Official Statistics

Hate crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2025

Published 9 October 2025

Applies to England and Wales

Frequency of release: Annual

Forthcoming release: Home Office statistics release calendar

Home Office responsible statistician: John Flatley

Press enquires: pressoffice@homeoffice.gov.uk. Telephone: 0300 123 3535

Public enquires: crimeandpolicestats@homeoffice.gov.uk

This release contains statistics about hate crime offences recorded by the police in England and Wales.

Key results

• in the year ending March 2025, there were 115,990 hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales (excluding the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS)), a 2% increase compared with the previous year

• there was a 6% increase in race hate crimes and a 3% increase in religious hate crimes recorded by the police (excluding the MPS) over the last year; there were falls in the other 3 strands, sexual orientation (down 2%), disability (down 8%) and transgender (down 11%)
• there was a 19% increase in religious hate crimes targeted at Muslims (excluding the MPS), with a spike in these offences seen at the time of the Southport murders and subsequent disorder
• the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) (combined year ending March 2023 to year ending March 2025 surveys) showed that there were an estimated 176,000 incidents of hate crime a year, similar to the last estimates which were published before the COVID-19 pandemic

1. Introduction

1.1 Overview

This statistical bulletin provides information on the number of hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in the year ending March 2025 and estimates from the CSEW from the combined year ending March 2023 to year ending March 2025 surveys.

1.2 Information on police recorded hate crime figures

Police forces have made significant improvements since 2014 in how they record crime. They have also improved their identification of what constitutes a hate crime. Because of these changes, police recorded crime figures do not provide reliable trends in hate crime since 2014. Figures from the police should also not be seen as a good measure of prevalence since not all hate crime is reported to them. The figures do, however, provide a good measure of the hate crime-related demand on the police.

In August 2025, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) published ‘How effectively do the police record crime? This report brought together findings from HMICFRS inspection programmes in recent years and outlines how the police have improved their crime recording. For more information, see Section 4: Police recorded hate crime data sources and quality.

In February 2024, the MPS changed crime recording systems as part of a wider improvement project to replace several legacy IT systems with a single integrated solution. The new system, CONNECT, is used nationally by several police services and allows more effective and efficient management of data related to intelligence, investigations, custody and other policing functions. In moving to the new system, some data quality issues have been revealed with the legacy crime recording system, CRIS. Under the new CONNECT crime recording system, one record is created for every victim of crime. Under their old system, it was possible for investigating officers to nest more than one offence under a single crime incident report.

However, due to limitations of the previous system, if a hate crime identifier was added to one offence within this crime report, this would by default be added to all offences that had also been recorded under that report, whether or not all offences were hate crimes.

For example, if the police attended a public order incident and recorded several offences under the same report, and one of these was identified as being a hate crime, all offences would be counted as a hate crime in the statistics supplied to the Home Office. This means that while the MPS were accurately counting the number of total crimes in line with the Home Office Counting Rules, data in previous years were overstating the number of offences that were hate crimes. Under the new MPS system, each offence has its own crime record, allowing the MPS to improve their data quality by correctly identifying which offences were hate crimes. It should be noted that the over flagging of offences as hate crimes had no downstream impact on the handling or processing of cases within the criminal justice system.

Due to the change in the MPS crime recording system, MPS data for the year ending March 2025 are not comparable with data supplied in previous years and have been excluded from the trend analysis in this bulletin.

1.3 Hate crime definitions

Hate crime is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.’ This common definition was agreed in 2007 by the police, Crown Prosecution Service, Prison Service (now the National Offender Management Service) and other agencies that make up the criminal justice system. There are 5 centrally monitored strands of hate crime:

• race or ethnicity
• religion
• sexual orientation
• disability
• transgender identity

In the process of recording a crime, the police can flag an offence as being motivated by one or more of these 5 monitored strands (for example, an offence can be motivated by hostility towards the victim’s race and religion). For more information, see Section 4: Police recorded hate crime data sources and quality. Hate crime figures in this bulletin are therefore dependent on a flag being correctly applied to an offence that is identified as a hate crime.

The College of Policing (CoP) published updated guidance on how the police should respond to hate crime in October 2020. The Authorised Professional Practice guidance on hate crime includes information on what can be covered by hate crime. The guidance states:

A hate crime is any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice based on:

• a person’s race or perceived race, or any racial group or ethnic background including countries within the UK and Gypsy and Traveller groups
• a person’s religion or perceived religion, or any religious group including those who have no faith in a theology
• a person’s sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation, or any person’s sexual orientation
• a person’s disability or perceived disability, or any disability including physical disability, learning disability and mental health or developmental disorders
• a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender, including people who are transsexual, transgender, cross dressers and those who hold a Gender Recognition Certificate under the Gender Recognition Act 2004

Race hate crimes can include offences with a xenophobic element (such as graffiti targeting certain nationalities or migrants).

Perceived religion of religious hate crime victims means the religion targeted by the offender. While in the majority of offences the perceived and actual religion of the victim will be the same, in some cases they will differ. For example, if anti-Muslim graffiti is sprayed on a religious temple of another faith, this would still be recorded as an offence of racially or religiously aggravated criminal damage and identified by the respective police force as a religious hate crime against Muslims. There are 9 different perceived religions covered, matching those 2021 Census groupings.

An offence may also be motivated by hatred towards a characteristic that is not currently centrally monitored and therefore does not form part of the data collection presented in this statistical bulletin (age or gender for example).

Hate crimes are taken to mean any crime where the perpetrator’s hostility or prejudice against an identifiable group of people was a factor in determining who was victimised. While a crime may be recorded as a ‘hate crime’, it may only be prosecuted as such if evidence of hostility is submitted as part of the case file.

Terrorist offences may or may not be considered a hate crime depending on the circumstances. A terrorist attack may be targeted against general British or Western values rather than one of the 5 specific strands. Attacks of this nature are therefore not covered by this statistical bulletin, although they will clearly be motivated by hate. However, other terrorist attacks are motivated by a hatred towards one of the centrally monitored hate crime strands covered by this statistical bulletin. For example, the Finsbury Park Mosque attack in June 2017 has been classified as a hate crime because the victims were thought to be targeted because of their religious affiliation.

1.4 Hate crimes and racially or religiously aggravated offences

There are some offences in the main police recorded crime collection which have specific racially or religiously motivated elements defined by statute. These constitute a set of offences which are distinct from their non-racially or religiously aggravated equivalents (the full list of these is shown in Table 1.1). These racially or religiously aggravated offences are, by definition, considered to be hate crimes. Over a half (56%) of hate crime offences were recorded as one of these racially or religiously aggravated offences.

