Kelowna vs Durham: which should you move to?

The Kelowna CMA's Crime Severity Index has fallen four years running, from 126.03 in 2022 to 119.56 in 2023, 107.49 in 2024 and 103.68 in 2025, and its rank among CMAs dropped from second in 2022 to ninth in 2025. Most of the decline is in non-violent crime (128.98 in 2021 to 105.25 in 2025); the violent index has barely moved (104.48 to 101.94), and a May 2026 City of Kelowna citizen survey found one in four residents feel unsafe.

What the rates cover: Police-reported total violent Criminal Code violations per 100,000, Kelowna CMA, table 35-10-0177-01. 2024: 1,897.16; 2021: 1,947.46.

Homicides: Kelowna CMA homicide victims, table 35-10-0071-01, rate 1.58 per 100,000. 2024: 2 (0.80); 2023: 5 (2.04); 2022: 8 (3.36).

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.

Health care, retail and construction together account for about 41% of regional jobs, and tourism output reached $2.4 billion with 12,630 jobs in 2022. The Okanagan tech sector counted 787 companies and 32,645 jobs with a $4.98 billion economic impact in 2023 (Accelerate Okanagan/KPMG), but the CMA has carried the highest unemployment rate in Canada through spring and summer 2026 as the labour force has grown faster than jobs.

Main sectors: Health care and social assistance, Retail trade, Construction and real estate, Tourism and hospitality, Technology.

BC also levies a speculation and vacancy tax and an additional property transfer tax for foreign buyers in the Central Okanagan; MSP premiums were abolished in 2020, replaced by an employer health tax.

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 publicly funded through the BC Medical Services Plan (no premiums since 2020) and delivered by Interior Health; Kelowna General Hospital is the interior's tertiary referral hospital with cardiac surgery and cancer care on site (BC Cancer Kelowna). Access is the problem rather than cost: KGH closed its pediatric unit for at least six weeks in May 2025 and curtailed neurology in January 2026 for lack of specialists, obstetricians warned of a collapse in primary maternity coverage, and finding a family doctor typically means a long wait on the provincial Health Connect Registry.

Education

UBC Okanagan (opened 2005, now roughly 12,000 students, with a record domestic intake of more than 3,000 new students in September 2025) and Okanagan College (about 5,200 FTE students across the valley) are the post-secondary anchors. Public schooling is School District 23 Central Okanagan, one of BC's fastest-growing districts, with French immersion and a few independent schools; there is no magnet or charter system.

Living there

Kelowna is a lake-and-orchard city of about 166,000 stretched along the east shore of Okanagan Lake, with a compact downtown, sprawling hillside subdivisions and a single bridge to West Kelowna that jams every afternoon. Summers are hot and dry and built around the beach, boats and the wineries; they also come with wildfire smoke, and the 2023 McDougall Creek fire is still a fresh memory. Housing costs are high for local wages, the unemployment rate led the country in 2026, and crime severity, though falling since 2022, is still well above the national figure.

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.