10 metro areas with the most car thefts in the first half of 2026

You walk out of a coffee shop, keys in hand, and find an empty curb where your car sat a few minutes earlier. Thieves need only moments to drive off with a vehicle. Car theft keeps falling, yet police agencies logged 268,415 reports of it during the first six months of 2026. The national rate came to about 77.81 thefts for every 100,000 people. The numbers describe a crime in retreat, but they offer little comfort to a driver staring at a bare parking space with no ride home.

The decline reached every corner of the country, and its breadth makes the remaining hot spots easier to see. Thefts fell 21% compared with the first half of 2025, and all 50 states posted year-over-year drops, extending a slide that has lasted several years. The burden remains lopsided. Thefts in D.C. plunged 52%, from 2,641 to 1,262, yet the district carried the highest rate among the jurisdictions examined, at 181.94 per 100,000 people. California logged 57,821 stolen vehicles, more than any other state. The Bakersfield-Delano metro in California posted a rate of 223.28 per 100,000, close to triple the U.S. figure. A steep drop in raw numbers can still leave a place far above the national average.

A new analysis from the National Insurance Crime Bureau, a nonprofit devoted to identifying insurance fraud, compares the vehicle thefts that people reported to law enforcement in the first two quarters of 2026 with the same stretch of 2025. The bureau expresses rates per 100,000 people and sorts metros by core-based statistical area. It also finds that organized crime groups have been moving away from conventional car theft as other vehicle-related crimes and fraud schemes keep multiplying. The bureau warns that the threat remains "far from gone." Tim Slater, the bureau's chief operating officer, credited sustained collaboration among law enforcement, insurers, auto theft prevention authorities, and other partners. He pointed out that more than a quarter-million vehicles vanished in six months, a toll he said makes continued investment in those partnerships, prevention, and public awareness essential to keeping the progress going. The list below follows the report's table of the 10 metro areas with the most vehicle thefts, running from the highest total in the first half of 2026 to the lowest.

Illustration: Quartz

The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro area lost 21,540 vehicles to thieves in the first half of 2026, more than any other metro in the country. Its haul comes close to double the tally in Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, the next metro among the 10. No other neighboring pair on the list shows a gap that wide. Roughly one of every 12 vehicles stolen nationwide during those six months disappeared from this single region.

Thefts in the area fell 23% from the first half of 2025, a sharper retreat than the country as a whole managed. Sheer size did not slow the improvement. A region with more stolen cars than any other still trimmed its losses faster than the national pace. Even after the cut, volume alone keeps Los Angeles at the head of the group by a wide margin.

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim accounts for roughly 37% of the vehicles stolen in California, the state with the most thefts. No other metro there claims a slice nearly as big. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont and Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario also appear among the 10, giving California three entries, more than any other state. Together, the two trail Los Angeles by nearly 6,000 vehicles.

Its 23% decline also outpaced the declines in both of the state's other listed metros. California's largest theft market shrank fastest among the three, and the statewide tally hinges on Los Angeles more than on any other metro.

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Chicago-Naperville-Elgin recorded 11,761 vehicle thefts in the first half of 2026, a 2% increase that made it the only metro among the 10 to move upward.

Illinois and Indiana, the two states this metro straddles, both logged fewer thefts than a year earlier. The Chicago area added cases even as the states around it shed them. Taken together, the parts of Illinois and Indiana outside the metro fell far enough to offset its gain and still finish lower.

NICB offers no explanation for the local rise. Tim Slater, the group's chief operating officer, acknowledged that many factors feed the broader decrease, and the release ties none of them to Chicago.

Chicago finished 455 thefts ahead of New York-Newark-Jersey City, enough to hold the second-highest total among the 10 metros. The margin amounts to a small slice of either metro's count, and modest swings could reshuffle the order in a future report.

The bureau's prevention advice carries extra weight in a market where thefts are climbing. NICB recommends locking doors, taking the keys every time, and adding tools such as steering wheel locks, alarms, kill switches, and GPS trackers.

Nine of the 10 highest-volume metros shrank their theft counts. Chicago's increase shows the falling tide has yet to reach every large market.

Illustration: Quartz

Thieves took 11,306 vehicles across the New York-Newark-Jersey City metro in the first half of 2026, a 16% drop from the same months of 2025. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim and Chicago-Naperville-Elgin were the only metros to log more, and Chicago finished 455 thefts ahead of New York. Chicago's count rose while New York's fell. Two regions with nearly identical volumes moved in opposite directions. Working back from the two percentage changes, New York likely topped Chicago during the first half of 2025. The pair probably traded places in 2026.