Table 1.1: The 5 racially or religiously aggravated offences and their non-aggravated equivalents

	Racially or religiously aggravated offences		Non-aggravated equivalent offences
Offence code	Offence description	Offence code	Offence description
8P	Racially or religiously aggravated assault with injury	8N	Assault with injury
105B	Racially or religiously aggravated assault without injury	105A	Assault without Injury
8M	Racially or religiously aggravated harassment	8L	Harassment
9B	Racially or religiously aggravated public fear, alarm or distress	9A	Public fear, alarm or distress
58J	Racially or religiously aggravated criminal damage	58A 58B 58C 58D	Criminal damage to a dwelling Criminal damage to a building other than a dwelling Criminal damage to a vehicle Other criminal damage

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

1.5 Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHI)

A NCHI is an act that is motivated by prejudice or hostility towards a person’s identity but does not amount to a criminal offence. The Home Office does not collect data on NCHIs from the police.

1.6 Crime survey for England and Wales (CSEW)

The CSEW is a face-to-face victimisation survey run by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and provides estimates on hate crimes experienced by people resident in households in England and Wales. The size of the CSEW sample means the number of hate crime incidents and victims estimated in a single survey year is too unreliable to report on. Therefore, 3 annual datasets are combined to provide a larger sample which can be used to produce robust estimates for hate crime. As 3 years’ worth of data has been combined, the CSEW estimates for hate crime are not suitable for examining short-term changes in hate crime.

CSEW hate crime estimates are based on respondents to the survey stating that a crime incident was motivated by the offender’s attitude towards their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or gender identity.

CSEW estimates of hate crime are published in this bulletin for the combined surveys from the year ending March 2023 to the year ending March 2025. These are the first published estimates since the Hate Crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2020 release. This is because the face-to-face survey was suspended due to public health restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In contrast to police recorded crime, the CSEW is unaffected by changes in police recording practices, reporting rates or police activity, and it includes crimes that do not come to the attention of the police. However, the CSEW does not cover crimes against businesses or those not resident in households (for example, short-term visitors, or people living in institutions – such as care homes). It also excludes homicides and crimes that are termed ‘victimless’, such as many public order offences, which account for over half of police recorded hate crime. Differences between the measurement of hate crime in the CSEW and police recorded crime are outlined in Section 4.4.

2. Police recorded hate crime

Key results

• in the year ending March 2025, there were 137,550 hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales
• due to a change in crime recording system by the MPS, their data is excluded from year-on-year comparisons; excluding the MPS, there was a 2% increase in police record hate crimes, from 113,166 to 115,990 offences
• there was a 6% increase in race hate crimes and a 3% increase in religious hate crimes recorded by the police (excluding the MPS) over the last year
• within religious hate crimes, there was a 19% increase in hate crimes targeted at Muslims, with a spike seen in these offences following the Southport murders and subsequent disorder
• there were falls in the remaining 3 strands of hate crime; sexual orientation hate crimes fell by 2%, disability hate crimes by 8% and transgender hate crimes by 11%

2.1 Latest data and trends

Hate crimes are a subset of notifiable offences recorded by the police. In the year ending March 2025, 3% of such offences recorded by the police were identified as being hate crimes.

There were 137,550 hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in the year ending March 2025.

Due to a change in crime recording systems in the MPS in February 2024, their data is not directly comparable with data supplied to the Home Office prior to this change (see Section 1.2). Therefore, their data is excluded from the trend analysis presented below. Figures for the MPS are given in the tables accompanying this bulletin.

Excluding the MPS, there were 115,990 hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales, a 2% increase compared with the previous year (113,166; offences; see Table 2.1).

There was an increase in both race (6%) and religious (3%) hate crimes, with falls in the other 3 strands. Sexual orientation hate crimes fell by 2%, disability hate crimes by 8% and transgender hate crimes by 11%.

Table 2.1: Hate crimes recorded by the police by monitored strand, year ending March 2021 to year ending March 2025, England and Wales (excluding MPS)

Hate crime strand	2020/21	2021/22	2022/23	2023/24	2024/25	Percentage change 2023/24 to 2024/25
Race	71,995	87,905	84,039	77,901	82,490	6
Religion	4,527	6,510	6,513	6,973	7,164	3
Sexual orientation	15,668	22,317	21,306	19,127	18,702	-2
Disability	9,418	13,611	13,637	11,131	10,224	-8
Transgender	2,510	3,920	4,477	4,258	3,809	-11
Total number of motivating factors	104,118	134,263	129,972	119,390	122,389	3
Total number of offences	99,813	128,485	123,033	113,166	115,990	2

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

The number of hate crimes recorded by the police increased from 31,844 offences in the year ending March 2013 to 128,485 in the year ending March 2022. This rise was thought to have been driven by improvements in crime recording by the police following a critical inspection by HMICFRS in 2014. This, in part, led to the removal of the designation of police recorded crime as Accredited Official Statistics.

The HMICFRS How effectively do the police record crime? report outlines how the percentage of crimes recorded by the police has increase from an estimated 80.5% in 2014 to 94.8% for 2023 to 2025. For violent crime, this has increased from 66.9% to 93.6% over the same period. This shows that improved crime recording has had a particular marked impact on violent crime. It is thought that the recording of public order offences has also been similarly affected. These 2 offence groups accounted for over 9 in 10 (93%) of hate crime offences recorded in the last year (Section 2.3). It is also thought that growing awareness of what constitutes hate crime in the police has also led to improved identification of such offences by officers. Because of these changes, police recorded crime figures do not provide reliable trends in hate crime since 2014.

Figure 2.1 shows the indexed trend in overall violent and public order offences since the year ending March 2014 compared with all hate crime offences over the same period (excludes MPS). As can be seen, there is a strong correlation between the increase in overall public order and violence against the person offences and hate crime up to the year ending March 2022. This suggests that the improvements in crime recording were an important factor in the increases seen in police recorded hate crime.

Figure 2.1: Indexed trends in the number of police recorded violence against the person and public order and hate crime offences (excluding MPS), year ending March 2015 to year ending March 2025 (2014/15 = 100)

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

2.2 Hate crime by strand

Trend analyses in this section exclude the MPS (see Section 1.2).

Race hate crime

As in previous years, race hate crimes accounted for the majority of police recorded hate crimes (71%; 82,490 offences). These offences increased by 6% over the last year but were below the peak seen in the year ending March 2022 (87,905 offences).

The increase in these offences over the last year was due to an increase in public order offences, which increased by 7% (2,736 offences), racially or religiously aggravated harassment up 21%; 1,497 offences) and racially or religiously aggravated assault without injury (up 10%, 771 offences).

Religious hate crime

There was a 3% increase in police recorded religious hate crime over the last year, from 6,973 to 7,164 offences, the highest annual total of these offences recorded.

There was a 19% rise in religious hate crimes targeted at Muslims (from 2,690 to 3,199 offences). Figure 2.2 shows a clear spike in these offences in August 2024, which coincides with the Southport murders on the 29 July and the subsequent disorder across several English towns and cities.

