How often someone is home during a burglary

Every estate security conversation eventually arrives at the same question: what happens if they come while we're home? It's the right question. It's also one where the fear has a specific shape and the data has a different one. The best public numbers on it come from a Bureau of Justice Statistics report called Victimization During Household Burglary, written by Shannan Catalano and published in September 2010. It pulls five years of National Crime Victimization Survey data, 2003 through 2007, and splits every burglary by whether a household member was present. I read the whole thing, tables included. Keep the dates in mind; I'll come back to them.

The headline number

An estimated 3.7 million household burglaries a year, on average. In 27.6% of them, a household member was present. The report's own confidence interval on that figure runs from 24.2% to 31.0%. In 7.2% of all burglaries, someone was home and experienced violence, which the report defines broadly: simple assault counts, and simple assault was the most common form. Put another way, of the roughly one million burglaries a year with someone home, 26% involved some violence and 74% did not.

Note what the survey can't tell you. In the report's words, it "does not distinguish between a household member who is present when the offender gains entry and one who arrived home unexpectedly while the burglary was in progress." It also records no offender motivation. So "someone was home" includes the family asleep upstairs, the teenager who walked in on it, and the ex-partner who knew exactly who was home. The report has a box on the term "home invasion" and says the survey cannot address the narrow definition that requires intent.

How they got in when someone was home

This is the table I'd want every client to see. Burglaries split into forcible entry (a window broken, a door forced) and unlawful entry (no force, someone with no right to be there walks in). Across all forcible entries, a household member was present 15.5% of the time. For unlawful entries the figure was 33.3%. The entries that happen with you home are disproportionately the ones that needed no force.

For unlawful entries with someone present, the report's Table 7 breaks down the method: an open door or window, 27.0%; an unlocked door or window, 28.0%; someone inside let the offender in, 17.6%; someone opened the door and the offender pushed their way in, 11.8%; the offender had a key, 3.6%; a picked lock, 2.2%. Add the first two and more than half of the no-force burglaries of occupied homes came through a door or window that was simply open or unlocked. Add the next two and nearly three in ten began with a resident opening the door.

When nobody was home, the picture shifts toward the unlocked door (39.5%) and "other means" (21.4%), and 7.9% used a key. The report's note on that table is worth quoting, because it's the estate problem in one sentence: an offender may get in while the household is away "by being let in by an individual not living in the household, such as a visiting guest, housekeeper, or repair person."

When, and what they were doing

Burglaries with someone home happened at night (6 p.m. to 6 a.m.) 61% of the time. Burglaries of empty homes were daytime events 43% of the time, nighttime 26%, with the rest unknown. Of the people who were home, 38% were asleep and 44% were doing something else in the house. The report puts it flatly: residents were "more likely to be present during a nighttime burglary (61%) than during one that occurred between the daytime hours of 6 am and 6 pm (33%)."

The offender's return on these was lower. In 55% of burglaries with someone home, nothing was taken, against 25% when the house was empty. Among burglaries where something was taken, losses of $1,000 or more occurred in 30% of empty-house cases and 17% of occupied ones. Electronics, wallets, and personal items were all more likely to go when nobody was home. Cash was taken at about the same rate either way.

Who it was

Across all burglaries with someone present, the offender was known to the victim in 29.5% of cases, a stranger in 24.2%, and unknown in 46.3%. Narrow it to the violent ones, and the known-offender share jumps: 65.1% knew the offender in some way, 31.1% as a current or former intimate partner and 34.0% as a relative or acquaintance. Strangers were 27.5%. The BJS press release summarized it in one line: residents "were equally likely to be victimized by a current or former intimate partner as they were by a stranger."

Weapons: in violent burglaries with someone home, 60.5% of offenders had no weapon and 12.4% had a firearm. Among violent burglaries committed by a stranger, 23.3% involved a firearm. That stranger-with-a-firearm case, the one the safe room is built for, works out by my arithmetic from the report's tables to roughly 17,000 a year, under half a percent of all burglaries. Injuries: 44% of people who experienced violence during a burglary were injured, and 8.5% seriously. The report also cites FBI data for the same years: about 430 burglary-related homicides a year, which it calls less than 1% of all homicides and 0.004% of reported burglaries.

