Methodology

Source of the offences

Producer: Federal Police - DGR/DRI/BIPOL (bulletins of the Register of police crime statistics). Edition currently loaded: Q4 2025, with the closing date shown on each publication (usually 24/04/2026 for the main batch).

Time coverage of the annual series in the PDFs: the year 2000, then 2015-2025. The years 2001-2014 are not in these bulletins.

Processing: the tables in the BIPOL PDFs are extracted automatically into a working database, then loaded into the site's database. A new quarterly publication is a new observation: a figure already published is never overwritten.

Reading the tables

• An empty cell in the BIPOL PDF means 0 offences. These zeros are generally not stored in the database: a missing row is not missing data for the summary totals.
• The « Evol. 2025/2024 » column is the relative change of 2025 compared with 2024. A negative sign means 2025 is lower than 2024.
• In the PDFs, the Subtotal of the main categories equals the Total number of offences. The Total row often adds the « Breach of local police regulations »; the raw sum of all displayed categories can therefore exceed the total offences. The expected equality is: sum of categories excluding local breaches = total number of offences.

Population and rate per 1,000 inhab.

Formula: (offencesY ÷ population on 1 January Y) × 1,000. Rates are computed by the site from the counts and the stored population, not an opaque index.

Primary population source: Statbel (Directorate-General Statistics - Statistics Belgium), file Population by municipality on 1 January (1992-2026): total population on 1 January by NIS / REFNIS code (country, regions, provinces, municipalities). SPC municipalities are matched via NIS / REFNIS codes (2025 nomenclature, 565 municipalities).

Backup source (if a whole year were missing from Statbel): FPS Home Affairs / DG Identity and Citizen Affairs, National Register PDF figures on ibz.rrn.fgov.be. The two sources can differ slightly (e.g. Ixelles 1/1/2025: Statbel 89,897 vs IBZ 89,576); the register uses Statbel.

• Rates shown for: country, regions, provinces, municipalities (when the population is available for the year).
• Counts only for: police zones (no official zone population) and judicial arrondissements (a different division from administrative arrondissements).
• If the population is missing for a year: shown as « - », never an invented zero. The year 2000 has no population in the loaded population data (2015-2026) → no rate for 2000.
• Recent municipal mergers: population only for the years in which Statbel publishes the merged NIS code; no invented sum of the former municipalities.

Technical detail: docs/population-taux.md in the repository.

« Profile » block on place pages

Demographic and tax indicators from Statbel, shown with their edition and a link to the source. They are not crossed with any crime statistic (no correlation, no score).

• Foreign nationals: people with a non-Belgian nationality in the National Register on 1 January (open data Population by place of residence, nationality, marital status, age and sex, 2010-2026). Naturalised Belgians or Belgians of foreign origin are counted as Belgians.
• Origin (a separate indicator): official Statbel categories (Belgian of Belgian origin, Belgian of foreign origin, non-Belgian), based on current nationality, first recorded nationality and that of the parents (Statbel, Diversity by origin). Non-Belgians are also split into groups by nationality of origin: neighbouring countries (including the United Kingdom), EU27 excluding neighbouring countries, outside the EU27.
• Age (0-17, 18-64, 65+), area and density (1/1/2025), median income per tax return (2023 income, Statbel tax income).
• Country, regions, provinces and judicial arrondissements: sum of municipal counts (never an average of percentages). Judicial arrondissements: documented composition in municipalities (e.g. Eupen = 9 municipalities of the German-speaking Community). Hainaut (Charleroi) = 28 municipalities of the judicial cantons of Beaumont-Chimay-Merbes-le-Château, Binche, Charleroi, Châtelet, Fontaine-l’Évêque, Seneffe and Thuin; Hainaut (Mons) = the 41 other municipalities of the province (Judicial Code, art. 150 § 4, inserted by the law of 1 December 2013, and the annex to the Judicial Code for the composition of the cantons). Checks: Charleroi + Mons = province of Hainaut for every year, and the BIPOL total for the Mons arrondissement exactly equals the sum of its 41 municipalities. Median income, which is not additive, is only shown where Statbel publishes it for the area (so not for Charleroi, Mons or Liège).
• Merged or renumbered municipalities: no reconstructed series before the new code.