The number of religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people fell by 18%, from 2,093 to 1,715 offences. Caution is needed with these figures as they exclude the MPS who recorded 40% of all religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people in the last year. This fall follows a 113% increase in these offences in the year ending March 2024 (which included MPS data), with a spike in these offences after the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Figure 2.2: Number of religious hate crimes targeted against Jews and Muslims by month, year ending March 2025 (35 forces)

Public order offences were the most commonly recorded hate crimes targeted against Muslims and Jews (50% of offences for both).

Figure 2.3 Proportion of offences targeted against Jews and Muslims, by offence type, year ending March 2025

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

Of the 10,065 religious hate crimes recorded by the police in the year ending March 2025 (including the MPS), information on the targeted religion was provided in 9,843 of the offences (98%). However, in 11% of cases, the religion was given as ‘unknown’. Information on the targeted religions for the year ending March 2025 can be found in Table 2.2.

Table 2.2: Numbers, proportions and rates of religious hate crimes recorded by the police, by the perceived targeted religion, all forces, year ending March 2025, England and Wales

Perceived religion of the victim	2024/25	Proportion of religious hate crimes 2024/25 (%)	Religious hate crimes rate per 10,000 population
Buddhist	28	0	1
Christian	502	5	0
Hindu	182	2	2
Jewish	2,873	29	106
Muslim	4,478	45	12
Sikh	259	3	5
Other	612	6	18
No religion	161	2	0
Unknown	1,075	11	[u]
Total number of targeted religions	10,170
Total number of religious hate crimes (targeted religion provided)	9,843
Number of offences where no information on targeted religion was provided	222
Total number of religious hate crime offences	10,065

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

Notes:

1. [u] indicates a number is unavailable.

Information on religious hate crimes can also be presented based on rates per population, using estimates from the 2021 Census (data below include the MPS). In the last year, there were 106 religious hate crimes per 10,000 population targeted at Jewish people, the highest rate for any religious group. The next highest rate was for hate crimes targeted at Muslims, with 12 per 10,000 population. ‘Other religion’ had a rate of 18 religious hate crimes per 10,000 population. This category on the Census covers 43 different religions and may not match up with the religions recorded by the police under this category.

Sexual orientation hate crime

There was a 2% fall in sexual orientation hate crimes over the last year, to 18,702 offences, the third successive annual fall. The latest figure was 16% lower than the peak in the year ending March 2022, when 22,317 offences were recorded. The decline in these offences was driven by a 36% fall in malicious communications offences, from 1,547 to 997 offences.

The fall in malicious communication offences follows changes made to the Home Office Counting Rules (HOCR) in 2023 for conduct crimes (stalking, harassment and coercive and controlling behaviour). The requirement to record 2 crimes when one of them was a conduct crime was removed, leading to a reduction in those crimes often associated with conduct crimes, such as malicious communications. There has been an increase in stalking and harassment offences in recent years as the police focus their investigations on these conduct crimes.

Disability hate crimes

Disability hate crimes fell by 8% over the last year, to 10,224 offences, the second consecutive annual fall. The fall in these offences was due to falls in public order offences (down 452) and malicious communication offences (down 399). As outlined above, the fall in malicious communication offences follows changes to the HOCR.

Transgender hate crimes

Transgender hate crimes fell by 11% over the last year, to 3,809 offences, the second consecutive annual fall. There were falls in malicious communication offences (down 245), following the HOCR changes, criminal damage (down 82) and public order (down 96).

Hate crime by multiple factors

It is possible for a crime to have more than one motivating factor (for example, an offence may be motivated by hostility towards both the victim’s race and religion). Thus, as well as recording the overall number of hate crimes, the police also collect data on the number of motivating factors by strand as shown in Table 2.1. For this reason, the sum of the 5 motivating factors in the above exceeds the 115,990 overall hate crime offences recorded by the police (excluding the MPS). Five per cent of hate crime offences in the year ending March 2025 were estimated to have involved more than one motivating factor (based on 35 forces who supplied record level data).

Hate crime data by police force area from the year ending March 2012 to the year ending March 2025 can be found in the Home Office Open data tables.

2.3 Hate crimes by type of offence

Information presented in this section includes the MPS data as no year-on-year comparisons are presented.

Just over half (52%) of the hate crimes recorded by the police in the year ending March 2025 were for public order offences, with a further 41% for violence against the person offences (Figure 2.4; Bulletin Table 6. Together, these offence categories accounted for over 9 in 10 (93%) of all hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales.

Figure 2.4: Distribution of offences recorded by the police flagged as hate crimes, England and Wales, year ending March 2025

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

The distribution of hate crime offences differs markedly from overall police recorded crime. Theft offences accounted for a third (34%) of all recorded crime in the year ending March 2025 (for information on offences for all police recorded crime see: Crime in England and Wales - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)); these offences would be less likely to involve a motivating factor against a monitored strand. In contrast, public order offences accounted for 9% of all notifiable offences compared with 52% of hate crime offences (Figure 2.5).

Figure 2.5: Breakdown of hate crimes and overall recorded crime by selected offence types, England and Wales, year ending March 2025

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

Figure 2.6 shows what type of offences were recorded for each monitored strand. As in previous years, public order offences were the most common category to be recorded for all strands except for disability-targeted hate crime. Stalking and harassment offences were the most commonly recorded for disability-targeted hate crimes.

Figure 2.6: Breakdown of hate crime by selected offence types and monitored strand, England and Wales, year ending March 2025

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

2.4 Racial or religiously aggravated offences

The data the Home Office receives in the main police recorded crime return for racially or religiously aggravated offences are available on a monthly basis whereas data for all hate crimes for all forces are only available annually. MPS data is included in this section as data on specific offences were unaffected by the change in their crime recording system (see Section 1.2).

There are several time periods where a rise in aggravated offences has not been seen in the non-aggravated offences. These ‘spikes’ coincide with certain events. The most recent of these was seen in August 2024, following the Southport murders on the 29 July and the subsequent disorder and related protests in certain towns and cities across England. There were 10,097 racially or religiously aggravated offences recorded in August 2024, the highest monthly total ever recorded.

At the police force area level, 27 of the 44 forces in England and Wales, including the British Transport Police, recorded their highest ever monthly levels of these aggravated offences in August 2024. All 44 forces recorded a higher number of these offences in this month than the previous August.

Previous spikes in racially or religiously aggravated offences were also observed:

• following the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict in October 2023
• at times when there have been an increased number of protests, such as the summer of 2020 following the Black Lives Matter protests and far-right counter-protests following the death of George Floyd on 25 May in the United States of America
• July 2017, following the terrorist attacks seen that year
• around the time of the EU Referendum

Figure 2.7: Indexed number of racially or religiously aggravated offences recorded by the police by month, England and Wales, April 2015 to March 2025

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

Ethnicity of victims in racially or religiously aggravated crimes

From April 2021, it became a requirement for forces to provide the Home Office with the ethnicity of victims of racially or religiously aggravated offences. Last year, we moved to self-defined ethnicity to be in line with Office for National Statistics Census categories and to better reflect the actual ethnicity of the victims of hate crimes.

