Yes, in the boring way. About 45 crimes per thousand residents over the last twelve months. Roughly 21 percent below the Horsham local-authority average. Around 383 recorded incidents in a town of around 5,800 residents. The safety story here is that there isn't much of one, which is what you want the safety story to be.
Over the twelve months from April 2025 to March 2026, the town recorded around 383 crimes at a rate of roughly 45 per thousand residents. The wider Horsham local-authority area comes in at around 57 per thousand over the same period. That gap, about 21 percent below the local baseline, is the number that carries the answer. Horsham itself is not a high-crime local authority. Sitting 21 percent below it puts Steyning near the quiet end of a quiet distribution in a county that already sits comfortably below most English averages. Both figures are published statistics using the appropriate police-area denominators. Do not try to recover the rate yourself by dividing 383 by the town's population, because the two numbers use different statistical bases and you will get a wrong answer that looks right.
The shape of small-town crime is predictable and roughly the same everywhere. Property theft, vehicle-related incidents, occasional criminal damage, and a background of anti-social behaviour weighted toward weekend evenings around wherever the pubs are open. The town does not have the volume, the density, or the transient population that produces the sort of headline crime that shows up on national dashboards. What it has is what a small West Sussex market town produces: a background hum that mostly involves sheds, cars, and the occasional broken window.
The trap for buyers arriving here from urban postcodes is over-reading the low rate as a guarantee. Small towns produce low totals partly because there is less to steal per square mile, partly because everyone in the town centre recognises everyone else, and partly because opportunistic theft is a function of foot traffic that Steyning does not have. But the individual property is still what the individual property is. An unlocked shed on a rural lane, a car left on the drive with the keys in the fruit bowl by the front door, a garage door that hasn't shut properly since 2019. A low town-level rate does not do the securing for you, and the ratio between town-level statistics and property-level risk is not one to one. The published rate tells you what the neighbours experience on average. It does not tell you what the vendor did with the back gate.
The demographic profile reinforces the picture. The median resident is 54. About seventy-seven percent of homes are owner-occupied. Just over a third of households are single-person households, and around a fifth are single-pensioner households. This is a settled town, populated by people who know their streets and notice unfamiliar cars in ways that new-build suburbs do not. That is not a statistical claim, it is a description of how a small town of this age composition tends to work in practice.
Five out of five on safety. Steyning sits 21 percent below an already-quiet local-authority average, in a settled town where the demographic pattern reinforces the crime pattern, and the honest answer to the safety question is: yes, this is a safe area, and the amount of time worth spending worrying about crime here is close to zero.