Is Mexico City Safe? An Honest Answer

Before answering whether Mexico City is safe, it’s worth asking a different question first: what does the rest of the world say about visiting the United States?

Uruguay tells its citizens to avoid specific American cities, Detroit and Baltimore among them, over the “indiscriminate possession of firearms by the population.” Canada instructs travelers to “familiarize themselves with how to respond to an active shooter situation.” Germany warns of “killing sprees.” Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Venezuela, and the Netherlands have issued similar warnings, and Amnesty International has urged travelers worldwide to have an “emergency contingency plan” for visiting the US at all. Read from outside, the United States sounds alarming. Read from inside, most Americans never think about any of it.

That’s the gap most people are working from when they ask if Mexico City is safe. Here are the real numbers, compared directly to the US cities held up as the standard of safety, plus the specific caveats the numbers alone won’t tell you.

What the US government itself says

Mexico City currently carries a Level 2 advisory from the US State Department: “Exercise Increased Caution.” That’s not a special, elevated warning reserved for Mexico. It’s the exact same tier the State Department assigns to France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Bahamas. Mexico is also the only country in the world where the State Department issues a separate advisory level for every individual state rather than one blanket rating, which means Mexico City’s Level 2 is a specific, current judgment about this city, not an average pulled down by cartel violence somewhere else in the country. Several Mexican states carry the same Level 2 rating as Mexico City; a smaller number carry Level 3 or 4, and those are overwhelmingly border states and specific trafficking corridors, not the capital.

The numbers, city by city

Mexico City’s citywide homicide rate over the past year runs around 7.9 per 100,000 residents. To put that in context against the same kind of American cities a cautious traveler already trusts:

Homicides per 100,000 residents, most recent available year for each city (2024–2025).

Mexico City lands close to Los Angeles, and meaningfully safer than Chicago, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, or St. Louis, several multiples safer in some cases. It does sit a little above New York City and the US national average, and the honest version of this article says that plainly rather than only citing the comparisons that flatter the answer. Baltimore’s number above is itself a genuinely good-news figure: 23.5 is the city’s lowest homicide rate in 48 years, down sharply from where it stood just a couple of years ago. Nationally, Mexico’s homicide rate has also been falling: preliminary data show roughly a 30% drop in 2025 alone. Both places are trending the same direction.

The same pattern shows up in “safe” American cities too

Here’s the part that cuts both ways, and it’s worth sitting with before assuming a citywide average tells the whole story about anywhere, Mexico City included. Some of the US cities with the calmest overall reputations have specific neighborhoods with crime rates that rival or beat the worst numbers above. Anacostia, inside Washington, D.C., the seat of the federal government and a city most Americans don’t think twice about visiting, posts a murder rate around 34.4 per 100,000, well above Mexico City’s citywide figure, and a broader violent crime rate running 80% above the D.C. average. Kensington, inside Philadelphia, a major East Coast city with no particular reputation for danger, runs about 21 per 100,000, right around Chicago’s citywide rate. San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, inside a city most people associate with tech wealth and scenic hills, posts a crime index 78% above the city’s own average, concentrated specifically in property and drug crime. None of this makes Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, or San Francisco unsafe cities to visit, any more than Tepito or a handful of specific blocks make all of Mexico City unsafe. It’s the same lesson either direction: a citywide number is a starting point, not the answer, and the actual safety story of Mexico City lives at the colonia level, the same way it does in any city this size.

Beyond homicide: the fuller crime picture

Homicide is the number people ask about first, but it’s not the only crime that matters, and it’s not the category where Mexico City’s reputation problem is most deserved. Three real breakdowns, what violent crime and property crime consist of in the US, and what theft and robbery consist of in Mexico City, tell a more useful story than any single headline number:

FBI national crime data (2024); Mexico City figures from SESNSP-reported 2024 incident counts (robbery with violence, non-violent theft, vehicle theft).

The same pattern holds in both countries: the category that dominates reported crime is the mundane one, not the violent one. Aggravated assault, not homicide, makes up the overwhelming majority of US violent crime. Non-violent theft, not armed robbery, makes up the majority of what gets reported as theft and robbery in Mexico City. Homicide gets the headlines in both places precisely because it’s the rare, extreme case, not the typical one.

Numbeo’s crowdsourced Crime Index, which blends perceptions of everything from armed robbery and theft to corruption and vandalism, rates Mexico City higher-crime than New York City or Houston, not lower. That’s a real, honest data point worth stating plainly rather than burying: on the everyday, low-level crime that touches far more visitors than violence does, petty theft, pickpocketing, being overcharged or scammed, Mexico City doesn’t have a case to make that it beats major US cities. Mexico’s national robbery rate ran about 158.6 per 100,000 people in 2023, and it’s genuinely the category the pickpocketing warning further down this page exists for.

The flip side is just as real. Benito Juárez, the alcaldía that includes Nápoles, Del Valle, and Narvarte, has ranked as Mexico City’s single safest borough for 20 consecutive quarters, five years running, according to INEGI’s own national urban safety survey, with 84% of residents reporting they feel safe as of the most recent count. That’s not a homicide statistic. It’s an ongoing, government-tracked measure of how safe people who actually live there say it feels day to day, and it’s stayed positive for half a decade straight.

Put together: Mexico City’s case for safety is strongest on violent crime, the category most people mean when they ask “is it safe,” and weakest on petty theft, the category most likely to happen to a visitor. Both are true at the same time, and neither cancels the other out.

Why the citywide number still overstates the real risk to a visitor

Two things narrow the gap even further, and neither is a matter of opinion.

