Yes, Esher is a safe place, and safer than the borough around it. Crime runs about a tenth below the Elmbridge average. Hardly anyone is out of work. The mix of crimes looks much like the national one, just at a lower volume. The most famous killing in Esher's history was made up by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Surrey Police recorded 736 crimes in Esher in the year from June 2025 to May 2026. The published crime rate for the area is about 56 per 1,000 residents, roughly 10% below the Elmbridge average. That's twelve months of reports, long enough that one bad weekend can't change the picture. In "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge", Conan Doyle put a murder in and around Esher and needed Sherlock Holmes to solve it, and real life has given Surrey Police less to work with.
Across Elmbridge as a whole, the rate over the same twelve months was about 63 crimes per 1,000 residents, against Esher's 56. The gap is real but modest. Esher is the calmer end of a borough that isn't rough to begin with.
The neighbourhood itself explains why the numbers look this way. Esher has about 1,900 residents per square kilometre on average. About 2% of residents are unemployed and about 2% of households are overcrowded. Those are descriptions of the place, and they don't cause anything on their own. Still, it's a town of detached houses on wide plots, with few people out of work and fewer living on top of each other.
The mix of crimes is unremarkable. Violence and sexual offences were the largest category in the same twelve months, at about 34% of recorded crime against about 35% across England and Wales. That category covers everything from common assault without injury upwards, and it's the biggest one almost everywhere. Anti-social behaviour was about 13% here against 16% nationally. Public order offences were about 9% against 7%, other theft about 8% against 7%, criminal damage and arson about 7% against 7%, and vehicle crime about 6% against 5%. Vehicle crime running slightly above the national share fits a town where the cars on the driveways are worth stealing. The police.uk street map shows a year of incidents around any specific road, and it's worth checking before you make an offer.
Detection is a separate question from how often crime happens. Surrey Police charges a suspect in about 11% of cases across the whole force, against about 12% nationally, which put it 30th of 42 forces over the year to May 2026. About 36% of the force's cases closed with no suspect identified. Those are force-wide figures covering the whole of Surrey, so they say nothing about Esher's streets in particular. Esher stays safe because little crime happens, and the follow-up afterwards is no better than average.
Esher is one of the safer parts of Elmbridge. For most residents the risk is about being a target for theft, with very little danger to them personally.