Housebreaking is still the most common crime experienced by South African households, and more people reported being assaulted in 2025/26 than a year earlier, according to Statistics South Africa’s Governance, Public Safety and Justice Survey 2025/26. The figures come from a household survey of what people say happened to them, not from crime reports recorded by the police, and Stats SA released them at the start of September 2026.
## Housebreaking
Over 1.5 million incidents of housebreaking occurred in 2025/26, affecting 1.08 million households, or 5.3% of all households. Stats SA counted 1,549,000 incidents, against 1,493,000 the year before, while the number of households affected slipped from 1.12 million to 1.08 million. Home robbery affected 179,000 households (0.9%).
June is consistently the worst month. In 2025/26 an estimated 163,000 households had a housebreaking that month, ahead of April (129,000), May (124,000) and September (124,000).
Fewer than half of the households affected told the police: 48.2% reported some or all incidents, up from 43.4% in 2024/25 and well below the 59.2% recorded in 2021/22. Among those who did not report, 24.4% said the police would not do anything about it, and 21.8% said the police could do nothing or that there was a lack of proof. Statistician-General Risenga Maluleke’s remarks on the survey were quoted by TimesLIVE, which also carried Cosatu’s response. Its coordinator Matthew Parks said: “You cannot fight crime when police stations lack working vehicles, rape kits, body armour, regular training or secure cells.”
## Assault
An estimated 408,000 people aged 16 and older said they were assaulted in the 12 months before the survey, up from 363,000 in 2024/25, 295,000 in 2023/24 and 263,000 in 2022/23. Stats SA says the latest increase is not statistically significant, so it is a direction and not a firm jump. Assault was the third most experienced crime by individuals, behind theft of personal property and street robbery. In its five-year measure, which asks about a longer period, the number of individuals assaulted fell slightly from 736,000 to 706,000, a change the agency also says is not statistically significant.
Men were more likely to be assaulted than women (1.3% against 0.5%). The survey lists North West with the highest share of people assaulted, at 2.6%, and KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo with the lowest, at 0.4%. About 55% of those assaulted reported some or all incidents to the police, and 41.7% of incidents were committed by someone the victim knew, including friends or acquaintances (22.4%) and a spouse or intimate partner (10.4%). Boitumelo Mooketsi, Stats SA’s director for governance, said that about 31% of women aged 16 and older named a spouse or partner as the most common perpetrator of assault, according to ECR.
## Feeling safe
About 81% of people aged 16 and older felt safe walking alone in their neighbourhood in daytime, but only 37.9% felt safe after dark. The share who did something to protect themselves against crime rose from 43.3% to 46.6%. Only 31.5% said the main thing they did was to walk during safer hours, and 78.3% of those who took precautions felt safer.
The Government Communication and Information System called the low reporting rate for housebreaking equally concerning, and urged people to report crime so that police can investigate, deploy resources and spot patterns. It pointed to community policing forums as a way for neighbourhoods to work with the police, according to The Witness.
## What the numbers mean for shops and offices
The survey measures crime against households and individuals, so it says nothing directly about business premises. Its findings on housebreaking and assault still describe the conditions in which shops, restaurants and offices operate: property crime that is common but often unreported, and personal-safety risks that fall mostly on younger, single men and on women at home.
More coverage of crime and its effect on business is filed under regulatory and policy news, SME and entrepreneurship and retail and consumer.
