Where Summer Drives Up Burglary (And Where It Doesn't)

In Minneapolis, summer is burglary season in the way the warnings describe it. Police there log about 283 burglaries a month from June through August, against roughly 193 a month the rest of the year, a summer lift of 47%. It is the most seasonal burglary pattern of any major U.S. city we examined.

Head most of the way across the country, to Riverside, California, and the calendar flips. Riverside averages about 118 burglaries a month in summer and about 134 the rest of the year, a summer lift of negative 12.3%. Summer is the safest burglary season Riverside has.

The home-security industry and local news segments both run the same June reminder. Even the Insurance Information Institute publishes seasonal tips built around the assumption that summer is the riskier window. We pulled three years of monthly burglary counts for the 74 largest U.S. cities reporting to the FBI to find out whether the claim survives contact with city-level data. (For broader context on U.S. burglary patterns and who gets targeted, see our companion analysis of home burglary statistics.)

The national answer is anticlimactic. Across all 74 cities, summer burglary runs just 5.6% above the rest of the year, a long way from the more than 20% the warnings imply. Taken at face value, the "summer surge" looks close to dead. It is not. It just does not live everywhere: that flat national number hides a divide so wide the two ends of it are telling opposite stories about the same season.

Group the 74 cities by climate region and the average reassembles into three very different patterns.

The 35 Cold-Winter cities average an 11.9% summer lift. This is the classic pattern: a deep winter trough, a summer peak, exactly the shape the warnings describe. Minneapolis anchors the extreme, but it has company. St. Paul runs +25.8%, Newark +25.0%, Buffalo +20.5%. Fourteen of the 15 most seasonal cities in the country are Cold-Winter cities.

The lone exception in that top 15 is Atlanta, ranked 11th at +16.2%. It is the one Sun Belt city to crack the high end of the ranking, which makes it the clearest break in an otherwise clean regional sort.

The 25 Sun Belt cities average a 4.8% lift: mild and mixed, a muted echo of the cold-city pattern with no strong seasonal signal in either direction.

The 14 Pacific Coast cities in our dataset, from Seattle south to San Diego and including Honolulu, average negative 2.0%, and the sign is no accident. Ten of the 14 post a negative summer lift, meaning burglary is lower in summer than the rest of the year. Riverside (-12.3%), Portland (-10.2%) and San Diego (-9.5%) sit at the very bottom of all 74 cities. Honolulu (-8.6%) is close behind.

The split is consistent, not anecdotal. Compare every Cold-Winter city against every Pacific Coast city pair-by-pair, and the Cold-Winter city has the higher summer lift in 425 of 490 matchups, 87%. Across the full dataset, 18 of 74 cities have a negative summer lift. The "summer burglary surge" is not a national fact. It is a regional one, and on the Pacific Coast it runs backward.

We can describe the pattern with confidence. We can only hypothesize about its causes, because seasonal burglary counts do not let us isolate one force from another. With that caution, two explanations fit the data and point in consistent directions.

The first is climate contrast. The cities with the largest summer lifts are the ones with the coldest winters. A hard winter suppresses burglary (fewer hours of daylight for daytime entries, fewer easy opportunities, more people indoors), which leaves more room for a summer rebound. Mild-climate cities never build that trough, so they have nothing to rebound from.

The second is absence. Burglary is an opportunity crime, and the classic summer story is about empty houses: vacations, second homes, students gone for the season. That story is strongest where there is a pronounced seasonal exodus, which means the colder, more northern cities, and weakest where the weather is even year-round.

One thing the data cannot separate is residential versus commercial burglary. Our counts include both, because the FBI's monthly aggregates do not split them. Within a single city that mix mostly cancels out when comparing summer to the rest of the year, but it is a genuine limit on how precisely we can name a cause.

Neither hypothesis is proof. Together they sketch a coherent picture: the summer pattern is a cold-climate phenomenon, and the Pacific Coast simply does not have the ingredients.

Seasonal security advice has a region problem. National "harden your home for summer" messaging, the kind that drives a sizable share of homeowners-insurance and home-security marketing, is aimed at the wrong half of the country.

In Minneapolis, Buffalo or Newark, the data backs the standard advice. Timers, alarms, camera checks and a mail hold do their work in June, July and August, the months these cities actually peak.

On the Pacific Coast, the riskier stretch falls in the colder half of the year. If a homeowner in Riverside, Portland or San Diego is going to think about burglary seasonally at all, that is the window to watch, not summer.

The coverage side does not move with the seasons. A standard homeowners policy covers theft year-round, and the average U.S. policy runs about $3,548 a year for $250,000 in dwelling coverage, though the right coverage amount depends on your rebuild cost, not a national average. That premium protects against theft in January exactly as it does in July.

What should shift by region is behavior, not coverage: the months when timers, alarms, camera checks and a mail hold earn their keep. A monitored security system is also one of the discounts that can lower a homeowners premium. In the cold-climate cities, that vigilance belongs in summer. On the Pacific Coast, it belongs in winter.

The "summer burglary season" is not wrong. It is parochial. It was built on a national average that masks the geography underneath. In the Cold-Winter cities, extreme winters predict a summer burglary peak. On the Pacific Coast, mild climates predict the reverse. Most of the country sits somewhere in between, with no strong season at all. The coverage does not change from region to region. The vigilance should.

The next read on this comes in 2027, when the FBI releases full-year 2025 data and a fourth year can be added to the series. Until then, the safest summary is the one the national number hides: there is no single American burglary season. There are at least two, and they fall on opposite ends of the calendar depending on where you live.

Summer Lift is the percent difference between a city's average monthly burglary count in summer (June through August) and its average monthly count across the rest of the year, using FBI NIBRS data from the Crime Data Explorer for 2022 through 2024, accessed June 29, 2026. The formula: ((average summer monthly count − average non-summer monthly count) / average non-summer monthly count) × 100. A secondary metric, Summer vs. Winter %, compares the summer average to the December-through-February average and is used for the chart only.

The national 5.6% is an aggregate: total summer burglary across all 74 cities over total non-summer burglary, which weights each city by volume. The typical city is close behind, with a median lift of 5.5% and a mean of 6.9%. The mean runs higher because it counts a small city such as Honolulu the same as a large one such as Houston, so the volume-weighted aggregate is the more defensible national number.

Of 83 target cities, nine were dropped: six because their police departments do not report to NIBRS (San Francisco, Oakland, New Orleans, Anchorage, Orlando and St. Petersburg) and three for reporting anomalies in the window (Tucson, Pittsburgh and Miami). Five more passed the quality gate but carry a single-month anomaly and are footnoted in the table (Madison, Louisville, Omaha, Santa Ana and Jersey City). The final dataset is 74 cities.

All 74 cities, ranked by summer lift from highest to lowest. A positive number means more burglary in summer; a negative number means less.