Yes, Fairford is a safe place to live, with crime well below the Cotswold district average. Recorded crime here runs at about two-thirds of the district's rate. The mix of offences looks much like anywhere else in the country. The numbers are small enough that a bad month shows up in them. The weak spot is what happens after a crime is reported, and that belongs to the county's police force, not the town.
Gloucestershire Constabulary recorded 164 crimes in Fairford in the year to May 2026. The published rate is about 27 per 1,000 residents, about a third below the average for the Cotswold district. Fairford had a prison in 1248 and a village lock-up by 1809, and modern figures like these would barely have kept either in business.
Set side by side, the two rates are about 27 per 1,000 for Fairford and about 40 per 1,000 for the Cotswold district as a whole. A buyer looking only at the district figure would be pricing in more crime than the town actually records.
The town is a compact, settled sort of place. About 2,110 people live in each square kilometre of its built-up area, unemployment is about 2%, and about 1% of households are overcrowded. These describe the kind of neighbourhood the crime figures come from. None of them explains the crime rate on its own.
The biggest category is violence and sexual offences, at about 38% of Fairford's recorded crime against about 35% nationally. That heading also covers common assault where nobody was hurt, and it is the largest category almost everywhere. Anti-social behaviour makes up about 17% here and 16% nationally, criminal damage and arson about 7% in both, and other theft about 10% against 7%. The totals are small, so a handful of incidents can move any of these shares by several points. Read this year's mix as a snapshot. Next year's could look different.
Charging is where the picture weakens, and it is a county-wide figure. Gloucestershire Constabulary charges a suspect in about 9% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which places it 39th of 42 forces. About 33% of its cases are closed without anyone being identified, and the force reported outcomes for only eight of the twelve months in the year to May 2026. These figures say what to expect if you report a crime. They say nothing about how often crime happens in Fairford, which is the question the crime rate answers. For a particular house, the police's street-level crime map will show what was recorded on that road over the same months.
Safety is one of Fairford's real strengths. Crime is rare here by the district's own standard, and what does happen is the ordinary run of small-town incidents.