Of the 84,374 racially or religiously aggravated crimes recorded by the police in the year ending March 2025, information on the victim ethnicity was provided in 34,072 of the offences (40%). Data was supplied by all forces except Leicestershire Police.

Where the ethnicity of the victim was known, the victim identified as White in just under a third of offences (30%). Almost a quarter of victims identified themselves as Black (23%), and 33% as Asian (Table 2.3). It is likely that offences against White victims will include xenophobic abuse against people not born in the UK.

Given the relatively high proportion of offences where the ethnicity of victim was not recorded, these figures should be taken as indicative only.

Table 2.3: Proportion of racially or religiously aggravated offences recorded by the police, by victim ethnicity (where known), year ending March 2025, England and Wales, excluding Leicestershire Police

				Ethnicity
Offence Code	Description	White (%)	Black/African/ Caribbean/Black British (%)	Asian/ Asian British (%)	Mixed/multiple ethnic groups (%)	Other ethnic group (%)
105B	Racially or religiously aggravated assault without injury	22	30	36	7	5
58J	Racially or religiously aggravated criminal damage	37	15	36	5	7
8M	Racially or religiously aggravated harassment	36	20	27	11	6
8P	Racially or religiously aggravated assault with injury	26	23	35	9	6
9B	Racially or religiously aggravated public fear, alarm or distress	30	23	33	8	5
Total offences (%)		30	23	33	8	5

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office Data Hub

2.5 Hate crime outcomes

The Home Office collects information on the investigative outcomes of police recorded offences, including those that are identified as hate crimes. For further information on outcomes see Crime Outcomes in England and Wales: 2024 to 2025.

This section covers how the police have dealt with hate crimes recorded in the year ending March 2025. This analysis is based on the outcomes assigned to crimes recorded at the time the data was extracted (July 2025). Some offences will not have been assigned an outcome at this time and therefore these figures will be subject to change as police investigations continue and more outcomes are assigned. Data for the MPS are included in this section.

Racially or religiously aggravated offence outcomes

Data presented in this section are for racially or religiously aggravated offences. This data was available for all police forces. Data on outcomes for all hate crime offences, which were available for 35 of the 44 police forces, are presented in the next section.

At the time this data was extracted, 88% of racially or religiously aggravated offences had been assigned an outcome compared with 94% of their non-aggravated counterparts (see Police recorded crime outcomes open data year ending March 2025).

Figure 2.8 shows that racially or religiously aggravated public order and assault offences were more likely to be dealt with by a charge/summons than their non-aggravated counterparts, reflecting the more serious nature of the aggravated offences. For example, over 3 times the proportion of racially or religiously aggravated public fear, alarm or distress offences had been dealt with by charge/summons than the non-aggravated equivalent offences (10% and 3% respectively). In contrast, for criminal damage, non-aggravated offences were slightly more likely to result in a charge or summons (5%) compared with the racially aggravated equivalent offences (4%).

Figure 2.8: Percentage of racially or religiously aggravated offences and their non-aggravated equivalents recorded in the year ending March 2025 resulting in charge/summons, by offence type, England and Wales

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

The overall proportion of racially or religiously aggravated offences resulting in a charge and or summons increased slightly to 9% compared with the previous year (8% at the time the year ending March 2024 data was published). This shows a reverse in the long-term downward trend in the proportion of offences resolved by a charge and or summons. For example, in the year ending March 2015, 30% of racially or religiously aggravated public fear, alarm or distress offences were dealt with by charge or summons. The fall in the charge summons rate was seen across most crime types, reflecting improvements in crime recording and the changing caseload and crime mix being dealt with by the police.

Flagged hate crime offences – Home Office Data Hub (HODH)

The HODH is a case-level dataset of offences recorded by the police in England and Wales and provides information on how hate crimes have been dealt with by the police. The analyses presented are based on data from 35 of the 44 police forces in England and Wales that supplied adequate data to the Data Hub. These forces’ data accounted for three-quarters (77%) of all police recorded hate crime in the year ending March 2025.

In total, 91% of hate crime flagged offences recorded in the year ending March 2025 had been assigned an outcome at the time the data was extracted for analysis. The remaining 9% were still under investigation. The same proportion of non-hate crime offences had been assigned an outcome at the time of data extraction (91%).

Appendix Table 4 shows that 8% of all hate crime flagged offences had been dealt with by a charge or summons. This was slightly higher than the previous year (7%), which was based on data from 30 forces, so is not directly comparable.

The distribution of offences recorded by the police that constituted hate crimes was very different to overall crime. Therefore, to provide more meaningful comparisons charge/summons rates are shown below for certain offence groups.

Figure 2.4 shows that violence against the person, public order offences and criminal damage and arson offences comprised 97% of hate crime flagged offences. This proportion was the same for the 35 forces included in this analysis, suggesting that these forces are broadly representative of all.

The proportions of outcomes assigned varied by offence type (Appendix Table 5; Figure 2.9):

• in the latest year, 6% of violence against the person hate crime flagged offence were dealt with by a charge or summons, a similar proportion compared with non-flagged offences (6%); these proportions have moved closer in recent years
• a greater proportion (11%) of hate crime flagged public order offences had been dealt with by a charge or summons compared with non-hate crime flagged public order offences (7%)
• a slightly higher proportion (5%) of non-hate crime flagged criminal damage and arson offence had been dealt with by a charge or summons compared with hate crime flagged criminal damage and arson offences (4%)

Figure 2.9: Percentage of selected offences dealt with by a charge/summons, offences recorded in the year ending March 2025, England and Wales, 35 forces

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

The most frequent outcome recorded for violent offences was “evidential difficulties as the victim does not support action”; this was the outcome for 32% of hate crime flagged violence against the person offences compared with 43% of non-hate crime flagged offences. For both hate crime flagged and non-hate crime flagged violent offences, a formal out-of-court disposal such as a caution was assigned in 1% of offences (Appendix Table 5).

Figure 2.10 shows the proportion of hate crimes that were dealt with by charge or summons for each of the 5 hate crime strands for 3 offence groups. While the proportions for race, religious and sexual orientation hate crimes tended to be higher than for non-hate crimes, the figures for disability and transgender hate crime were lower.

Figure 2.10: Percentage of selected offences resulting in charge/summons, by hate crime strand, offences recorded in the year ending March 2025, England and Wales, 35 forces

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

Figure 2.11 shows the median number of days taken, from the date the crime was recorded until it was closed with a final outcome, for selected hate crime and non-hate crime offences. Hate crime offences, on average, took longer to be assigned a final outcome than non-hate crime offences. For example, the median number of days taken for criminal damage and arson hate crime offences was 22 days, compared with 8 days for non-hate crime offences. Similarly, it took longer to compete an investigation of violence against the person hate crime offences (median=40 days) than for non-hate crime flagged violent offences (median=23 days). This may be due to the complexity of these crimes, or the greater investigative effort invested, reflecting the serious nature of these offences.

