Yes, safer than most of Rother. Crime runs well below the district average. Unemployment and overcrowding hardly register. The local police force charges fewer suspects than most forces in the country. So crime is rare here, but getting anyone charged for it is harder than it should be.
Sussex Police's published figures put crime in Icklesham at about 52 incidents per 1,000 residents in the year to May 2026, roughly 29% below the average for Rother. In all, 87 crimes were recorded over those twelve months. That's the total. It doesn't say what kinds of crime they were or where they happened, so any estate agent who claims to know "it's mostly minor stuff" is guessing.
The Rother average is about 73 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same period, against Icklesham's 52. The district figure includes the busier towns, and the gap between the two numbers shows what a village buys by being small.
The census figures give some texture. The neighbourhoods here average about 1,340 people per square kilometre. Unemployment is about 2%, and about 2% of households are overcrowded. None of these figures explains the crime rate. They describe a quiet place with room to spare, where a stranger's car in the lane gets noticed before its owner has turned the engine off.
What happens after a report is a separate question, and the answer comes from Sussex Police as a whole, not from Icklesham. In the year to May 2026 the force charged a suspect in about 10% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which puts Sussex 35th of 42 forces. About 48% of cases across the force were closed without anyone being identified as a suspect. None of that makes Icklesham less safe. It means that if something does happen, you shouldn't expect a quick arrest, and you should keep the receipt for anything worth stealing.
On safety, Icklesham is one of the strongest places in the district: crime is well below the Rother average in a village this small and settled. When the police are rarely needed, their charge rate matters much less.