Detail: sources/statbel-profil/README.md.

Perceived safety (Security Monitor)

The Security Monitor (Moniteur de sécurité / Veiligheidsmonitor) is a population survey by the Federal Police (DRI/BIPOL), with the FPS Home Affairs and local authorities. It measures perceptions and self-reported victimisation: these are not recorded offences. The site shows it in a separate block, never combined with BIPOL figures, with no score or ranking.

• Current coverage: the 6 Brussels police zones (5339 to 5344) and the 19 municipalities of the Region, 2021 and 2024 editions, with the Region and Belgium as benchmarks from the same edition. The 2024 reports for the Montgomery zone, Berchem-Sainte-Agathe and Ganshoren come from Wayback Machine copies of 30/11/2025 (police.be under maintenance). The 2021 report for Brussels-West exists only in Dutch.
• Method (2024 methodological note): random sample stratified by age and sex, drawn from the National Register by Statbel, residents aged 15 and over; at least 350 responses targeted per zone or municipality (1,400 mailings); questionnaire online first, then on paper; results weighted by age, sex and municipality. 2024: 428,515 mailings, 149,388 usable responses, participation rate 34.9 %, from 25 to 50 % depending on the municipality or zone (lower in Brussels). 2021: nearly 400,000 mailings, without reminder. The response rate is not published by zone or municipality.
• Voluntary participation: only registered zones and municipalities have a local report (2024: 136 zones and 185 municipalities; 2021: 132 zones and 163 municipalities).
• Indicators used: « always » + « often » feeling unsafe; « always » + « often » avoiding certain places in one’s municipality; the 3 most cited neighbourhood problems; victimisation over 12 months (burglary, theft of a bicycle or scooter, theft with violence) and the share of victims who reported it. Each value links to the page of the PDF report; the only operations are sums of published columns.
• Comparisons over time: possible for 2018, 2021 and 2024 according to the note (same survey mode since 2011; before that, a non-comparable telephone survey). 2018 values are only shown when the report publishes the « by year » table (which it only does when the difference is significant). The scale of the neighbourhood problems question changed in 2024 (« a little » became « rather »): the two editions are shown separately.
• Margin of error: 90 % confidence interval computed by the site with the formula from the 2024 methodological note (§3.8, p. 21), p ± 1.645 × √(p(1 - p)/n). This is an approximation: weighting is not taken into account. Fewer than 30 responses: value flagged « read with caution ».
• Belgium 2024: the federal table report was not retrieved. Only two rounded values from the 2024 federal analysis are used (feeling unsafe 10 %, p. 30; bicycle or scooter theft 5.6 %, p. 38).

Sources: 2024 methodological note (in French); detail and checks: sources/moniteur-securite/README.md.

