Houston vs Durham: which should you move to?

On the FBI's definitions, violent offenses in Houston went from 28,850 in 2021 to 26,383 in 2022, 25,517 in 2023, 26,758 in 2024 and 21,345 in 2025, a 20% drop in the last year and 26% in four, and property offenses from 97,068 to a peak of 105,522 in 2022, then 104,829, 100,302 and 92,382, 12% below the peak. Motor vehicle theft rose from 15,694 in 2021 to 20,085 in 2023 and fell to 12,516 in 2025. In 2025 the CDE shows aggravated assaults down 19% (18,341 to 14,839), robberies down 24% (6,359 to 4,859), rapes down 20% (1,729 to 1,377) and murders down 18% (329 to 270). HPD's own year-end counts show the same direction: homicides down from 331 to 272, robberies from 6,438 to 4,987 and aggravated assaults from 18,590 to 15,378 (Major Cities Chiefs Association survey, as reported by the Houston Chronicle). The 2025 CDE counts were read on 30 September 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September and can still be revised.

What the rates cover: Computed: 21,345 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the Houston Police Department (ORI TXHPD0000) in calendar 2025, divided by the 2,397,315 Vintage 2025 city population. On the CDE's own agency population of 2,413,559 the rate is 884. HPD's year-end figures as reported to the Major Cities Chiefs Association and quoted by the Houston Chronicle run slightly higher than the CDE's: 272 homicides, 4,987 robberies and 15,378 aggravated assaults, against 270, 4,859 and 14,839. The Chronicle did not give HPD's rape count, so HPD's own total on the FBI definition could not be rebuilt.

Homicides: 270 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, against 329 in 2024, about 11.3 per 100,000 on the city population. HPD's own year-end count, obtained by the Houston Chronicle through an open records request, was 272 against 331 in 2024, a 17% drop; nothing fetched explains the gap of two cases in each year between the two series. The high point in the CDE series since 2021 is 474, in 2021.

Down in 2025 to the lowest violent count since the department began reporting incident-based data. On the FBI CDE's figures violent offenses were 2,054 in 2019, 2,454 in 2020, 2,181 in 2021, 1,978 in 2022, 1,890 in 2023, 1,865 in 2024 and 1,557 in 2025, about 640, 620 and 510 per 100,000 in the last three years on each July's Vintage 2025 population, so 2025 was 16.5% below 2024; the department reported a 16.9% fall on its own counts, led by aggravated assaults (down 21.5%) and robberies (down 9.2%). Property offenses fell to a low of 9,570 in 2022, rose to a peak of 11,447 in 2024 with the surge in vehicle thefts, and fell 3.4% in 2025. The SBI's summaries show the 2023 and 2024 figures within a few offenses (1,888 and 1,862 violent). The FBI series needs care in two places. The CDE lists the department as reporting incident-based (NIBRS) data from 1 January 2019, and its 2018 counts (1,963 violent, 9,790 property) come before that, so 2018 is not used. And its August 2026 row is plainly incomplete, 80 violent and 597 property offenses against 147 and 1,066 in August 2025, so 2026 is compared through July: January to July brought 939 violent offenses against 906 in the same months of 2025, up 3.6%, and 5,862 property offenses against 6,251, down 6.2%. The rise matches what the City said early in the year: by mid-February 2026, 22 people had been shot in Durham and seven had died, and the mayor called youth crime out of control (WRAL). The CDE counts were read on 5 October 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September and can still be revised; the SBI's 2025 summary had not been published.

What the rates cover: Computed: 1,557 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the Durham Police Department (ORI NC0320100) in calendar 2025, divided by the 305,561 Vintage 2025 city population; on the CDE's own agency population of 307,140 the rate is 507. That is about one and a half times the CDE's 2025 rate for reporting North Carolina agencies (331 per 100,000) and for the nation (329). Of the four North Carolina cities this site compares it is second, below Greensboro's 705 and Charlotte's 607 (on CMPD's own count) and above Raleigh's 396, and among the US cities here it sits in the middle, close to Jacksonville's 514 and Boston's 507. Among the state's largest city police departments on the CDE's 2025 counts and populations it is sixth of seven, below Winston-Salem's 744, Greensboro's 702, Fayetteville's 614, Charlotte-Mecklenburg's 559 and High Point's 521 and above Raleigh's 395. The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation's most recent annual summary, for 2024 (published October 2025), counts 1,862 violent offenses for the department that year, three fewer than the FBI's 1,865, about 619 per 100,000, sixth of the thirteen city departments in its table of the state's largest agencies. The department's own year-end report counts 1,529 violent crimes in 2025, 28 fewer than the FBI: 39 homicides, 150 rapes, 433 robberies and 907 aggravated assaults, against the FBI's 33, 161, 443 and 920.