Figure 2.11: Median number of days taken to assign an outcome, hate crime flagged and non-hate crime flagged offences, outcomes recorded in the year ending March 2025, England and Wales, 35 forces

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

3. Hate crime from the CSEW

Key results

• the combined April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW estimated there were an average of 176,000 incidents of hate crime a year. This was similar to the previous estimate of 190,000 incidents (from the combined April 2017 to March 2020 surveys)
• over the longer-term, the number of hate crime incidents has fallen, by 43% between the combined April 2007 and March 2009 surveys (307,000 incidents) and the latest estimate of 176,000
• overall, 44% of hate crime incidents came to the attention of the police, a higher proportion than for all CSEW crime (37%)
• victims of hate crime were more likely to report being affected by the incident rather than victims of all CSEW crime, for example, 39% of hate crime victims said they were ‘very much’ affected emotionally following the incident compared with 14% for all CSEW crime
• satisfaction levels with the police have fallen, with the latest estimates showing 40% were very or fairly satisfied with how the police handled the crime, down from 55% in the previous figures

3.1 Overall hate crime incidents

Hate crime estimates in this section are based on the combined figures from 3 years of the CSEW; the year ending March 2023, 2024 and 2025 surveys. For ease, these are referred to as the April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW, or the latest CSEW estimates.

The April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW estimated that there were 176,000 incidents of hate crime a year. This represents around 4% of all CSEW crime (4.5 million incidents), a similar level to the latest annual proportion in the police recorded crime series (3%).

The latest annual estimate of 176,000 incidents is not statistically significantly different from the previous estimate (190,000 incidents per year in the April 2017 to March 2020 survey).

Over the longer-term, the CSEW has shown a fall in hate crime incidents with the latest estimate 43% below that from the April 2007 to March 2009 CSEW (down from 307,000 to 176,000). The latest estimate was also lower than a decade ago (down 21% from 222,000 in the April 2012 to March 2015 survey). There were no statistically significant differences in the last 3 CSEW hate crime estimates (184,000, 190,000 and 176,000 incidents per year; Figure 3.1; Appendix Table 8).

Figure 3.1: Estimated number of annual incidents of hate crimes (thousands), April 2007 to March 2009 CSEW to April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW

Source: CSEW, ONS

This fall in CSEW hate crime over the longer-term contrasts with the police recorded hate crime series, which showed increases in these offences between the year ending March 2013 and the year ending March 2022. These increases were driven by improvements in crime recording, as outlined in Section 2.1. Therefore, police recorded crime data do not provide reliable trends in hate crime. The CSEW estimates were not affected by changes in recording practices by the police.

Furthermore, the coverage of hate crime as measured by the CSEW is different to police recorded crime. As shown in Section 2.3, public order offences account for over half of police recorded hate crime offences. These offences are not well covered by the CSEW, as many of these offences will not involve a specifically identifiable victim – so will not be captured in a victimisation survey. Caution is needed in comparing the trends in the 2 sources. Other differences between the CSEW and police recorded crime are outlined in Section 4.4.

3.2 Hate crime prevalence

The latest CSEW showed that 0.3% of adults were victims of any hate crime in the 12 months prior to interview. To put these figures in context, across all CSEW crime, around 1 in 10 (10.2%) were victims of crime (Appendix Table 10).

Over the longer term, the decline observed in the number of hate crime incidents has also been reflected in the prevalence of hate crime. There was a statistically significant fall in the percentage of adults who were victims of hate crime from 0.6% in the April 2007 to March 2009 CSEW to 0.3% in the April 2015 to March 20218 CSEW. The rate has remained at 0.3% since.

Over the same time period, there was also a fall in prevalence of all CSEW headline crime excluding fraud and computer misuse, from 22.7% of adults in the April 2007 to March 2009 CSEW to 14.5% in the April 2015 to March 2018 CSEW. In contrast to hate crime, the prevalence rate for all CSEW headline crime has continued to fall, to 10.2% from the latest combined surveys.

3.3 CSEW hate crime by strand

As with police recorded crime, race hate crimes were the most common of the 5 centrally monitored strands (93,000 incidents a year). Figures for the other strands are shown in Figure 3.2 and Appendix Table 16.

Figure 3.2: Estimated number of incidents of hate crimes with confidence intervals, April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW

Source: CSEW, ONS

Notes:

1. Figures for all hate crime do not equal to the sum of incidents in individual strands as the victim may have said the crime was motivated by more than one strand.

Estimated volumes of 3 of the 5 strands of hate crime have declined between the April 2007 to March 2009 CSEW and the latest figures. Race hate crimes have fallen by 39%, sexual orientation by 66% and disability hate crimes were down by 31%. The trend in religious hate crimes has been relatively flat. It is not possible to determine the trend in gender identity hate crimes due to the low number of CSEW respondents included in the survey sample.

As stated in the Introduction, survey years have been combined to give more robust estimates for hate crime. However, even with the joining of datasets, the number of victims of hate crimes upon which these estimates were based was still relatively small. Therefore, the associated ‘range’ or confidence intervals around the estimate of total hate crimes and each monitored strand are relatively large, as shown in Figure 3.2, and care needs to be taken in making comparisons over time, and between the monitored strands.

3.4 CSEW personal and household hate crime

The CSEW provides estimates of the levels of personal and household crimes experienced by adults in England and Wales. Personal crimes are those against the individual and only relate to the respondent’s own personal experience (not that of other people in the household). Household crimes cover property crimes which target the household more generally (for example, burglary, criminal damage, or vehicle-related theft) and respondents are asked whether anyone currently residing in the household has experienced any such incident. See Section 2.5 in ONS’s User guide to crime statistics in England and Wales for a discussion of measures of CSEW crime.

The April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW showed that two-thirds (67%, 118,000 incidents) of CSEW hate crime were personal hate crimes, while a third (33%, 58,000) were household crimes. This differs from the overall CSEW, where household crimes accounted for over half (57%) of all CSEW headline crime excluding fraud and computer misuse (Appendix Table 8).

3.5 CSEW hate crime by crime type

As in previous years, the proportion of incidents that were perceived to be hate crime varied by crime type. For example, 10% of the violence without injury incidents in the CSEW were perceived to be hate crimes, more than twice the proportion of criminal damage (4%; Appendix Table 11).

Violent crimes and criminal damage offences accounted for the majority of hate crime incidents in the CSEW. Just over a half (51%) of CSEW hate crimes were violent, with a further 1 in 6 (17%) being criminal damage incidents. In comparison, only 20% of all CSEW headline crime excluding fraud and computer misuse was violence (Bulletin Table 17).

Table 3.1: Percentage of hate crime incidents, by type of offence, April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW

Type of incident	All hate crime excluding fraud and computer misuse [note 1] (%)	CSEW headline crime excluding fraud and computer misuse (%)
Personal crime excluding fraud and computer misuse	64	40
Violence without injury	33	11
Violence with injury	18	8
Robbery	4	2
Theft from person	4	8
Other theft of personal property	4	10
Household crime	36	60
Criminal damage	17	15
Burglary	10	9
Vehicle-related theft	3	16
Bicycle theft	1	5
Other household theft	7	17
Unweighted base [note 2]	588	12,768

Source: CSEW, ONS

Notes:

1. Forces included were: Please note that the hate crime offences are a subset of all CSEW crime, this should be borne in mind when making comparisions between them.
2. Base is all CSEW crime incidents.