Coverage limitations

• Municipalities missing from the reference bulletin: the Q4 2025 bulletin has no municipal PDF for Flemish Brabant (63 municipalities), nor for Oud-Turnhout, Pont-à-Celles and Meix-devant-Virton (499 municipalities out of 565). These 66 municipalities are loaded from older BIPOL bulletins preserved by the Wayback Machine (link to each PDF on the municipality page): Q2 2025, closing 31/10/2025 (Flemish Brabant, Oud-Turnhout; years 2000, 2015-2024); Q1 2023, closing 22/09/2023 (Pont-à-Celles; 2000, 2015-2022); Q1 2024, closing 20/09/2024 (Meix-devant-Virton; 2000, 2015-2023). The last column of these bulletins only covers a quarter or a half-year: it is not used. These figures have an earlier closing date and are therefore not revised: for recent years they may be slightly lower than in a recent bulletin (Flemish Brabant 2024: +405 offences between the closings of 31/10/2025 and 24/04/2026, based on the police zones). Checks: for 2000 and 2015-2020, the sum of the 63 municipalities of Flemish Brabant equals that of its 23 police zones in the reference bulletin, and for the three other municipalities « province minus published municipalities » gives exactly the archived total. About 5,000 offences a year in Flemish Brabant are not attributed to any municipality (provincial total higher than the sum of municipalities, notably offences recorded at the airport).
• Tessenderlo-Ham: the municipal merger took effect on 1 January 2025. BIPOL does not yet provide its own multi-year main series for the new entity; the 2025 bulletin may still reflect an incomplete edition. The site therefore hides the main series of Tessenderlo-Ham and keeps documenting the pre-merger municipalities separately, until the source publishes a complete multi-year table.
• Herstappe: gaps in 2015-2016 for the total, absent from the source BIPOL PDF, not an extraction loss.
• 2025 is provisional: see the section below.
• Monthly series: limited coverage (mainly the national bulletin).

2025: provisional figures

The police database (BNG/ANG) keeps being fed after the end of the year: reports recorded late are added in later bulletins. Each year is therefore first published « low », then raised. The site shows 2025 as published (first release, closing 24/04/2026) marked provisional, without correcting the figures.

• Belgium, total offences (current reference bulletin, closing 24/04/2026, « Main categories » row): 2023 = 938 893, 2024 = 931 245, 2025 = 903 078 (provisional).
• The years 2023 and 2024 have already been revised by successive bulletins; 2025 has not yet and will be raised in later bulletins. The displayed 2025/2024 change therefore compares a first publication with an already revised year: it may overstate the decrease.
• Brussels-Capital Region (same bulletin): 2024 = 170 316; 2025 = 152 042 (provisional). Part of the displayed decrease may come from this effect; some zones also report a decrease (2025 review of the Brussels-North zone: −12 %).
• Zones do not feed the database at the same pace. Examples of 2025 reviews published by zones that do not match the bulletin: Namur Capitale (drugs rising according to the zone, falling in the bulletin), La Louvière (+2,2 % according to the zone, −20,9 % in the bulletin). A 2025 decrease for a single municipality should therefore be read with caution.

Sources: national BIPOL bulletin for Q4 2025 (closing 24/04/2026); Federal Police, 2021 statistics press release (our translation: « a very small increase cannot therefore be ruled out, for example in case of late recording of reports »); safe.brussels, methodological guide (our translation: « the speed at which the BNG is fed differs from one police zone to another »).

Consistency checks

An independent audit (stratified sample of 45 areas, new extraction of the PDFs by another method, comparison of the data loaded on the site with the original extraction, check of category sum vs 2025 total) found no numerical discrepancy in the main series checked. Operational caveat: Tessenderlo-Ham (see above). The full audit remains a sample, not a page-by-page review of the 769 PDFs.

Rankings

The Rankings page ranks municipalities or provinces for a main category and a published year, as counts or as a rate per 1,000 inhab. (Statbel population on 1 January of the year). Values are those of the main annual series of the BIPOL bulletins, no composite score.

• Default threshold: municipalities of 20,000 inhab. or more (151 municipalities in 2025), so that very small municipalities do not dominate the rate per 1,000 inhab. with a few offences. The « All » option remains available (?seuil=0). For a year without a Statbel population (e.g. 2000), the default threshold cannot apply: all municipalities are shown, with a message.
• Tessenderlo-Ham is excluded from the main rankings while its multi-year BIPOL series remains hidden.
• Flemish Brabant, Oud-Turnhout, Pont-à-Celles, Meix-devant-Virton: ranked for the years present in their archived bulletin (see Coverage limitations), absent from the 2025 rankings.
• Police zones and arrondissements: outside the rankings (counts available on place pages; no rate for lack of a reference population).
• In rate mode, a place without a population for the chosen year is excluded, with the number excluded shown, never an invented rate.

