A clearance rate is the share of reported offenses a police agency marks as cleared, and per FBI published data, roughly half of reported murders in recent years were cleared — a share that has hovered between about 50 and 60 percent since the mid-2010s. Cleared, however, does not mean solved in the way most readers use the word, and the gap between the two is where the number starts to mislead.
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How is a clearance rate actually calculated?
The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program defines a cleared offense as one for which law enforcement has identified an offender, has enough evidence to charge, and has actually referred the matter — by arrest, by charging a person already in custody, or by referring a juvenile to authorities. In the old Summary Reporting System and in the National Incident-Based Reporting System that replaced it, the calculation is a ratio: offenses cleared in a calendar year, divided by offenses known to police in that same year, expressed as a percentage.
The arithmetic itself is simple. The complications come from what the numerator and denominator are allowed to contain. If a city records 100 murders in 2024 and clears 55 of them in 2024, the rate is 55 percent. But the 55 cleared offenses do not have to be the same offenses as the 100 recorded — a case from three years ago can be cleared this year and counted now, which can push a rate above 100 percent in a year with few new homicides and many old arrests.
What does "cleared" mean, in plain terms?
Cleared means police say they know who did it and the case has moved into the charging process. It does not mean anyone has been charged, tried, or convicted. An offender may be identified and referred for prosecution and then never charged, or have charges dropped, or be acquitted, and the offense remains cleared all the same. The FBI itself notes that clearance is an administrative status recorded by the investigating agency, not a court outcome.
Per the FBI's own published definitions, an offense is also cleared when an offender is identified but cannot be apprehended — someone who has died, for instance, or someone in another country beyond extradition. The status reflects an investigative judgment by the agency, made on the agency's own records, with no external audit before the figure is submitted.
Why does one case clear many offenses?
Clearance counting runs per offense, not per offender or per case file. One burglar arrested with a stash of stolen property can generate clearances for dozens of burglaries across multiple jurisdictions, because each recorded offense is cleared when connected to that person. Researchers at the Bureau of Justice Statistics have long noted this asymmetry: a single arrest can lift a property-crime clearance rate noticeably, while the same arrest is one case in court.
The reverse is also true and less intuitive. One homicide with four victims is four murder offenses in the data; one arrest clears all four. A shooting with two wounded people can be two aggravated assaults and one attempted murder in the record, and clearing any of them requires the agency to mark each offense individually. Comparing clearance rates across cities therefore compares filing habits as much as investigative performance.
Related stories: What NIBRS data shows about property crime trends · How hate crime counts are collected, and why underreporting persists.
What is exceptional clearance, and why does it matter?
Agencies may classify an offense as cleared by exceptional means when they believe they know the offender and something beyond police control prevents arrest — the offender's death is the classic example, and refusal of a victim to cooperate is another in defined circumstances. These classifications are included in the clearance rate without any external verification, and scholars who study clearance data, including analysts at the Murder Accountability Project, have argued that exceptional clearances are used unevenly across departments.
Because the classification rests on the agency's own judgment, a skeptical reading asks what would have happened without it. An offense cleared exceptionally closes the statistical file but leaves no defendant, no charge, and no court record to check the work against. Trends in exceptional clearance are therefore one of the first places researchers look when they audit a department's numbers.
How much do clearance rates vary across crimes and places?
Per FBI published data for 2023, murder and manslaughter were cleared at roughly 54 percent, aggravated assault near 46 percent, and robbery near 27 percent, while property offenses sat far lower — burglary around 12 percent, motor vehicle theft around 12 percent, and larceny-theft around 14 percent. Violent offenses clear more often than property offenses largely because victims and witnesses are more available and because forensic and investigative resources concentrate on them.
Variation across places is wider than variation across crime types. agencies serving similar populations report murder clearance rates differing by dozens of percentage points, and small agencies' rates swing wildly year to year because a handful of cases make up the whole denominator. A town with three murders one year and one the next can move from 33 to 100 percent on a single arrest.
| Offense | Approximate clearance rate, per FBI 2023 data |
|---|---|
| Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter | about 54 percent |
| Aggravated assault | about 46 percent |
| Robbery | about 27 percent |
| Burglary | about 12 percent |
| Motor vehicle theft | about 12 percent |
What should readers take from the number?
Treat clearance rates as a rough administrative indicator of investigative activity, not a measure of justice delivered. A high rate tells you offenses were administratively closed; it does not tell you arrests led to charges, charges led to convictions, or identified offenders matched the person who actually committed the offense. A low rate is more legible than a high one — it reliably means many offenses produced no identified offender — but even that is filtered through reporting practices and offense classification.
The honest use of the number is comparative and longitudinal: how a department's own rate moves over many years, and how exceptional-clearance practices shift alongside it. The FBI publishes the data precisely so the public can ask those questions, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics funds methodological work on the measure's limits. Read together, the files reward exactly the skepticism this arithmetic invites.
For more context, read What cleared by exception means, and why the classification draws scrutiny.
For more context, read seasonal crime patterns.
For more context, read What clearance data shows about homicide cases going cold.