Retail Theft Trends Report: Mid-Year 2026 Edition

Retail theft data is scattered across FBI releases, city samples, retailer surveys, and state press releases. No agency tracks it in one place. This report does. Safe and Sound Security, a commercial security installation company protecting more than 20,000 locations nationwide, compiled and verified every major public data source on retail theft.

Key Takeaways

• Police-reported shoplifting fell 10% in 2025, the first annual decline since 2021, based on Council on Criminal Justice data from 21 cities. Rates still sit 37% above the 2021 low.
• At least 17 states now run an organized retail crime task force or enforcement unit. Only 6 publish results. Safe and Sound Security’s tally of every published figure: about 34,000 arrests or charges and about $272 million in recovered merchandise.
• California accounts for roughly 96% of all publicly reported ORC arrests and recoveries. Remove California and the published national total drops to about 1,360 arrests and $12.6 million recovered.
• 15 states passed 19 new organized retail crime laws in 2025, and four more signed laws by March 2026, according to ICSC legislative tracking.
• Flash mob shoplifting nearly quadrupled from 2020 to 2024 but makes up 0.1% of all shoplifting incidents, per the FBI’s first report on the subject.
• No organization has published a survey-based national shrink dollar figure since 2023. The last NRF number was $112.1 billion for 2022. The survey that produced it no longer exists.

Shoplifting Fell 10% in 2025, the First Drop Since 2021

The average reported shoplifting rate across 21 US cities fell 10% in 2025 compared with 2024, according to the year-end update from the Council on Criminal Justice. It is the first annual decline since 2021.

The numbers behind the trend, from the Council’s consistent 21-city sample:

Three facts stand out in Safe and Sound Security’s analysis of this series:

1. 2024 was the worst year on record for the sample. The 2024 rate of 615.0 per 100,000 was the peak of the eight-year series, 53% above the 2021 low.
2. The 2025 decline accelerated through the year. First-half 2025 ran 5% below first-half 2024. Second-half 2025 ran 15% below second-half 2024, the lowest second half since 2022.
3. 2025 ended about 4% below 2019. Six years after the pandemic disruption began, police-reported shoplifting is roughly back to its pre-pandemic level, not below it.

The decline matches the broader 2025 picture. The FBI’s preliminary 2025 data, released May 2026, shows property crime down 12.4% year over year. The Council’s larceny measure fell 11%.

One caution applies to every number in this section: these are incidents reported to police. The Council states that reported shoplifting almost certainly undercounts the real total, and retailer survey data later in this report shows why.

The State Enforcement Scoreboard: 17 States, $310 Million Committed

At least 17 states now operate an organized retail crime task force, unit, or grant program. No federal agency tracks their results. Safe and Sound Security compiled every published figure into one scoreboard. Six states have published enforcement results or a formal study to date:

The other states with active programs but no published enforcement totals: Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.

What the combined published figures show:

• About 34,000 arrests or charges across the five states reporting enforcement totals.
• About $272 million in recovered merchandise.
• More than $310 million in committed funding across the three states that disclose budgets: California ($267 million total program spend, including $242.25 million in prevention grants), New York ($45 million including small-business security tax credits, per the Governor’s office), and Pennsylvania ($1.75 million per year).
• California is 96% of the picture. The state reports 32,600 arrests and nearly $260 million recovered since fall 2023, plus 2,615 convictions by grant-funded prosecutors in a single quarter of 2026. Every other state combined reports about 1,360 arrests and $12.6 million recovered.

Periods differ by state, so these are cumulative published results, not a single-year national total. That is the point: nobody publishes a national total. A 2024 Congressional Research Service report confirmed that no complete organized retail crime data exist at the federal or state level, and that the FBI’s crime data system cannot separate organized theft from ordinary shoplifting.

15 States Passed New Organized Retail Crime Laws in 2025

State legislatures moved faster on retail theft in 2025 than in any prior year:

• 15 states passed 19 ORC-related laws in 2025, according to ICSC legislative tracking, including Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma.
• More than 30 state ORC laws have been amended or enacted since 2022, per the National Retail Federation.
• Four more states signed ORC laws by March 2026: Wisconsin, Oregon, Wyoming, and Kansas.
• 31 states considered a combined 74 ORC bills during 2025.

California’s Proposition 36, effective December 2024, is the largest single change. It allows felony charges for theft of any amount when the defendant has two prior theft convictions, partially reversing the $950 misdemeanor threshold set by Proposition 47 in 2014. Early county filings show prosecutors using it: 269 felony theft charges in Orange County and 335 in Riverside County within the first months, per CalMatters and county DA releases.

California’s own crime data adds a wrinkle. The state DOJ recorded 132,076 shoplifting offenses in 2024, up 16.8% from the prior year, even as overall property crime hit the lowest rate in the 59-year series. Part of that rise is likely reporting behavior: new enforcement gives retailers a reason to report theft they previously absorbed.

Retailers Still Report More Theft Than Police See

Police data and retailer surveys describe the same problem at different depths. The NRF’s latest Impact of Retail Theft and Violence study, released in late 2025 and surveying companies representing a quarter of US retail sales, found:

• Shoplifting incidents rose 18% in 2024 versus 2023. The prior edition found incidents up 93% in 2023 versus 2019.
• Threats or acts of violence during shoplifting events rose 17% in 2024. 91% of retailers increased employee safety training in response.
• 67% of retailers report involvement of transnational organized crime groups in thefts against their company.
• 64% of retailers report fewer than half of theft incidents to law enforcement.