Municipalities map

The Map page colours each municipality by the same value as the Rankings (BIPOL category, year, rate per 1,000 inhab. by default or counts). Settings are in the address (shareable link: ?indicateur=…&annee=…&mode=effectifs&seuil=20000&commune=62063&zoom=bxl).

• Quantile classes: five groups of roughly equal size, computed on the coloured municipalities (the bounds change with category, year, measure and threshold; they are shown in the legend). Tied values: classes may merge.
• Single-hue palette (light blue → navy): darker = higher value, with no judgement implied (no red/green). Plain light grey = municipality below the chosen population threshold; grey hatching = no data.
• Default threshold: 0 (all municipalities) for a complete map; the Rankings thresholds of 20,000, 50,000 and 100,000 inhab. remain available. The rank shown (1 = highest value) covers the coloured municipalities.
• No data: Tessenderlo-Ham (hidden series); in 2025, the 66 municipalities loaded from an archived bulletin (Flemish Brabant, Oud-Turnhout, Pont-à-Celles, Meix-devant-Virton; see Coverage limitations); or missing value/population for the year.
• Boundaries: Statbel, statistical sectors as of 1 January 2025 (EPSG:3812), grouped into 565 municipalities (2025 mergers), simplified (Visvalingam, 5 % of vertices) and prepared for direct display; file hosted on this site (no third-party map service). Detail: sources/contours-communes/.

Shareable card (PNG)

On each municipality page, « Download the card » generates on demand, server-side, a PNG image (1200 x 630 or 1080 x 1080): population and share of foreign nationals on the latest 1 January (Statbel), total offences 2025 as counts and per 1,000 inhab., change in counts vs 2024, rank of the rate among municipalities of 20,000 inhab. or more (same rule as the Rankings), mayor in office with their party badge, sources and generation date. The card itself is only available in French.

• 2025 carries the « provisional » badge (first release). For municipalities from an archived bulletin, the card shows the last complete year of that bulletin (e.g. 2024 for Flemish Brabant, 2022 for Pont-à-Celles), marked « archived », with the bulletin source and the change vs the previous year of the same publication; no rank, as it would not be comparable with the 2025 ranking.
• No composite score; values and change in neutral ink (neither red nor green). Only the party badge carries a colour, that of the party brand.
• Any visitor can download the card from the municipality's page. It is made at the moment of the click and has no address of its own on the site: you share it yourself, for example by attaching it to a message. When a link to a page of the site is shared on social media, the preview shows one fixed image, the same for every page, not this card.
• Newsreader and IBM Plex Sans fonts (OFL licence) hosted with the site; the image is made on our server, with no external service.

Priority neighbourhoods (regional perimeters)

Belgium has no federal list of « priority neighbourhoods » (equivalent of the French QPV). Each Region publishes its own instruments, not interchangeable: ZRU (Brussels-Capital) ≠ ZIP ≠ PDU (Wallonia) ≠ kwetsbare buurten ≠ wijkverbeteringscontracten (Flanders).

The register documents them on the Priority neighbourhoods page, from a compiled Excel file (sources cited on the page). No neighbourhood name is invented; PDU « to be defined » stay empty; Brussels statistical sector codes missing from the 2026 ZRU note are shown as unavailable.

Mosques / recognised local Islamic communities

The Recognised mosques page only publishes recognised local Islamic communities (a regional competence). It is not a census of all places of prayer: administrative recognition clearly undercounts press inventories and estimates (~345 mosques cited notably by Le Vif and other unofficial compilations). No « unrecognised » inventory is mixed into this list.

V1 sources: Flanders, vlaanderen.be (+ CMB addresses); Wallonia / Brussels, cmb-mrb.be (cross-checked against EMB, no silent merging). Coordinates: positions found from the addresses, via Belgian services only, never invented. Detail: sources/mosquees/.

