KwaZulu-Natal residents bore a disproportionate share of South Africa’s property crime burden during 2025/26, according to a comprehensive victims survey released by Statistics South Africa on Tuesday, 1 September 2026. The Governance, Public Safety and Justice Survey (GPSJS) 2025/26: Victims of Crime documents crime as households and individuals actually experienced it, independent of whether those victims ever filed a report with the South African Police Service.
The gap between lived experience and official record is the survey’s most consequential finding. Police statistics, it turns out, capture only a fraction of what is actually happening on the ground.
Housebreaking was the most common crime experienced by South African households during the period. Stats SA estimates approximately 1.5 million incidents, affecting around 1.08 million households, or 5.3% of all households nationally. KwaZulu-Natal ranked among the provinces most affected. Yet only 48.2% of affected households reported some or all of those incidents to police, meaning more than half never entered official records. That reporting rate did improve by 4.8 percentage points from the previous year, but the shortfall remains large.
Theft of personal property presents an even starker picture. An estimated 1.4 million incidents affected approximately 1.2 million South Africans aged 16 and older, equivalent to 2.6% of that population. KwaZulu-Natal again featured prominently among provinces where residents experienced this crime most frequently. Only 37.3% of victims reported some or all incidents to police. The remaining 62.7% of personal-property theft left no trace in official crime statistics, making this the most significant reporting gap among all major crime categories examined.
Meanwhile, home robbery, where occupants are present during the crime, affected approximately 179,000 households. Reporting rates here reached 51.6%, higher than for personal-property theft but still indicating that nearly half of incidents went unrecorded.
Street robbery affected approximately 459,000 South Africans, with Stats SA estimating 515,000 total incidents during 2025/26. That figure represents a slight decrease from 529,000 incidents in 2024/25. Reporting rates improved to 41.7%, up from 36.4% the prior year. Even so, the majority of street robbery victims did not file formal reports.
Assault moved in the opposite direction. The number of people experiencing assault rose from approximately 363,000 during 2024/25 to 408,000 during 2025/26. The survey also documented clear patterns around perpetrators. Among female assault victims, 70.3% identified the perpetrator as someone known to them: 31.4% named a spouse or intimate partner, 19.8% identified a friend or acquaintance, and 17.3% identified a relative or household member. Men experienced assault more frequently overall.
The cumulative effect on daily behavior is measurable. While 80.7% of South Africans aged 16 and older reported feeling safe walking alone in their neighbourhood during daylight hours, only 37.9% felt safe doing so after dark. KwaZulu-Natal ranked among provinces with comparatively high daytime safety concerns, with 18.9% of KZN respondents reporting they felt unsafe walking alone during the day. The Western Cape recorded the highest share at 30.1%, followed by Gauteng at 25.8%.
In response, South Africans are taking protective steps at increasing rates. The proportion reporting specific self-protective measures rose from 43.3% in 2024/25 to 46.6% in 2025/26. The most common actions included restricting walking to safer times and installing physical security features such as burglar doors.
Stats SA stated directly that the crime picture “cannot be understood through police statistics alone.” For KwaZulu-Natal, that observation carries particular weight. The province features among those most affected by two of the country’s most prevalent crime categories, and nearly one in five KZN respondents reported concerns about daytime safety. The practical question the survey leaves open is whether law enforcement resource allocation, which depends heavily on reported crime data, can adequately reflect a reality where the majority of incidents in several categories are never formally recorded at all.