Homicides: 33 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, about 10.8 per 100,000 on the city population, against the CDE's 6.5 for North Carolina and 4.3 for the nation, and against Greensboro's 37 (12.0 per 100,000), Raleigh's 25 (4.9) and Charlotte's 96 (about 10). The CDE series is 37 in 2019, 37 in 2020, 46 in 2021, 42 in 2022, 47 in 2023, 36 in 2024 and 33 in 2025. The department's own count is higher and flat: 39 homicides in 2025 and 39 in 2024, 48 in 2023, with 28 of the 2025 killings by gun against 34 in 2024, and it cleared 89.7% of them, against 69.2% in 2024 (Durham Police Department; WRAL). Nothing read explains the six-homicide gap between the department's 2025 count and the FBI's.

BLS counted 3,495,300 nonfarm jobs in the Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands MSA in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 44,700 or 1.3% on the year. Construction grew fastest (+5.5%, to 269,000), then professional and business services (+2.6%, to 581,300) and government (+1.9%), with education and health services and leisure and hospitality both up 1.3%, while information (-5.9%), financial activities (-1.2%), mining and logging (-0.5%, to 73,300) and manufacturing (-0.2%, to 240,400) shrank. Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest sector at 695,600 jobs, unchanged on the year. The seasonally adjusted series (SMS48264200000000001) was 3,510,100 in August 2026, 1.2% above August 2025. The Greater Houston Partnership counts 27 Fortune 500 headquarters in the region on the 2026 list, tied with Chicago for second among US metros behind New York and ahead of Dallas-Fort Worth's 24, with a 28th due when Expand Energy moves to Spring; ExxonMobil (No. 9) and Chevron (No. 21) lead them. Port Houston calls the Houston Ship Channel complex the nation's largest port for waterborne tonnage (309.5 million tons in 2023, USACE) and the fifth-ranked US container port by TEUs.

Main sectors: Energy: oil and gas producers, refiners, pipelines and oilfield services (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Phillips 66, ConocoPhillips, Enterprise Products Partners, Baker Hughes, Halliburton, Cheniere Energy), Trade, transportation and utilities, the metro's largest sector (the Port of Houston, the nation's largest port by waterborne tonnage; Sysco; United Airlines at Bush Intercontinental; CenterPoint Energy, NRG Energy), Professional and business services, including engineering and construction (KBR, Quanta Services, Comfort Systems USA, Waste Management), Health care and life sciences (the Texas Medical Center, Memorial Hermann, Houston Methodist, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas Children's Hospital), Petrochemicals and advanced manufacturing along the Houston Ship Channel (Westlake, NOV).

Property tax is the local levy that matters. Tax Foundation puts Texas's effective property tax rate on owner-occupied homes at 1.40%, and school districts must exempt $140,000 of a homestead's value from their tax. The City of Houston's own rate for tax year 2025 is 51.919 cents per $100 of taxable value, left unchanged by an 11-3 council vote on 15 October 2025 although the city controller warned it would open a $53 million gap in the $7 billion fiscal 2026 budget; the budget committee chair, who voted against, said there was still room under both the state's and the city's own revenue caps. On 10 June 2026 the council passed a $7.5 billion budget for fiscal 2027 by 15 to 1, closing a projected deficit of more than $200 million with no increase in the property tax rate and a new $5 monthly solid waste fee on residential water bills. The rate for tax year 2026 had not been published in anything fetched. The county, school district, METRO and other levies on the same bill belong to the housing layer.