That last number explains the gap. If most incidents never reach police, every police-based statistic in this report is a floor, not a ceiling. For 2024, both sources agreed on direction: police-reported rates rose 16% and retailer-reported incidents rose 18%. Whether retailers felt the 2025 decline that police data shows will not be known until the NRF’s next survey, expected in late 2026. The next edition of this report will cover it.

On the organized crime side, an NRF and K2 Integrity assessment found the median ORC fencing operation handles about $250,000 in stolen goods before apprehension, and that only 11% of profiled ORC groups target luxury goods. Everyday products, not designer items, are the core of organized theft.

Flash Mob Shoplifting Nearly Quadrupled, but It Is 0.1% of Incidents

The FBI released its first-ever report on flash mob shoplifting in December 2025. Safe and Sound Security’s read of the full report:

• Incidents nearly quadrupled from 2020 to 2024.
• Flash mob offenders stole $8.4 million in goods over five years.
• Department and discount stores were the top target (1,192 incidents), followed by specialty stores (638) and convenience stores (464).

Context matters here. The FBI logged 3,978,403 shoplifting incidents from 2020 through 2024. Flash mobs (six or more offenders) were 3,321 of them: about 0.1%. Council on Criminal Justice data agrees, finding more than 95% of shoplifting incidents involve one or two people and about 1% involve an assault. Flash mob theft is real, growing, and visually dramatic. It is not what drains most retailers.

Theft Concentrates in a Handful of Locations

The strongest finding in recent academic-grade data is concentration. A Council on Criminal Justice address-level study of Chicago and Los Angeles found:

• The top 5% of locations accounted for 68.5% of all shoplifting incidents in Chicago and 62.8% in Los Angeles.
• The median value stolen per incident rose from $74 in 2019 to about $100 in 2021. The 90th percentile rose from $572 to $756.
• November and December shoplifting rates run 14% above the rest of the year.

For retail operators, concentration is the stat that changes decisions. Theft is not evenly spread across stores. A small set of sites absorbs most of the loss, which is why loss prevention budgets increasingly go to site-level hardening: commercial security cameras, access control, and alarm systems at the highest-loss locations first, rather than thin coverage everywhere.

The Retail Theft Data Problem

The reason this report compiles sources is that the measurement infrastructure has thinned out:

• The NRF discontinued its National Retail Security Survey in 2024 after 32 years. The final shrink figure, covering retail’s 2022 fiscal year, was $112.1 billion. Its replacement survey publishes percentage trends only, no dollar totals.
• The national ORC database Congress mandated in 2006 (LERPnet) was abandoned after a 2011 acquisition, per the Congressional Research Service.
• The last GAO report on organized retail crime is from 2011.
• The Hayes International apprehension survey, a 35-year industry series, has not published an edition covering data after 2022.
• Federal victimization surveys cannot measure shoplifting because they survey households, not businesses.

What remains: FBI incident counts that cannot isolate organized theft, one 21-city academic sample, a retailer survey without dollar figures, and six state scoreboards. Each covers a different slice. This report exists to put the slices in one place, on one URL, updated twice a year.

Methodology

Safe and Sound Security compiled this report from primary sources only: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting publications (the December 2025 flash mob report, the 2024 UCR Summary, and the May 2026 preliminary 2025 release), the Council on Criminal Justice Crime Trends series and its underlying 21-city data, NRF National Retail Security Survey editions 2020 through 2023 and Impact of Retail Theft and Violence studies 2024 and 2025, Congressional Research Service report R48061, ICSC state legislative tracking, California DOJ Crime in California 2024, and official state publications from the governor, attorney general, or comptroller offices of California, New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, Washington, Georgia, and Virginia.

State enforcement results cover different reporting periods, which are noted where each figure appears. Police-reported data undercounts total theft because most incidents are never reported. Survey data measures retailer experience, not police reports. The two are presented separately and never combined into a single estimate. The FBI’s preliminary 2025 figures are labeled preliminary and will be replaced with final data in the next edition.

FAQs

The Bottom Line

Retail theft in 2026 is a story of correction and concentration. Police-reported shoplifting finally turned down in 2025, but it remains far above the 2021 low, states are spending more than $310 million to fight organized theft, and the losses concentrate in a small share of locations. The data that should track all of this is fragmented, which is why Safe and Sound Security, drawing on 19+ years of commercial security installation work across 20,000+ protected locations, maintains this report and updates it twice a year. The next edition lands after the FBI’s full 2025 data release this fall.

For a broader statistics library, see our shoplifting statistics page. To assess security for a high-loss location, contact our team.

Sources

1. Council on Criminal Justice: Crime Trends in U.S. Cities, Year-End Update
2. Council on Criminal Justice: Shoplifting Trends in Time and Space
3. Council on Criminal Justice: Shoplifting Trends, What You Need to Know
4. FBI: Reported Flash Mob Shoplifting Incidents
5. FBI: UCR Summary of Reported Crimes in the Nation
6. NRF: The Impact of Retail Theft & Violence
7. NRF: National Retail Security Survey, Final Edition
8. Congressional Research Service: Criminal Justice Data, Organized Retail Crime
9. ICSC: Fifteen States Pass New Laws to Curb Organized Retail Crime
10. Office of the Governor of California: Retail Theft Enforcement Results
11. California Grants Portal: Organized Retail Theft Prevention Grant Program
12. Office of the Governor of New York: Retail Theft Task Force Results
13. Michigan Retailers Association: FORCE Team First-Year Results
14. PennWatch: Pennsylvania Organized Retail Crime Unit First-Year Results
15. Florida Attorney General: Retail Theft Task Force Announcement
16. CalMatters: Proposition 36 and New California Theft Laws
17. Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice: California Crime Rates Analysis
18. Texas Comptroller: A Study on Organized Retail Theft in Texas