First, the areas visitors spend time in run safer than the citywide figure. Mexico City is also one of the largest cities in the world, with a metro population above 22 million, large enough that a single citywide number was always going to blend dramatically different realities into one line. Central, tourist-heavy colonias, Roma, Condesa, Polanco, and the Centro Histórico, generally sit below Mexico City’s overall average, the same pattern true of resort zones and historic centers across Mexico generally, consistently policed more heavily than their surrounding municipalities. The three safest, most tourist-heavy colonias and a second tier of safer, cheaper colonias most visitors never hear about both sit in that category.

Second, and this is the part that matters most for how to read any of these numbers: most homicide in Mexico is targeted, not random. It’s overwhelmingly violence between people connected to organized-crime groups, aimed at other perceived criminal, political, or security targets. That’s a structurally different kind of risk than the stranger-on-stranger violence a random-crime statistic implies, and it’s a large part of why a security geographer based in Mexico City has said he has no knowledge of tourists being particularly targeted for crime, in tourist areas or anywhere else in the city. The US State Department’s own guidance makes the same point: even in Mexico’s higher-violence areas, visitors are rarely the target.

The part that flips the whole comparison: guns

Here’s the detail that undercuts most people’s instinct about which country is more dangerous. Mexico has some of the most restrictive civilian gun laws in the world. The entire country has exactly one legal gun store, run by the army, located on a military base outside Mexico City. Buying a gun there requires an official photo ID, proof of residency and employment, proof of completed military service, and a clean criminal record, and even after all of that, the permit holder is legally barred from carrying the gun outside their own home. Civilian rifles and shotguns aren’t available at all; the store sells handguns capped at .380 caliber.

The United States, by comparison, recorded 44,447 gun deaths in 2024 and 499 separate mass shootings that same year, even after a real, multi-year decline. The US ranks in the 93rd percentile globally for firearm mortality. Australia’s gun death rate runs twelve times lower than America’s. The specific scenario several countries explicitly warn their citizens to prepare for before visiting the US, an active shooter in a public place, is not a real risk category in Mexico City the way it is in the country most of this site’s readers are flying in from.

The honest caveats, specifically

None of this means Mexico City has no real risks. It has a short, specific list, and naming them plainly is more useful than pretending they don’t exist.

Pickpocketing, mostly on the Metro. This is the risk category the US State Department itself flags most consistently for visitors here, petty theft in crowded spaces, not violent crime.

Business extortion in the Roma-Condesa corridor. Mexico City’s own Ministry of Citizens Security has flagged this specific police sector for a real, documented pattern of extortion targeting local businesses. It’s a genuine local problem, and it overwhelmingly touches business owners rather than tourists passing through for a few days.

Virtual kidnapping phone scams. This one is worth knowing about by name, because it specifically targets tourists and specifically happens in nice hotels in nice neighborhoods. The scam: a caller claims to have kidnapped a family member or threatens the victim directly, often citing real, specific details pulled from social media to sound credible, and pressures the target to withdraw cash, destroy their phone, and cut off contact with anyone who could check on them. In one documented case, a touring band staying at a hotel in Roma received a call warning of a fake shootout outside and was pressured into a $380,000 ransom scheme targeting their family back home. No one was ever actually in danger. If it happens to you: hang up and call someone to verify in person, don’t act on instructions from the caller, and if you’re a US citizen, the embassy runs a 24-hour emergency line for exactly this: +52 55 8526 2561.

None of these three are evenly distributed across the city either, the same pattern true of violent crime in Chicago, Kensington, or Anacostia: it concentrates in specific places and specific situations rather than spreading evenly across an entire metro area. A handful of Mexico City areas genuinely call for more caution than the rest, and one is worth skipping outright. Knowing which colonias fall into which category is most of the actual work of staying safe here, more than any citywide statistic.

For a longer, more personal answer to the same question, What I Learned Walking Mexico City Alone in 2017 covers what nine years of living here, most of it on foot, taught me about the difference between a place that sounds dangerous and a place that is.

Sources: US Department of State Mexico travel advisory and country-by-country advisory level data; Uruguay, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, and Netherlands government travel advisories for the United States, as reported by NBC, Newsweek, The Conversation, and CBS News; Amnesty International’s public statement on US travel safety; Latinometrics’ comparative homicide-rate analysis of Mexican and US cities; HoyoDeCrimen’s Mexico City neighborhood-level crime data; contemporary US city homicide statistics as reported by Wirepoints, USAFacts, and factually.co for St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City; Baltimore Banner and Baltimore Sun reporting on the city’s 48-year homicide-rate low; CrimeGrade.org and neighborhood-level crime data for Anacostia (Washington, D.C.) and Kensington (Philadelphia); NeighborhoodScout data on the Tenderloin (San Francisco); FBI 2024 national crime data on violent-crime and property-crime composition, via the FBI’s own 2024 Reported Crimes in the Nation release; SESNSP-reported 2024 Mexico City incident counts for robbery with violence, non-violent theft, and vehicle theft; Numbeo’s Crime Index and Safety Index comparisons for Mexico City, New York City, and Houston; Statista and Dragonfly Intelligence reporting on Mexico’s national robbery rate; INEGI’s Encuesta Nacional de Seguridad Pública Urbana (ENSU) safety-perception data for Benito Juárez; Mexico News Daily reporting on 2025 national homicide trends and the Roma-Condesa extortion designation; OSAC’s Mexico Country Security Report and Forbes reporting on organized crime’s targeting patterns; CDC and Gun Violence Archive data on 2024 US gun deaths and mass shootings, via The Trace and Pew Research; firearm regulation research on Mexico’s single legal gun store; contemporary reporting on virtual kidnapping scams targeting tourists, including the documented Colonia Roma hotel incident.