BLS counted 359,600 nonfarm jobs in the Durham-Chapel Hill MSA in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 1,700 or 0.5% on the year. Professional and business services (+2,000, or 3.3%, to 63,300), leisure and hospitality (+1,500, or 5.1%, to 30,800), private education and health services (+800, or 1.0%, to 82,100, of which health care and social assistance is 55,500) and construction (mining, logging and construction +500, or 4.5%, to 11,700) added the most, while government lost 1,900 (-2.7%, to 68,600), state government 1,500 of it and federal government 500, manufacturing 1,000 (-3.8%, to 25,600) and transportation, warehousing and utilities 400 (to 7,800). Private education and health is 22.8% of the metro's jobs, government 19.1% and professional and business services 17.6%. The principal employer table is the City's own, from its annual comprehensive financial report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024, the most recent the City has posted; it counts 159,974 people employed in the city, and its ten largest employers hold 89,147 jobs, 55.7% of them. Several, IBM, Cisco, Pfizer, IQVIA and GSK, have their large sites in Research Triangle Park, outside the city limits. Its 2015 column had Duke at 35,998, IBM at 7,000 and Durham Public Schools at 4,600, with Cree and the City government on the list. Two thirds of the city's 165,719 workers worked inside it in 2024 (66.7%) and 28.3% outside Durham County, many of them in Wake County and Research Triangle Park. 20.5% worked from home, and the mean commute for the rest was 21 minutes, with 2.7% spending an hour or more (ACS 2024 1-year, B08007, B08008, B08013, B08301 and B08303).

Main sectors: Duke University and Duke Health, far the largest employer: 44,500 people in the City's latest principal employer table, 27.8% of employment in the city, and 48,313 in Duke's own July 2025 count, which includes Duke University Hospital (11,776), the schools of medicine and nursing (11,804) and Duke Regional Hospital (2,270) as well as Duke Raleigh Hospital; the State ranks Duke the fourth-largest employer in North Carolina, and private education and health services hold 82,100 of the metro's 359,600 nonfarm jobs in August 2026, more than any other supersector, Research Triangle Park, founded in 1959 between Durham and Raleigh: 7,000 acres, more than 385 companies and more than 55,000 people working there daily (Research Triangle Foundation), outside the city limits but in its labor market; IBM (9,350), Cisco (4,250), Pfizer (4,000), IQVIA (3,900) and GSK (3,100) are on the City's list of the ten largest employers, and professional and business services added 2,000 metro jobs in a year, to 63,300, the most of any sector, Insurance and finance: Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, headquartered in Durham, is the third-largest employer on the City's list (8,245), and Fidelity Investments employs 3,600; financial activities hold 15,900 metro jobs, Government and public education: state government, which in BLS's count includes the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina Central University, holds 41,800 metro jobs, down 1,500 on the year, and federal government 6,400, down 500; Durham Public Schools (4,697) and the Veterans Administration Medical Center (3,505) are on the City's list, Hospitality and the downtown built in old tobacco warehouses: the American Tobacco Campus, Brightleaf Square, the Durham Performing Arts Center and the Durham Bulls' ballpark (Wikipedia), with leisure and hospitality up 1,500 metro jobs in a year, or 5.1%, to 30,800, the fastest growth of any sector.

North Carolina's flat income tax rate has come down every year since 2022, to 4.25% for 2025 and 3.99% for 2026. Property tax is levied by Durham County and the City on assessed value. For 2026-27 (the bills mailed in the summer of 2026) a house in the City pays 101.63 cents per $100 of assessed value: the County's 57.92 cents, up 2.5 cents and adopted on 8 June 2026, and the City's 43.71 cents, held and adopted on 15 June, with no fire district inside the city (Durham County; City of Durham). The values are new: Durham County revalued every parcel to 100% of market value as of 1 January 2025, the first reappraisal since 2019, it drew more than 10,000 appeals, and the next is 1 January 2029. The combined rate fell from 139.49 cents in 2024-25 to 99.13 in 2025-26 as the values rose. The Department of Revenue measures how close the values sit to sale prices: on 2024 sales assessments averaged 100.23% of prices, so the bill on a house assessed like the average one is about 1.019% of its market value, about $4,331 a year on the $424,990 median sale. On the Department's 2025-26 table Durham's combined rate (99.13 cents) was below Greensboro's 140.30 and above Raleigh's 87.21 and Charlotte's 76.68, but because only Durham's values were current its effective rate, 0.9936% of market value, was the highest of the four North Carolina cities this site compares (Greensboro 0.9583%, Raleigh 0.8319%, Charlotte 0.6808%). Downtown Business Improvement District parcels pay 7 cents more. Stormwater is not on the tax bill: the City charges it on the utility bill, $5.70, $11.80 or $23.64 a month for a house by impervious area. The City says its median home, valued at $424,000, pays about $1,853 a year in City tax. The Durham Regional Association of REALTORS' Doorify MLS median sale price for the City was $424,990 in August 2026, up 3.7% on 283 sales of houses and condominiums together; Zillow's typical home value for the City, a model of every home rather than a count of sales, was $389,634, down 3.4%, and its single-family value $392,384. That fall is the steepest of the four North Carolina cities here (Raleigh's $428,671, Charlotte's $392,573, Greensboro's $263,264), and of the US cities here only Cape Coral's and Austin's fell faster. Zillow's observed rent index for the City was $1,659 a month in August, up 1.8%, second of the four North Carolina cities after Charlotte's $1,744. The bills, insurance and fees that follow from these figures belong to the housing layer.

