makes clear that hate crime risk is far from evenly distributed. Adults whose gender identity differs from the sex registered at birth face the highest measured risk of all groups tracked, at 1.3%, more than six times the 0.2% rate for adults whose gender identity matches their sex registered at birth. Muslim adults and Asian/Asian British adults both report a 0.6% victimisation rate, six times the 0.1% rate for White adults and, in the case of Muslims, six times the 0.1% rate for Christian adults. Men aged 16 to 24 report a 0.4% rate, double the 0.2% figure for all adults, pointing to a familiar pattern in crime data more broadly where younger men carry disproportionate risk. For deeper context on the size and composition of the communities behind these figures, see the UK South Asian community statistics report.

Household-level hate crime shows a similar pattern shaped by economic circumstances. Social renters faced a 0.5% household hate crime victimisation rate compared with 0.1% for owner occupiers, and people living in the most deprived fifth of areas in England faced a 0.3% rate against just 0.04% in the least deprived fifth, a sevenfold difference. The Home Office is careful to caveat these ethnicity-based comparisons, noting that earlier academic research has found that once other factors are accounted for, ethnicity alone does not always independently predict victimisation risk for every crime type, since demographic characteristics like age and housing tenure often overlap and interact with ethnicity in ways a simple percentage comparison cannot fully separate out.

Victim Impact and Police Satisfaction Statistics in the UK 2026

Hate Crime Victim Impact vs. All Crime, England and Wales
Emotionally affected by the incident  |███████████████████████████████ 92% vs 75%
"Very much" affected                  |███████████████████ 39% vs 14%
Satisfied with police handling        |████████████████ 40% vs 54%
Felt treated fairly by police         |█████████████████ 42% vs 68%

Source: Home Office, Hate Crime, England and Wales, Year Ending March 2025, Section 3.9.

Hate crime leaves a heavier emotional mark than crime generally. 92% of hate crime victims said they were emotionally affected by what happened to them, against 75% for all CSEW crime victims, and 39% said they were “very much” affected, nearly three times the 14% figure recorded across all crime. Victims of hate crime were also more than twice as likely to report a loss of confidence or feeling vulnerable afterwards, at 44% compared with 24% for crime overall, and more than twice as likely to report fear, difficulty sleeping, anxiety, panic attacks, or depression.

Satisfaction with the police response has also fallen sharply. Just 40% of hate crime victims said they were very or fairly satisfied with how police handled their case, down from 55% in the last comparable pre-pandemic survey, and well below the 54% satisfaction rate recorded for all crime victims. Only 42% of hate crime victims felt they had been treated fairly by the police, a steep drop from 70% in the previous survey period, and again lower than the 68% figure for crime victims generally. Both measures moved in the same direction as crime overall, but the fall was noticeably steeper for hate crime victims specifically, widening a gap that was already present in earlier survey rounds.

Long-Term Hate Crime Trends Statistics in the UK 2026

Long-Term Hate Crime Trends, England and Wales
Police-recorded, YE March 2013       |███████ 31,844
Police-recorded, YE March 2022 (peak)|███████████████████████████ 128,485
CSEW estimate, 2007-09 surveys       |███████████████████████████████ 307,000
CSEW estimate, latest 2022-25 surveys|██████████████████ 176,000

Source: Home Office, Hate Crime, England and Wales, Year Ending March 2025, Sections 2.1 and 3.1.

Police-recorded hate crime and the Crime Survey estimate have moved in almost opposite directions over the long run, and the Home Office is unusually direct about why. Police figures climbed from 31,844 offences in the year ending March 2013 to a peak of 128,485 in the year ending March 2022, a rise the Home Office attributes primarily to better crime recording following a critical 2014 inspection that found a third of violent crime cases were not being recorded at all, plus growing police awareness of what qualifies as a hate crime. Because of that, the Home Office states plainly that police recorded crime figures do not provide reliable trends in hate crime since 2014, since so much of the increase reflects better bookkeeping rather than more hostility in society.

The CSEW, unaffected by police recording practices, tells the opposite story over the same long stretch: hate crime incidents have fallen 43%, from an estimated 307,000 a year in the combined 2007-to-2009 surveys down to 176,000 in the latest combined estimate. Three of the five monitored strands show measured declines over that period, with race hate crime down 39%, sexual orientation hate crime down 66%, and disability hate crime down 31%, while religious hate crime has stayed comparatively flat. Reading the two data sources side by side, rather than picking one, is exactly what the Home Office recommends, since police figures show where demand on the justice system is rising while the CSEW shows that the underlying rate of hate crime experienced by the public has, if anything, eased over the same two decades.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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