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Winchester’s year in public-safety statistics comes down to one small decimal: 0.2. That is the rate of violent crime per 1,000 residents the town logged in 2026, and it is what helped push Winchester four positions up SafeWise’s annual ranking of Massachusetts’ safest cities, where the Middlesex County town now sits at No. 6.
The climb is one of the larger year-over-year jumps inside the top six communities on the list, which SafeWise built from FBI crime data and published in late January.
SafeWise is an online company that “researches and contextualizes national crime and safety trends to show how they affect you and your neighborhood.”
Winchester’s violent crime rate held steady at 0.2 incidents per 1,000 residents for a second consecutive year, after falling from 0.4 in the 2024 report. Property crime eased to 3.7 incidents per 1,000 residents, down from 4.0 a year earlier, though that figure remains above the 2.7 rate the town of 23,238 posted in 2024.
Translated into rough human terms, a violent crime rate that low means fewer than one in every 4,000 Winchester residents is the victim of a reported violent crime in a given year. SafeWise’s dataset does not attribute any homicide to Winchester this cycle.
Above Winchester on the list, Northborough holds No. 1 for the third consecutive year and Clinton repeats at No. 2; Scituate jumped five places to No. 3, Holliston rose three to No. 4 and Sharon slipped one to No. 5.
The bigger movement is below Winchester. Grafton climbed 19 positions to No. 7, Holden moved up six to No. 8, Bedford surged 20 spots to No. 9 and Bridgewater entered the top 10 as a new addition at No. 10.
Every community in the top 10 lies within the suburban reach of either Boston or Worcester; no city from the western half of Massachusetts qualified this year.
Massachusetts itself outperforms the country on both of the categories SafeWise tracks. The state’s violent crime rate of 3.14 incidents per 1,000 residents runs well below the national rate of 4.43, and its property crime rate of 11.37 per 1,000 is roughly half the national 22.89.
SafeWise’s State of Safety survey, taken among residents in each state, found that 61% of Massachusetts respondents say they feel safe where they live — a share SafeWise describes as the sixth-highest in the nation.
Within the same Massachusetts respondent pool, the share reporting first-hand property crime experiences fell from 16% to 6% year over year, while the share reporting first-hand violent crime experiences rose from 9% to 13%.
Mass shooting events tracked by the Gun Violence Archive in Massachusetts fell to one in 2025, down from six the year before.
The ranking begins with violent and property offense totals reported by local police through the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), then divides each city’s totals by population to produce the per-1,000-resident rate.
That adjustment is what allows a town of 23,238 to be measured fairly against communities a third its size, and it is the reason Winchester can sit alongside places like Northborough and Clinton on the same leaderboard.
SafeWise includes only cities whose departments filed complete NIBRS reports for the year and does not estimate figures for agencies with gaps; 159 Massachusetts cities cleared that bar this cycle.
The report was written by Cathy Habas, edited by Rebecca Edwards and built on data analysis by Daniel Delgado.
SafeWise is careful to say the labels “dangerous” and “safest” in the report refer strictly to crime rates derived from FBI data and imply nothing broader about any community. The survey results gathered alongside the rankings hint at how partial any number can feel.
Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He runs The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.