3.6 Victimisation by personal and household characteristics

Analysis of victimisation by personal and household characteristics showed that for personal hate crime (as with CSEW crime overall, Appendix Table 12), the risk of being a victim varied by socio-demographic characteristics.

It should be noted that differences in victimisation rates between ethnic groups may be at least partly attributable to factors other than ethnicity. Previous research (Jansson, 2006; Salisbury and Upson, 2004) has shown that people with a Mixed ethnic background are most at risk of crime. However, multivariate analyses identified that, for the key crime types, ethnicity was not independently associated with the risk of victimisation (Jansson et al., 2007). The proportion of young people in the Mixed ethnic group was, for example, found to be large in comparison to other ethnic groups; and young people are at a higher risk of victimisation (Flatley et al., 2010). There are also inter-relationships between other personal characteristics.

Furthermore, the nature of the hate crimes identified by the CSEW will be proportionately different to the crime mix of the overall survey. For example, hate crimes are more likely to be violent crimes than for all CSEW crime.

The risk of being a victim of personal hate crime in the April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW (Appendix Table 12) was highest, for example, among:

• men aged 16 to 24 (0.4%), compared with 0.2% for all adults
• Muslims (0.6%) compared with, for example, 0.1% of Christians
• Asian/Asian British adults (0.6%) compared with White adults (0.1%)
• those whose gender identity was different from the sex registered at birth (1.3% compared with 0.2% where the gender was same as the sex registered at birth)

The risk of being a victim of household hate crime (Appendix Table 13) was highest among, for example, people who:

• were social renters (0.5%) compared with, for example, 0.1% of owner occupiers
• lived in a household resident within the 20% most deprived areas, by English Indices of Deprivation (0.3% compared with 0.04% among those who lived in households within the 20% least deprived areas)

3.7 Reporting hate crime

The CSEW asks people who experienced crimes whether or not the police came to know about the incident, that is, because they reported themselves or the police came to know about it in another way (for example, someone else reported it or the police arrived at the scene of crime). The April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW estimated that 44% of hate crime incidents came to the attention of the police. This was higher than that for all CSEW headline crime excluding fraud and computer misuse, which was 37%. The difference in reporting rates was most marked for household crime (Appendix Table 15).

The apparent higher reporting rate for hate crime compared with all CSEW headline crime excluding fraud and computer misuse may be, in part, due to the different types of crime experienced by victims. For example, as shown in Table 3.1, a higher proportion of hate crimes were for violence (51%) that overall CSEW crime (20%). Violent offences have a higher reporting rate (43%) than, for example, theft offences (34%). Conversely, theft offences accounted for around two-thirds (66%) of all CSEW headline crime, but less than half that (29%) for hate crimes. Therefore, the crime mix is likely to be a factor in the different reporting rates.

3.8 Racially or religiously motivated hate crime

This section provides additional information for racially or religiously motivated hate crimes. Comparisons are made with all CSEW headline crime excluding fraud and computer misuse (called all CSEW headline crime for ease).

Racially motivated hate crime

The April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW estimated that there were 93,000 incidents of racially motivated hate crime per year (Appendix Table 8). Most incidents (66,000) were personal crimes (such as assaults with or without injury). From these combined surveys, 0.2% of adults were estimated to be victims of a racially motivated hate crime in the 12 months prior to interview.

Asian and Black adults were more likely to be victims of a racially motivated hate crime than White adults (for example, 0.7% of both Asian and Black adults compared with 0.1% of White adults). For all CSEW headline crime (of which hate crime incidents are a subset), adults from all other ethnic groups were also more likely to be victims in general than White adults (14.3% of adults from Mixed ethnic groups, 10.6% of adults from an Asian ethnic group and also 10.6% from a Black ethnic group compared with 9.9% of White adults; Table 20).

Table 3.2: Percentage of adults aged 16 or over who were victims of racially-motivated hate crime and all CSEW crime, by ethnic group, April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW

	All racially motivated hate crime excluding fraud and computer misuse [note 2]	CSEW headline crime excluding fraud and computer misuse	Unweighted base
All adults	0.2	10.2	93,562
Ethnic group [note 1]
White	0.1	9.9	79,641
Mixed/multiple ethnic groups	0.5	14.3	1,325
Asian/Asian British	0.7	10.6	7,294
Black/African/Caribbean/Black British	0.7	10.6	3,777
Other ethnic group	0.5	12.9	1,200

Source: CSEW, ONS

Notes:

1. Ethnic group is based on the 2011 Census definition of ethnic group which now includes Chinese in the Asian/Asian British group. For more information see Section 7.3 of the User guide to crime statistics in England and Wales.
2. This percentage is calculated treating a household crime as a personal crime.

Analysis of racially motivated hate crime by religion shows that Muslim adults were more likely to be a victim (1.0%) than those adults who identified as Christian or stated they had no religion (0.1%; Appendix Table 16).

Religiously motivated hate crime

The latest combined CSEW surveys estimated that there were 38,000 incidents of religiously motivated hate crime per year (Appendix Table 8). As with race hate crimes, personal crimes (28,000 incidents) made up a greater proportion of these than household crimes (9,000). While there have been falls over the longer-term in race, sexual orientation and disability hate crimes as estimated by the CSEW, the trend in religious hate crimes has been relatively flat.

The CSEW estimated that 0.1% of adults were victims of a religiously motivated hate crime in the 12 months prior to interview. Muslim adults (0.8%) were the most likely to be a victim of religiously motivated hate crime, followed by Jewish adults (0.4%; Appendix Table 17).

3.9 Additional information from the CSEW

The CSEW also provides additional information on victim satisfaction with the police following a hate crime incident, the emotional impact of being a victim and respondents’ worry about hate crime. Where possible, comparisons are made with all CSEW headline crime excluding fraud and computer misuse.

Victim satisfaction with the police

CSEW respondents who were victims of crime and had contact with the police in the 12 months prior to their interview were asked how satisfied they were with the way the police handled the matter. The April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW showed that 40% of hate crime victims were very or fairly satisfied with the handling of the matter, a lower proportion than for victims of all CSEW headline crime (54% were very or fairly satisfied). Hate crime victims were also more likely to be very dissatisfied (42%) with the police handling of the matter than victims of all CSEW headline crime (24%; Appendix Table 18 and Figure 3.3).

Victim satisfaction with the way the police handled the matter has declined since the last published estimates prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Those who were very or fairly satisfied fell from 55% to 40% for hate crimes, and 66% to 54% for all CSEW headline crime (Appendix Table 18).