Health care

Care is paid for through employer or marketplace insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and Texas is one of the ten states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (KFF, August 2026). It had the highest uninsured rate of any state in 2024: 16.7%, or 5,152,427 of 30,799,312 people, against 8.2% nationally and 12.0% in Georgia, the next highest, on the ACS 2024 1-year estimates. The City of Houston's rate was 23.3% (553,576 of 2,370,907), Harris County's 20.8% and the metro's 18.4%. The Texas Medical Center, south of downtown, calls itself the largest medical complex in the world: by its own count 10,000 patient beds, more than 120,000 employees, 10 million patient encounters and 750,000 emergency visits a year, and among its members the world's largest children's hospital and largest cancer hospital (Texas Children's and MD Anderson). Harris Health's Ben Taub Hospital in the medical center, licensed for 402 beds, is the county's public Level I trauma center and treats more than 80,000 emergency patients a year; in May 2024 Harris Health broke ground on a $1.6 billion, 12-story hospital on its Lyndon B. Johnson campus in northeast Houston, due to open in late 2028 as the first Level I trauma center in the county outside the medical center. This file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Houston ISD, the largest school district in Texas, has been run by a state-appointed board and superintendent, Mike Miles, since the Texas Education Agency took it over in 2023. It counted 168,810 students on its official snapshot of 31 October 2025, down 4.5% from 176,727 a year earlier, and just over 155,600 on 4 September 2026, nearly 10,000 fewer than in September 2025, and it is cutting staff and campus budgets as a result (Houston Chronicle). The Texas Tribune counts 21,000 students lost since the takeover began, a faster decline than any of its urban peers, and about $190 million in state funding with them. Under Miles the number of F-rated campuses fell from 56 to five, but voters rejected a $4.4 billion bond in 2024, the largest Texas school bond ever to fail, and in August 2026 Miles said the official end of the takeover may come at the end of the 2026-27 year. The University of Houston (48,950 students in fall 2025) and Rice University (8,880 in fall 2024) are both inside the city, and Houston Community College renamed itself Houston City College in 2025.

Living there

Houston is the fourth-largest city in the country and the energy capital of its fifth-largest metro, which added 126,720 people in 2024-25, more than any other. It spreads into four counties with 22.7 miles of light rail near the core, and 68.7% of its workers drive alone, though its 3.4% transit share is the highest of the Texas cities this site compares. Water is its hazard: Harvey flooded 154,170 homes in Harris County in 2017, most of them outside the mapped floodplain, and Beryl left more than two million customers without power in July heat in 2024. Summer is long and humid rather than extreme, with far fewer 100F days than Dallas but 111 days a year at 90F or above and 1,317 mm of rain. Texas takes no income tax, 23.3% of the city's residents have no health insurance, and the Texas Medical Center, the largest in the world by its own count, sits a few miles south of downtown. The open questions are fiscal and civic: the council held the property tax rate flat in October 2025 against its controller's warning and passed a fiscal 2027 budget that closes a deficit of more than $200 million without raising it, METRO has shelved the University Line that was once the cornerstone of its expansion plan, and Houston ISD, under state control since 2023, began 2026-27 with nearly 10,000 fewer students than the year before.

