Horsham is safe enough to live in, but it is the busiest corner of a very quiet district, and the crime figures show it. Crime runs about a third above the district average. Shops lose goods at roughly twice the national share. Violence makes up a smaller slice than it does nationally. Horsham is a market town with market-town crime, sitting inside a district of villages that have very little.
Sussex Police recorded 4,108 crimes in and around the town in the year from June 2025 to May 2026. The published rate over that year is about 76 crimes per 1,000 residents, roughly 32% above the average for Horsham district. That rate is calculated on its own population base, so it can't be checked by dividing the count by the town's population, and nobody should try.
Put the two numbers side by side and the gap is plain: about 76 per 1,000 in the town against about 57 per 1,000 across the whole district. The district's figure is pulled down by Warnham, Rusper, Slinfold and a scattering of villages where the most contentious local incident is a parking dispute outside the church. Horsham has the shops, the station, the pubs and the late buses, so it takes a share of the district's crime to match.
As a neighbourhood, Horsham isn't under strain. Population density averages about 4,950 people per square kilometre, which is a proper town rather than a sprawl of cul-de-sacs. Unemployment sits at about 2%, and about 2% of households are overcrowded. The crime rate here doesn't come from hardship. It comes from being the place everyone else drives into.
The mix tells you more than the headline. Violence and sexual offences, the broad statutory category that includes common assault without injury, make up about 31% of recorded crime here, below the roughly 35% share across England and Wales. Anti-social behaviour accounts for about 22% against about 16% nationally. Shoplifting is where the town stands out, at about 17% of all recorded crime against about 8% nationally. Criminal damage and arson (about 8% against 7%), public order offences (about 6% against 7%) and other theft (about 5% against 7%) all sit close to or below the national mix. Horsham's extra crime is mostly nuisance and pocketed stock, not danger on the doorstep. Retailers on the Carfax feel that gap far more than anyone living in Holbrook.
Reporting a crime is a separate matter from how safe the town is, and the figures need keeping apart. Across the force area, Sussex Police charged a suspect in about 10% of cases in the year from June 2025 to May 2026, against about 12% nationally, putting it 35th of 42 forces. About 48% of cases across the force were closed with no suspect identified. That is a force-wide figure for Sussex, not Horsham's own, and it answers "will they catch them" rather than "will it happen". The honest answer to the first is "about half the time, nobody gets named".
Safety is Horsham's weak spot. Few of those crimes are violent, but the town sits well above the rest of its district, and a buyer should know that before choosing between the town centre and a village five miles out.