Figure 3.3: Victim satisfaction with the police, April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW

Source: CSEW, ONS

There has also been a decline in the proportion of people who thought they were treated fairly by the police. In the latest estimates, 42% of hate crime victims thought they had been treated fairly, down from 70% in the April 2017 to March 2020 survey (Appendix Table 18). There was a less pronounced fall in victims who thought they were treated fairly for all CSEW headline crime over the same period, from 79% to 68%.

Effects of hate crime

Victims were asked about their emotional reactions after the crime incident they experienced. According to the April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW, victims of hate crime were more likely than victims of all CSEW headline crime to say they were emotionally affected by the incident (92% and 75% respectively) and more likely to be ‘very much’ affected (39% and 14% respectively). This continues the pattern seen in previous years (Appendix Table 19).

Of those who said they were emotionally affected, victims of hate crimes tended to be more affected than victims of all CSEW headline crime. For example, almost twice as many victims of hate crime said they had suffered a loss of confidence or had felt vulnerable after the incident (44%), compared with all victims of all CSEW headline crime (24%). Hate crime victims were also more than twice as likely to experience fear, difficultly sleeping, anxiety or panic attacks and depression or crying/tears compared with victims of overall CSEW headline crime (Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4: Emotional impact of hate crime incidents, April 2022 to March 2025 CSEW

Source: CSEW, ONS

Worry about being a victim of crime

The CSEW asks respondents how worried they are about being a victim of different types of crime. The latest CSEW estimates showed that 3% of all adults were ‘very’ worried about being subject to a physical attack because of their skin colour, ethnic origin or religion. In the latest figures, Black/Black British adults (11%) and Asian/Asian British adults (10%) showed the highest proportions of adults who were very worried about being a victim of crime. The proportion of people who are worried about being a victim of crime has tended to fall since the last estimates from before the pandemic (April 2017 to March 2020 survey; Figure 3.5, Appendix Table 20).

Figure 3.5: Proportion of people who said they were very worried about being a victim of crime, by ethnicity, CSEW

Source: CSEW, ONS

4. Data sources and quality

4.1 Police recorded hate crime overview

In January 2014, the UK Statistics Authority published its assessment of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) crime statistics. It found that statistics based on police recorded crime data, having been assessed against the Code of Practice for Official Statistics (now the Code of Practice for Statistics), did not meet the required standard for designation as National Statistics (now accredited official statistics). The designation was therefore removed and police recorded crime data is not designated as accredited official statistics.

Police forces have made significant improvements in how they record crime since 2014. The HMICFRS, in August 2025, published How effectively do the police record crime?. This report brings together findings from HMICFRS inspection programmes in recent years and outlines how the police have improved their crime recording.

Police forces also improved their identification of what constitutes a hate crime over this time period. Due to these improvements, police recorded crime figures do not currently provide reliable trends in hate crime. The figures do, however, provide a good measure of the hate crime-related demand on the police.

The UK Statistics Authority published a list of requirements for police recorded crime data to regain accredited official statistics designation. Some of the requirements of this assessment were to provide more detail on how data sources were used to produce these statistics, along with more information on the quality of the statistics. Additionally, there was a requirement to provide information on the process used by police forces to submit and revise data, and the validation processes used by the Home Office. To ensure that this publication meets the high standards required by the UK Statistics Authority, details are provided in Section 4.2.

In May 2022, the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) wrote to the Home Office following their compliance review into published hate crime statistics across the UK. The OSR recognised the difficulties in measuring hate crime but found a range of positive features that demonstrate the value and quality of the published statistics in their review.

Additionally, they recognised the difficulty in presenting data on police recorded hate crime without the CSEW estimates to provide context to the numbers, meaning “it is difficult to determine whether police recorded hate crime is increasing”. They stated that they had heard from users of a ‘perception problem’, where “the public is likely to see police recorded crime as the main data source, despite ongoing concerns about data quality” and asked the Home Office to make clear in this publication the limitations of police recorded crime data. Information on the uncertainty of police recorded crime trends is now outlined throughout the publication in response to this recommendation.

4.2 Police recorded crime data sources and validation process

Hate crime data is supplied to the Home Office by the 43 territorial police forces of England and Wales, plus the British Transport Police.

Greater Manchester Police were not able to supply hate crime data for the year ending March 2020 following the implementation of a new IT system in July 2019.

In February 2024, the MPS changed crime recording systems as part of a wider improvement project to replace several legacy IT systems with a single integrated solution.

The new system, CONNECT, is used nationally by several police services and allows more effective and efficient management of data related to intelligence, investigations, custody and other policing functions. In moving to the new system, some data quality issues have been revealed with the legacy crime recording system, CRIS. Under the new CONNECT crime recording system, one record is created for every victim of crime. Under their old system, it was possible for investigating officers to nest more than one offence under a single crime incident report. However, due to limitations of the previous system, if a hate crime identifier was added to one offence within this crime report, this would by default be added to all offences that had also been recorded under that report, whether or not all offences were hate crimes.

For example, if the police attended a public order incident and recorded several offences under the same report, and one of these was identified as being a hate crime, all offences would be counted as a hate crime in the statistics supplied to the Home Office. This means that while the MPS were accurately counting the number of total crimes in line with the Home Office Counting Rules, data in previous years were overstating the number of offences that were hate crimes. Under the new MPS system, each offence has its own crime record, allowing the MPS to improve their data quality by correctly identifying which offences were hate crimes. It should be noted that the over flagging of offences as hate crimes had no downstream impact on the handling or processing of cases within the criminal justice system.

Due to the change in the MPS crime recording system, MPS data for the year ending March 2025 are not comparable with data supplied in previous years and have been excluded from the trend analysis in this bulletin.

Forces either supply the data at least monthly via the HODH or on an annual basis in a manual return. For forces with data on the Data Hub, the Home Office extracts the number of offences for each force which have been flagged by forces as having been motivated by one or more of the monitored strands. Therefore, counts of hate crime via the HODH are dependent on the flag being used for each hate crime offence. It is then possible to derive the count of offences and the monitored strands covered.

In the manual return, police forces submit both the total number of hate crime offences (that is a count of the number of unique offences motivated by one or more of the 5 monitored strands) and the monitored strands (or motivating factors) associated with these offences. From the year ending March 2016, police forces who returned data manually were required to provide an offence group breakdown for recorded hate crimes; prior to the year ending March 2016 only an aggregated total of hate crimes for each of the 5 strands was asked for. It is possible for more than one of the monitored strands (motivating factors) to be assigned to a crime. For example, an offence could be motivated by hostility to race and religion, so would be counted under both strands but would only constitute one offence.

It is known that for some police forces, the addition of tags to crime records could be improved. For example, there may be crimes that are operationally treated as a hate crime but were not correctly identified as a hate crime on their crime recording system. In July 2018, HMICFRS published a report on how the police deal with hate crime, including how crimes are flagged. Findings included a lack of recognition in forces about how important the flagging of hate crimes is and concerns around the lack of effective audit arrangements to check flags had been applied correctly.

The full report can be found here: Understanding the difference: the initial police response to hate crime.