Health care

Care is paid for through employer or individual private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and North Carolina is one of the 41 states, counting the District of Columbia, that have adopted the Medicaid expansion (KFF); the expansion covers about 740,000 people statewide. Federal and state changes narrow it: from January 1, 2027 most expansion adults aged 19 to 64 must show 80 hours a month of work, school or volunteering, or $580 a month in earnings, and renew every six months (NCDHHS). The City of Durham's uninsured rate was 8.3% in 2024 (24,892 of 300,100), against 8.6% for North Carolina and 8.2% nationally, above Raleigh's 7.1% and Greensboro's 7.5% and well below Charlotte's 12.1% (ACS 2024 1-year, B27001). Durham is a medical city built around one system. Duke University Hospital has 1,106 licensed inpatient beds (Duke Health's corporate page; its patient page says 1,062), is a Level I trauma center, opened in 1930 with 400 beds as part of James B. Duke's gift, and was ranked the 14th-best hospital in the country by Newsweek in 2025 (Wikipedia). Duke Regional Hospital in north Durham has 388 beds; it opened in 1976 as Durham County General Hospital, replacing the segregated Lincoln Hospital, for Black patients, and Watts Hospital, for white ones, which closed the same day (Wikipedia). The Durham VA Medical Center serves veterans (3,505 staff on the City's employer list), and North Carolina Specialty Hospital is a small surgical hospital with 18 licensed beds. Duke counted 11,776 employees at Duke University Hospital in July 2025. This file did not verify wait times for primary or specialist care.

Education

Durham is a university city with an unusually graduate-heavy student body. On the ACS 2024 1-year estimates 32,290 of its 290,103 residents aged 3 and over were enrolled in college (16,351 undergraduates) or graduate school (15,939), 11.1%, against 6.6% nationally and 6.7% in North Carolina; graduate students are 49% of them, against 22% nationally. Duke University, chartered in 1924 when James B. Duke's endowment expanded Trinity College, which had moved to Durham in 1892, enrolled 17,325 students in fall 2025, 6,525 undergraduates and 10,800 graduate and professional students (Duke). North Carolina Central University, which opened in 1910 and became the nation's first publicly supported liberal arts college for African Americans (Wikipedia), enrolled 9,160 in fall 2025, up 6.8% and its first time above 9,000, with 2,018 students online (NCCU), and a reported 10,124 in fall 2026, up 9.1% (HBCU Gameday). Durham Technical Community College, founded in 1961, serves nearly 20,000 students in credit and continuing education courses (Wikipedia), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is in the same metro. Public schools are run by Durham Public Schools, the countywide district, with 31,865 students in 2024-25 (NCES). Enrollment is falling: the district's day-20 count in fall 2025 was 30,172, down from 31,188 a year earlier and its largest drop since the pandemic, against a peak of 33,651 in 2014, while Durham residents in charter schools rose from 7,641 to 8,288 in 2024-25 and about 2,400 Durham students received Opportunity Scholarships, the state's private school vouchers (INDY Week; 9th Street Journal).

Living there

Durham is the Bull City, a tobacco town named for its most famous brand, Bull Durham, and built by the Duke family's American Tobacco Company, whose fortune founded Duke University and Duke Power (Wikipedia). It is also where Black business built Parrish Street into 'Black Wall Street', home of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance and Mechanics and Farmers Bank, and where the Durham Freeway was cut through Hayti, the Black neighborhood south of downtown, in the late 1960s; the last American Tobacco factory closed in 1987, and its warehouses are now offices, apartments and restaurants (Wikipedia). Today it is North Carolina's fourth city, with 305,561 people, only 3,106 behind Greensboro and growing more than twice as fast, a city whose largest employer by far is Duke University and Duke Health, whose labor market reaches into Research Triangle Park, and where almost half of the college students are graduate students. Next to Raleigh, about 18 miles southeast, it shares the airport and the climate, the same household income within the margins (about $83,000) and a higher share of owners, more bus riders per resident and a higher violent crime rate, 510 per 100,000 on the FBI's 2025 counts, about one and a half times the state's, though that was its lowest count since 2019 and 16.5% below 2024. Its homes cost a little less than Raleigh's on Zillow's index ($389,634 against $428,671) and the realtors' MLS median is $424,990, and its property tax is new: the County reset every value to market in 2025, so a City address pays 101.63 cents per $100 for 2026-27 on values that are close to what houses sell for.