Is Panama Safe? What the Official Data Shows

If you are asking whether Panama is safe enough to move to, the country's own crime statistics give you a better answer than any impression can. The Ministerio Público publishes a homicide report every month, broken down by province, district, sex, age and weapon, and the Ministerio de Seguridad Pública publishes a parallel series through SIEC, the Sistema Nacional Integrado de Estadísticas Criminales. Between them you can see not just how much violence Panama has, but where it happens and who it happens to. That second part is what settles the question.

Here is the answer those tables support. Panama's homicide is concentrated in a handful of places and a specific set of circumstances. In the first half of 2026, Panamá province, the San Miguelito district and Colón accounted for 80% of the country's homicides. Of the 561 intentional homicides SIEC recorded through 21 December 2025, 208 were rencillas delincuenciales, disputes between people already inside criminal activity, and only 34 had robbery as the motive, with one attributed to kidnapping. And 93% of victims in the first half of 2026 were male, with 43% aged 18 to 29. A retiring couple, a family relocating for work, a buyer spending part of the year here: none of that sits inside the profile Panamanian homicide actually touches.

That is not a reason to skip the numbers. It is the reason to read them, because the same tables that support a calm answer also tell you which districts to keep off your shortlist. The rest of this page is the data, in full, from the institutions that publish it.

Key takeaways

• The violence is concentrated in three places. Panamá province took 133 of 300 homicides in the first half of 2026, San Miguelito 54 and Colón 52, together 80% of the national total. Ministerio Público, Informe Estadístico de Víctimas de Homicidios, June 2026, preliminary figures.
• Robbery is a small share of homicide, and kidnapping is close to nonexistent. Of 561 intentional homicides through 21 December 2025, SIEC attributed 34 to robo and 1 to secuestro. The largest single category, at 208, is rencillas delincuenciales.
• 93% of victims are male and 43% are aged 18 to 29. MP, first half of 2026. Victims aged 60 and over are a small fraction of the total.
• 300 homicide victims in the first half of 2026, against 279 in the same six months of 2025, an increase of 8%.
• 2025 closed at 593 for the year, a rate SIEC puts at 14.2 per 100,000. SIEC classes that nationally as Tasa Moderada, "violencia notable, requiere atención". Executive summary for December 2025.
• Colón province is the outlier and it is not close. SIEC put it around 42 per 100,000 for 2025 and classified it Tasa Alta, "alta violencia y es alarmante", against roughly 25 for Panamá province.

Where the violence is, province by province

Two institutions produce Panama's crime figures and they are not the same body. The Ministerio Público publishes a monthly homicide victim report through its Centro de Estadísticas. SIEC sits under the Ministerio de Seguridad Pública and publishes weekly and annual executive summaries built on Policía Nacional and Dirección de Investigación Judicial data. Both label their figures preliminares, and both revise them.

Here is the geography, first half of 2026 against first half of 2025, exactly as the MP tabulates it.

Three things are worth pulling out of that table. The first is the concentration: the top three rows carry the country. The second is scale at the bottom of the table. Los Santos recorded a single homicide in the half year, Bocas del Toro two, and at those magnitudes one incident swings the percentage enormously, which is why Herrera reads +100% on a move from one death to two. The third is Chiriquí, which is where Boquete and David are, and which went from 5 to 17. On a provincial population of roughly half a million those remain small absolute numbers and a single half-year is not a trend, but it is the largest proportional movement in the table and it is worth checking the current MP report against before you treat any province's reputation as settled. Our Boquete guide covers the market there.

The geography goes down to corregimiento

SIEC's annual summary publishes neighbourhood-level data in counts. No Panamanian institution publishes a homicide rate per 100,000 for a neighbourhood, so counts are what exists. These are the corregimientos with the highest homicide counts in 2025.

Read these as counts rather than rates, since a large corregimiento will naturally record more of everything than a small one, and Panama does not publish corregimiento populations alongside these figures in the same document. What the counts do establish is where the deaths cluster. San Miguelito's three worst corregimientos alone account for 61. The district totals for 2025 were Panamá 247, Colón 120 and San Miguelito 100.