New York's decline trailed the national pace. Only San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, and Chicago-Naperville-Elgin fared worse on the year-over-year measure among the 10. Six others cut thefts faster, including Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, the next metro on the list, along with Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim and Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario. New York shrank its total, yet most metros that posted declines moved at a quicker clip, leaving the region in the slower half of the group on progress.

Car theft cases have proven hard for New York City police to close. NYPD figures showed officers cleared grand larceny auto at the lowest rate of the city's seven major crimes, according to Gothamist. The metro's smaller theft tally reveals nothing about how often a stolen car in the city ends in a closed case.

Authorities said one Bronx crew targeted Nissans, Toyotas, and Hondas for their rims and tires. Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said defendants in an auto theft ring case allegedly took car parts in nearly every Bronx precinct and in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. The charges portray thieves who stripped vehicles for components and worked far beyond a single neighborhood.

New York's gentler slide means the metro claimed a larger slice of all U.S. vehicle thefts in the first half of 2026 than it did during the same stretch of 2025.

Illustration: Quartz

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands logged 10,008 vehicle thefts in the first half of 2026, an 18% decline from the same six months of 2025. The total kept the metro above 10,000, a threshold no metro further down the list reached.

The metro's drop lagged the national pace. A slower fall than the country's means Houston claimed a larger slice of U.S. vehicle thefts in the first half of 2026 than it did a year earlier.

Thieves in Houston target General Motors $GM vehicles as often as almost any other make, a Houston Police Department sergeant said. The sergeant also pointed to a rise in Corvette thefts and said Dodges and Mercedes vanish at a similar clip. The roster stretches from mainstream brands to a sports car and a luxury marque. Owners across a wide range of price points face exposure.

Criminal groups in Houston were turning to VIN cloning more often to sell stolen vehicles, local law enforcement officials cautioned. The scheme copies the identification number of a legally owned vehicle onto a stolen one. The duplicated number lets a stolen car pose as a legitimate one at the point of sale.

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Thieves drove off with 9,825 vehicles in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metro area during the first half of 2026, a 14% decline from the same stretch of 2025. The metro's total sits under the 10,000 mark that Houston crossed, and it comes to less than half of what Los Angeles posted. Houston logged 183 more thefts and shrank its count faster, by 18%.

The improvement trails the national drop by 7 percentage points, which means the metro curbed thefts at two-thirds of the country's pace. Two metros among the 10 fared worse on this measure. Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington fell 11%, and Chicago-Naperville-Elgin moved in the opposite direction with a 2% rise. The other seven metros on the list, from New York to Seattle, all brought thefts down faster than the San Francisco area did. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington's 30% cut ran more than twice as steep.

San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont registered the smallest reduction among California's three entries. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim shed 23% of its thefts, and Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario trimmed its tally by 20%. Together the three California metros recorded 37,302 thefts, about 65% of the statewide figure. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont carries the second-heaviest load of the trio and accounts for about one in six vehicles stolen anywhere in California. Most of the state's auto thefts, in other words, happen in three metro areas.

WBGO reports that several local changes could have pushed crime down in San Francisco, among them a new district attorney, more police patrols, and police drones. The outlet also points to a wider retreat in crime across American cities after the pandemic. With so many forces overlapping, the report notes, isolating what the city's Flock cameras contributed becomes difficult.

Each of those developments belongs to San Francisco proper, while the metro also takes in Oakland and Fremont. Any credit the city's measures earn would cover a slice of the regional result.

Illustration: Quartz

Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington recorded 8,212 vehicle thefts in the first half of 2026, after a 30% drop that one other metro among the 10 surpassed. The North Texas region outran the national decline by a wide margin. It joined a short roster of big metros where theft receded at a quicker rate than it did across the country.

Dallas-Fort Worth posted the steepest retreat among the six metros with the largest theft totals. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, New York-Newark-Jersey City, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, and San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont all fell by smaller percentages, and Chicago-Naperville-Elgin moved in the opposite direction.

San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, which trimmed its count by a smaller share, finished the half with more stolen vehicles than Dallas-Fort Worth. The two metros' rates of change imply that the North Texas metro carried the larger total a year earlier. Its steeper cut pulled it below its Bay Area counterpart.

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, the other Texas entry, followed a different path. Houston logged more thefts than Dallas-Fort Worth, yet its count contracted at a slower clip that trailed the national pace. Two large metros in the same state moved at different speeds, and Texas did not behave as one theft market.

Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, the next metro on the list, ended the period with a total close to Dallas-Fort Worth's after posting the smallest reduction among the nine metros that fell. Totals this similar, reached after cuts this far apart, mean Dallas-Fort Worth entered the comparison with a heavier theft load than Philadelphia in the first half of 2025. The gap between the two a year earlier dwarfs the one separating them in 2026.

