Pirbright is safe, and it isn't close. Crime runs at well under half the Guildford rate. A few hundred reported crimes in a year cover the whole area. Almost nobody here is out of work. The main thing that hurts people in Pirbright is the house prices.
The police recorded 258 crimes across the area in the twelve months from June 2025 to May 2026. The published rate is about 34 crimes per 1,000 residents, roughly 62% below the Guildford borough average. That comes from police records, not from reputation or from a forum thread started by someone whose wheelie bin was knocked over.
Guildford as a whole runs at about 87 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same year, so it's 34 in Pirbright against 87 across the borough. That gap is wide enough that you don't need a map to read it. A borough average has to cover the town centre, the station and the late-night bars, and Pirbright has none of those.
The area averages about 1,350 people per square kilometre across its neighbourhoods, but the heath around it and the Army training centre in the middle make that figure less meaningful than it sounds. Unemployment is about 2%, and about 2% of households are overcrowded. That describes a comfortable place with little pressure on housing. It doesn't prove anything about why crime is low, but it's the kind of neighbourhood these rates usually come from.
The crime mix needs care, because the total is small enough that a handful of incidents moves any share by several points. With that caveat, violence and sexual offences make up about 41% of recorded crime, against about 35% nationally. That category is the largest almost everywhere and covers everything from serious assault to a shove with no injury. Anti-social behaviour is about 18% against 16% nationally, other theft about 10% against 7%, criminal damage and arson about 7% against the same 7%, public order about 5% against 7%, and burglary about 5% against 4%. Most of these sit close to the national shares. Anyone who quotes the violence figure without the national share next to it is making the village sound worse than it is.
When something does happen, Surrey Police charges a suspect in about 11% of cases across the whole force, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 30th of 42 forces in England and Wales. About 36% of cases across the force close with no suspect identified. That figure answers a different question from the crime rate. The chance of something happening to you in Pirbright is low, but if it does, the odds of anyone being charged are not good.
Safety is Pirbright's strongest point. Crime at this level is rare anywhere near a borough the size of Guildford.