Fedasil collective reception centres

The Fedasil centres page publishes the collective reception centres of the open Fedasil network (federal agency for the reception of asylum seekers). Primary source: the map of centres published on fedasil.be; check: Fedasil PDF of 15/09/2026 (stated total 101). The loaded list combines the map and the PDF (~104 rows): centres only on the map, only in the PDF, and the Koekelberg → Uccle pair (Samusocial, move around Sept. 2026) are recorded without silent merging. No capacity per site is invented (absent from public per-centre sources). Coordinates: position shown on the Fedasil map, or found from the partner's address (OpenStreetMap), never invented (Ieper without a street number: no dot). Attribution: information obtained from www.fedasil.be. Detail: sources/fedasil/.

Median sale price (Statbel)

The « Municipalities table » page puts municipal columns side by side (offences per 1,000 inhab., Fedasil centres, recognised mosques, median sale price in euros for 2-3 facade houses and for flats). No composite score. It is not a price per m² (no recent official €/m² series used).

Producer: Statbel, based on FPS Finance / Land Registry (CC BY 4.0 licence). Statbel's annual open data file (spreadsheet by municipality) is the reference source; the file could not be downloaded here (Statbel firewall). The medians used come from the be.STAT query tool (same producer), by quarter; shown by default: Q2 2026. Empty cell = median not published (Statbel threshold), never an invented zero. Detail: sources/prix-immobilier/.

Events (press / press releases)

The Events page is a layer separate from the annual SPC: one calendar day × one municipality × one category, with several linked sources (no duplicate card). No score. The arrests / injured officers columns stay per source, empty if the source gives no figure; no merged total across partial reviews, end-of-day figures and cumulative figures.

First version: hand-checked events in Liège (Oct. 2026, police / Belga / prosecutor’s office quoted by RTBF, L’Avenir, La Libre, RTL) + articles spotted in news feeds (RSS), checked before publication, from DH / L’Avenir / RTBF / La Libre (regions), BX1, VRT NWS FR, Le Vif (Belgium feed). Le Soir, Soirmag and 7sur7 refuse access from our server. Titles and excerpts stay in the language of the source. Detail: sources/evenements/.

Local executive (mayor, governor, minister-president)

On municipality, province and region pages, the « Local executive » block shows who leads the executive, their list or party as published by the source (local list names kept; a national party is only shown if the source says so) and the composition of the majority. Each row carries an « in office on » date and a link to its source; a secondary source (Wikipedia, press) is flagged as such. Governors are appointed, not elected. Unknown field = « not provided ». No score; only a badge carries the colour of the party brand.

Sources: Mandatendatabank of the Agentschap Binnenlands Bestuur (Flanders), UVCW « Mandataires locaux » dataset on ODWB (Wallonia, data as of 14/01/2026), municipal websites and Wikipedia (Brussels), official provincial and regional websites. Data are historised (one row per mandate, start / end dates) to follow changes during the term and the next elections. Detail and update procedure: sources/politique/.

Foreign population (Statbel)