The two deepest cuts among the 10 belonged to metros in the bottom half of the list, the Washington area and Dallas-Fort Worth. A metro's place on a list built from raw totals says little about how fast its theft problem is easing, and North Texas offers one of the clearest examples of that mismatch.

Illustration: Quartz

Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington recorded 8,056 vehicle thefts in the first half of 2026. The total fell 11% from the same six months of 2025, the smallest decrease among the nine metros on this list where thefts dropped. Progress in the region came at a crawl next to its peers.

The four-state region improved at a little more than half the national pace and trailed the country by 10 percentage points. Every other metro on the list that cut thefts landed within seven points of the U.S. figure or beat it. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, the next-slowest, fell 14%. New York-Newark-Jersey City and Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, two metros with heavier totals, posted drops of 16% and 18%. The two steepest declines among the 10, in the Washington metro area and Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, reached nearly three times Philadelphia's decrease.

Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington finished the half with 156 more thefts than the Philadelphia region, yet it shrank its count at a quicker clip. A steeper fall to a similar endpoint means Dallas-Fort Worth carried the heavier theft load in the first half of 2025. The Philadelphia area began the comparison with fewer thefts and shed a smaller share.

Delaware, one of the four states the metro spans, cut thefts 32% statewide, from 858 to 581. The state's reduction outran the metro's by 21 percentage points. The statewide total covers territory beyond the metro and cannot isolate the Delaware slice of the region. Even so, the count shows the area's sluggish pace did not extend to every state within its footprint.

Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, the next metro by total, counted 2,119 fewer thefts than the Philadelphia region. The gap places Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington alongside Dallas-Fort Worth in the middle of the group, ahead of the bottom three, each of which logged fewer than 6,000 thefts. Only Chicago, which moved in the wrong direction, posted a weaker year-over-year result among the 10.

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Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario recorded 5,937 vehicle thefts in the first half of 2026, a 20% drop from the same months of 2025. No other metro among the 10 came nearer the national pace. Its decline fell 1 percentage point short of the country's 21% slide, which kept the region in step with the broader trend. The metro finished the six months with one-fifth fewer thefts than a year before.

Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario carries the lightest load among the three California metros on the list. Its count came to less than a third of the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim total and sat 3,888 vehicles below San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont. The area accounted for about one in 10 vehicles stolen anywhere in California during the period. Its total exceeds that of every U.S. metro outside these 10. Car theft in California does not stop at its two largest hubs.

Speed divides the three California metros as much as volume does. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim cut thefts at a faster clip than Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, and San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont trailed both by a wide margin. Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario sits in the middle of its in-state peers. The statewide retreat did not arrive in equal measure across California's biggest theft markets.

A steep gap in totals separates Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario from the metros above it. Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, the next metro up, logged 2,119 more thefts. The Washington metro area came in 220 vehicles short of Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario after posting the deepest reduction of the 10. The math behind those percentages shows Washington carried more thefts than Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario in the first half of 2025, so the two metros traded places within a year. The distance to Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington dwarfs the margin over Washington, which leaves Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario closer in scale to the bottom of the list than to its center. The region opens a lower tier, where all three of the final totals sit below 6,000.

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The Washington metro area, which spans D.C. and parts of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia, cut vehicle thefts 31% to 5,717 in the first half of 2026. No other metro among the 10 posted a larger decline. Dallas-Fort Worth came within a single point of that mark, and Seattle trailed by four points. Washington's drop ran 10 points deeper than the 21% national retreat, a lead only Dallas-Fort Worth approached.

D.C. shed more than half its thefts over the same months, a sharper fall than the metro's 31%. The city ended the period with about 22% of the metro total. The remaining 4,455 thefts, about 78%, occurred in the Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia portions of the region. The suburban areas must have reduced thefts at a gentler rate than the city, even as the metro as a whole outpaced every other region on this list. Working backward from the 31% figure puts the suburban decrease at about 20% to 22%, close to the country's 21% slide. The District's loss of 1,379 thefts supplied a majority of the metro's total reduction, even though the city produced under a third of the region's thefts in the first half of 2025.

D.C. held the highest theft rate of any state or jurisdiction in the report, more than double the national figure. Its plunge shrank the raw count without lifting the city off the top of that per-capita comparison. The steepest metro decrease on this list left the region's core with a per-resident burden heavier than any state's.

Washington's 5,717 thefts landed 220 below Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario and 883 above Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue. Gaps widen toward the top. Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, two spots higher, logged 2,339 more thefts, and Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim recorded close to four times as many as Washington. Such narrow margins at the bottom of this list mean a swing of a few hundred thefts could reorder those metros.