I want to be careful here. Rare is not zero, and the consequences at the tail are the worst a family can face. The point of the numbers isn't that the tail doesn't matter. It's that a security design built only for the tail will miss the bulk, which came through an open door at night.

What this looks like for a high-value home

The report breaks rates out by income and housing. Households earning $75,000 or more (in 2003-to-2007 dollars) had the lowest burglary rates in the table: 16.8 per 1,000 households when nobody was home and 5.7 per 1,000 with someone home. Single-family houses ran 22.1 and 7.9. Owners ran lower than renters on both. A second BJS report, Household Burglary, 1994–2011, found the completed-burglary rate for households at $75,000 or more fell 74% over that period, from 48.2 to 12.7 per 1,000, the largest decline of any income group. Wealth buys a lower base rate. It doesn't change the shape of the risk, and from the burglar interviews I've written about before, it can make a house a more deliberate target rather than an opportunistic one.

So here is what I take from the tables, as someone who helps design the AI side of residential security systems:

• The occupied-home burglary is a door-discipline problem first. Open, unlocked, or opened by a resident covers the majority of no-force entries with someone present. On a large property with staff, guests, and vendors, the "let in" and "had a key" rows are the ones that scale with headcount. Revoking access and knowing what actually opens your door are the controls that touch this.
• Night is the occupied window. Sixty-one percent of occupied burglaries were at night, and 38% of residents were asleep. A system that arms the perimeter and the doors when the family goes to bed, and that wakes someone when a door opens, is aimed at the biggest slice. That's a mode setting, not a product.
• The safe room is for the tail, and it should still exist. I've written about what a safe room does and doesn't protect against. The numbers above are the honest sizing of its job: rare, severe, worth a plan. They are not a reason to skip the sensor on the back door.
• Who, not just whether. Two-thirds of violent burglaries with someone home involved an offender the victim knew. A design that only models the unknown stranger is modeling a minority of the violent cases.

Why this beat cares

I help design the AI security systems for a veteran-owned (SDVOSB) home-security company run by fellow veterans. I do not own that company and earn nothing from this link. Full policy here.

My training is in reading threat data without letting the scariest scenario crowd out the common one. In counter-IED work the device that killed people was rarely the exotic one; it was the one that matched the pattern you'd stopped checking for. Burglars interviewed in prison and the ways luxury homes get cased both point the same direction: the ordinary entry is the one to engineer out first.

What I could not confirm

Whether the shares still hold. The presence breakdown is 2003 to 2007 data in a 2010 report. I looked for a newer BJS report that splits burglaries by whether someone was home and did not find one; the 2013 trend report I cite doesn't make that split. Overall burglary rates fell sharply in the years the second report covers, and the 2010 report itself shows the empty-home rate falling while the occupied-home rate held roughly flat from 2000 to 2007. Treat the percentages as the best public estimate, not a current-year figure.

Luxury homes specifically. The survey's top income bracket is $75,000 and up. There is no estate-level row. The direction (higher income, lower rate) is in the table; the magnitude for a very high-value home is not.

The 17,000 figure. That's my multiplication of the report's stranger-violence total (73,360 a year) by its 23.3% firearm share. The report doesn't print that product, and its own note warns that estimates from small cell counts carry high relative errors.

Not my research. I didn't collect or analyze survey data. My published work is in microwave spectroscopy. The numbers belong to BJS and the NCVS.

The signal

Someone was home in about 28% of U.S. burglaries, by the federal survey that counted it. Those burglaries were mostly unforced entries at night, often through a door that was open, unlocked, or opened by a resident, and in two-thirds of the violent ones the offender was someone the victim knew. Violence occurred in 7% of all burglaries; a stranger with a gun, well under 1%. Build for the tail, but engineer the doors and the night mode first, because that's where the occupied-home burglary actually lives.