• Source: Statbel workbook « population by nationality and sex » (popstranger), one sheet per year, from 1 January 1992 to 1 January 2026, by municipality, with the Belgium, region and province totals published by Statbel. Files, URLs and checksums: sources/statbel-nationalites/.
• « Foreign national » = non-Belgian nationality in the national register. Naturalisations and other acquisitions of nationality lower the number of foreign nationals without anyone leaving: a falling percentage does not mean fewer people born abroad. Reforms of the Belgian Nationality Code (notably 1984, 1991, 2000 and 2012) changed the pace of these acquisitions.
• EU27: the 26 other current member states, applied to every year to keep a comparable series (the United Kingdom counts as non-EU27 over the whole period; « former Czechoslovakia » counts as EU27, both successors being members). « Non-EU27 » = foreign nationals minus EU27, including stateless and undetermined nationalities.
• Municipal mergers (2019 and 2025): a merged municipality only has values from its Statbel code; the site does not recompute former municipalities. Before 1995 the province of Brabant was not split: no series for Flemish Brabant and Walloon Brabant before 1995. Checks: the three regions add up to Belgium every year; the detail by nationality equals the foreign total on every row.
• Before 1992 (censuses): number of foreign nationals and total population of Belgium at the 1890 to 1991 censuses, and of the three regions from 1947 to 1991, transcribed from publications of the National Institute of Statistics (1970 census, volume IV A; Bevolkingsstatistieken 1970 no. 1; regional statistics yearbooks 1991 and 1992). Each figure is cited with its document and page; no point is interpolated. Check: the three regions add up to the Kingdom at every census. For 1947, 1961 and 1970 the regions are rebuilt from the published language areas (Flemish Region = Dutch-speaking area; Walloon Region = French- and German-speaking areas; Brussels-Capital = 19 municipalities). 1920: new territory (with the East Cantons). The 1846 to 1880 censuses do not report nationality in these tables. Dates: 31 December up to 1970, 1 March in 1981 and 1991. No municipal series before 1992. Detail: sources/recensements-etrangers/.
• Origin (separate indicator, 2000-2026, by municipality): Statbel categories based on current nationality, first registered nationality and that of the parents. Country of birth (1880-2026, Belgium as a whole): censuses until 1970, then the national register. These three measures are not comparable with each other.

Newborns' first names (Statbel)

• Belgium and regions, 1995-2025: Statbel « girls' / boys' first names » workbooks, official ranks and counts. Municipalities: Statbel open data « first names of newborns by municipality », total for 2016-2025 (no yearly detail). Statbel only publishes a name from 5 births.
• Spellings are counted separately, as in the source. Four duplicate rows in the 2015 workbook (same name listed twice): the first is kept, duplicates are listed in sources/statbel-prenoms/out/doublons_source.csv.
• The site classifies no first name by origin, language or religion. For residents' nationality, see the Foreign population page.

Languages (FR / NL / EN)

• The site exists in French (default), Dutch and English. Search engines are told that the three versions are translations of each other, and each one can be found there.
• Place names: official Statbel names of municipalities in Dutch; in English, the local name (bilingual FR / NL form for the 19 Brussels municipalities); official federal labels for regions, provinces and judicial arrondissements. Police zones keep the name published by BIPOL.
• BIPOL publishes no English version: in English, crime categories keep the official French label. (In Dutch, 216 of the 227 labels come from the official Dutch BIPOL bulletin.)
• Data values keep Belgian notation (space as thousands separator, decimal comma) in all three languages. The downloadable PNG card stays in French. Content taken from sources (article titles, perimeter names and descriptions, source notes) stays in the language of the source.

How we work

We publish the official figures as they are: federal police, Statbel and other public sources, with the date and a link to each document. When a figure is missing, we leave a gap rather than estimate it. We do not compute a rating or score per municipality: the rankings simply follow the published figures, as a number of offences or per 1,000 inhabitants. The press headlines on the Events page are links to the articles, not statistics.

Rankings · Priority neighbourhoods · Recognised mosques · Fedasil · Events · Municipalities table · Register structure · Belgium

European comparison of crime (Eurostat)

The European rates (homicide, robbery, burglary, per 100,000 inhabitants) come from the Eurostat table crim_off_cat. They are used to compare Belgium with its neighbours; they do not replace the BIPOL figures used on the rest of the site.

• Eurostat’s warning: laws, the way complaints are recorded and people’s readiness to report differ from one country to another. It is better to compare trends than levels. No ranking is made.
• Attempts: Eurostat only counts completed homicides. BIPOL figures count completed acts and attempts together. The two figures cannot be compared.
• Eurostat flags (estimated, provisional, break in series…) are shown next to the values, with the source’s update date.

See the comparison: Belgium in Europe