Further information on how the police record hate crime can be found in the College of Policing’s Authorised Professional Practice guidance on hate crime publication, launched in October 2020.

At the end of each financial year, the Home Office carry out a series of quality assurance checks on the hate crime data collected from the police forces (either by aggregate return or via the HODH).

These include checking:

• any large or unusual changes in hate crimes from the previous year
• outliers
• that the number of hate crimes by strand is higher than the total number of offences

Police forces are then asked to investigate these trends and either provide an explanation or resubmit figures where the quality assurance exercise identifies data quality issues.

The data is then tabulated by monitored strand and year and sent back to forces for them to verify. At this stage, they are asked to confirm in writing that the data they submitted are correct and if they are not, then they have the opportunity to revise their figures.

From April 2016, the Home Office began collecting information from the police on the perceived religion of victims of religious hate crimes – that the religion targeted by the offender. While in the majority of offences the perceived and actual religion of the victim will be the same, in some cases this will differ. For example, if anti-Muslim graffiti is sprayed on a religious temple of another faith, this would be recorded as an offence of racially or religiously aggravated criminal damage and flagged by the respective police force as a religious hate crime against Muslims. This collection was voluntary in the year ending March 2017 and made mandatory for the year ending March 2018.

From April 2021, the Home Office has begun the collecting the ethnicity of the victims of racial hate crimes recorded by the police. This data was originally published based on officer-defined ethnicity. From the year ending March 2024, this data has been published on self-defined ethnicity.

4.3 Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW)

CSEW estimates are accredited official statistics and were independently reviewed by the Office for Statistics Regulation in October 2024. They comply with the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics.

The CSEW is primarily an interviewer-administered face-to-face victimisation survey in which people (aged 16 years and over) resident in households in England and Wales are asked about their experiences of selected crimes in the 12 months before the interview. It tracks long-term crime trends from year ending December 1981 to year ending March 2025.

The size of the CSEW sample means the number of hate crime incidents and victims estimated in a single survey year is too unreliable to report on. Therefore, 3 annual datasets are combined to provide a larger sample which can be used to produce robust estimates for hate crime. As 3 years’ worth of data has been combined, the CSEW estimates for hate crime are not suitable for examining short term changes in hate crime.

The latest figures are based on interviews between April 2022 and March 2025, covering crimes that occurred between April 2021 and February 2025.

Home Office analysts are grateful to the ONS for providing the CSEW data and tables published in this release.

4.4 Understanding differences between the CSEW and police recorded hate crime

Statistics on police recorded hate crime are published on an annual basis, with estimates from the CSEW normally published every third year. However, the face-to-face CSEW was suspended due to public health restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The estimates in this bulletin, for the combined surveys from the year ending March 2023 to the year ending March 2025, are the first published estimates since the Hate Crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2020 release.

Trends in police recorded and CSEW hate crime have been notably different over the time periods that both data sources are available. Police recorded hate crime has risen, while the CSEW has shown a fall over the longer-term. The main reason for this difference will be due to the improvements to recording processes and practices made by the police since 2014. HMICFRS have conducted a range of inspections related to police forces’ crime and incident recording practices in recent years. In 2014, Crime recording: making the victim count concluded that 33% of cases involving violence were not recorded by the police in England and Wales. Improvements made by the police have been outlined in How effectively do the police record crime?.

These improvements have made substantial contributions to rises in recorded crime from 2014. This effect has been more pronounced for some crime types, such as violence against the person and public order offences. These offences account for 9 in 10 (93%) of police recorded hate crimes, meaning police figures do not currently provide reliable trends in hate crime.

Additionally, there are a number of differences in the coverage of the CSEW and police recorded crime.

The CSEW is a victimisation survey which covers adults aged 16 and over resident in households in England and Wales. Police recorded crime figures includes crimes against people of all ages, against society (crimes where there is not a direct victim such as public order offences) as well as businesses and institutions. This is a key difference for hate crime offences as public order offences are not well covered by the CSEW, as many of these offences will not involve a specifically identifiable victim. Conversely, public order offences account for over a half of police recorded hate crime.

The sources cover different time periods. The most recently available CSEW data was for the combined 3 annual datasets – the year ending March 2023 to the year ending March 2025. Furthermore, as respondents are interviewed throughout the survey year for their experiences of crime in the year to interview, the 3-year survey period actually relate to a near 4-year period. This is required to produce more robust estimates on numbers of hate crimes per year from the survey. The CSEW will therefore only give a very broad estimate of the level of hate crime in England and Wales across these 4 years and will not provide any information on whether the level of hate crime has changed in this period.

Police recorded hate crime data is available on an annual basis. In addition, for racially or religiously aggravated offences, data is available for all police forces in England and Wales on a monthly basis so trends in these crimes around events such as the EU Referendum and the terrorist attacks in 2017 can be examined. However, as mentioned above it is known that police recorded crime data has been heavily affected by improvements in crime recording by the police over recent years, so data from the police are limited in assessing longer-term trends in hate crime.

Other differences in coverage include:

• respondents to the CSEW might misunderstand the survey questions; when they are asked whether they think a crime was committed because of a motivating factor, they may instead be responding based upon their perceived vulnerability; this is likely to be a reason why the estimate of disability hate crime is much higher in the CSEW than the number of these offences recorded by the police
• the respondent is asked in the survey whether the hate crime incident came to the attention of the police and, not whether the police actually recorded a crime (the police may witness an incident and decide that a crime was not committed, for example)
• similarly, while a respondent might say the crime did come to the attention of the police, the survey does not ask whether the respondent told the police that they thought it was motivated by one of the 5 hate crime strands; it is possible that some offences estimated by the survey may have been recorded by the police as a crime, but not specifically as a hate crime
• in the recording of a crime, it might not become apparent that there was a motivating hate factor, meaning that police may not ask the direct question whether the victim thought that the crime was a hate crime

5. Further information

Accompanying tables

The data tables can be found here: Hate crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2025.

Other related publications

Previous hate crime statistical bulletins published by the Home Office are available here: Hate crime statistics.

The Office for National Statistics publishes quarterly publications on crime in England and Wales: Crime and justice .

Information on Crime outcomes in England and Wales statistics.

Police recorded crime and outcomes open data tables.

The True Vision website contains more information about hate crime and how to report it: The police don’t tolerate hate crime.

The Crown Prosecution Service website also carries information about hate crime, including policy and guidance and performance information, which can be found here: Hate crime.

Hate crime statistics for Northern Ireland can be found here: Hate Motivation Statistics.

Hate crime statistics for Scotland for the year ending March 2024 can be found here: Hate crime in Scotland, 2024 to 2025.

Please note: Figures published by the Scottish Government are based on the number of offenders charged, rather than police recorded crime.

Feedback and enquiries

We welcome feedback on the annual statistics release. If you have any feedback or enquiries about this publication, please contact Crime and Policing Statistics via crimeandpolicestats@homeoffice.gov.uk.