Notice which places are absent. The districts foreign buyers actually shop in, from Casco Antiguo and Punta Pacífica to Costa del Este and the Pacific beach corridor, do not appear anywhere on this list.

Why people are killed

This is the table that answers the question most people are really asking. SIEC assigns a motive to every intentional homicide. Through 21 December 2025, on 561 intentional cases:

Rencillas delincuenciales, at 208, means disputes between people already inside criminal activity. Add pandillerismo, gang killings, and ajuste de cuentas, score-settling, and roughly 55% of Panama's homicides are the criminal economy turning on itself. Almost none of that reaches anyone outside it.

Robbery accounts for 34 deaths in a year. Kidnapping accounts for one. Those are the two crimes that dominate expat forum anxiety and they are the two smallest meaningful categories in the national data. The honest counterweight is daño colateral, 35 bystander deaths, and en investigación, 74 cases with no motive assigned, some of which will turn out to be robbery, so treat 34 as a floor rather than a settled number.

Who the victims are

The MP's age and sex tables for the first half of 2026 do more work than any neighbourhood map.

• 93% of victims were male, 279 of 300.
• 43% were aged 18 to 29, made up of 75 victims aged 18 to 24 and 54 aged 25 to 29.
• 85% were killed with a firearm, 8% with a blade.
• Victims aged 60 and over are a small fraction of the total.

Put the three tables together and the picture is consistent. Panamanian homicide happens to young men, in a specific set of districts, mostly in disputes inside the criminal economy, overwhelmingly with a gun. If you are moving here to retire, to work, or to spend half the year in a place you own, you are outside that profile on every axis the data measures. Neither institution breaks victims down by nationality or residency status, so nobody can hand you a figure for foreign residents specifically, but the demographic profile is published and it is unambiguous.

The crime that is more likely to touch you

Homicide is the best-measured crime in any country because there is a body. It is also the crime least likely to affect you, and the more realistic risk in Panama is the ordinary one: a phone taken on a street, a bag lifted from a car, an apartment entered while you are away.

SIEC publishes delitos de alto impacto covering hurto (theft), robo (robbery with force or intimidation), lesiones personales, violencia doméstica and violación alongside homicide, with robbery running in the thousands of cases a year nationally against hundreds of homicides. We have linked that report rather than transcribing figures out of it, because its numbers sit inside chart images.

Those crimes also have a reporting problem. A homicide enters the count regardless of whether anyone files a complaint. A phone snatched on the street enters the count only if the victim goes to a corregiduría, the local administrative office, or to the Policía Nacional and files a report, and foreign residents frequently do not. Every property-crime figure for Panama is therefore an undercount by an unknown margin.

The practical implication is the ordinary one you would apply in any city: property crime is managed with habits and building choices rather than with a province-level statistic. Secure buildings, a garage rather than street parking, a taxi or ride app after dark, and the usual discretion with a phone in a crowd cover most of it.

Using this to choose where to live

The data supports a few clear moves when you are narrowing a shortlist.

• Look at the district, not the country. Panama's national figure is around 14 per 100,000 and Colón province is around 42. The spread between provinces is wider than the spread between Panama and its neighbours, so the country number tells you very little about a specific address.
• Check counts at corregimiento level for anywhere in Panamá province or San Miguelito. That is where the concentration is, and the SIEC annual summary names the corregimientos.
• Read small provinces over several years. With one or two homicides in a half year, a single incident rewrites the percentage, so treat Los Santos, Herrera, Bocas del Toro and the comarcas as stable rather than volatile.
• Treat the interior and the beach corridor as the low-count end of the table, and verify the current MP report at the time you buy rather than relying on a reputation formed years ago.
• Separate the two questions. Homicide geography tells you which districts to avoid. Property crime is about buildings, habits and hours, and it varies street by street in a way no published dataset captures.

Your next step

Most people who arrive at a page like this are not really asking for a national statistic. They are asking whether the specific place they have in mind is somewhere they can settle comfortably, and that is a question about a town, a building and a street rather than a country. It is also a question we answer for readers every week, with the same sourcing you have just read.

Tell us where you are looking, what your budget is, and roughly when you want to move. We will come back with the areas that fit, what they are actually like to live in, and the properties worth your time. The form below is the place to start, and it costs nothing to ask.

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