Most “safest area” pages for Cardiff rank a handful of neighbourhoods and leave the rest out. This one covers all 28 wards, with the same measurement applied to each: every crime recorded inside the ward’s actual boundary during July 2026, the most recent month published by the police.
Across the whole city that came to 4,505 recorded incidents in the month. The typical ward recorded about 132. The gap between the quietest ward and the busiest is roughly thirty-fold — which tells you more about what each ward is for than about how dangerous it is to live there.
All 28 Cardiff wards, quietest first
Bars are relative to Cathays, the highest count in the city.
What this ranking is, and what it is not
It is a count of incidents recorded in a place. It is not a risk-per-person figure, and we have deliberately not converted it into a 0 to 100 safety score. Three wards at the top of the list explain why.
Cathays contains Queen Street, the main shopping core and a large share of the student population. Shoplifting alone accounts for 121 of its 719 incidents — offences against shops, not residents. Butetown covers Cardiff Bay, and Adamsdown sits immediately next to the city centre and the railway. These are wards that tens of thousands of people pass through daily without living there. A per-resident score would flatter them or condemn them depending on which denominator you picked, and neither number would describe what it is like to live on a given street.
The quiet end has the opposite property. Radyr, Lisvane and Thornhill, Llandaff and Rhiwbina are residential, low-footfall and, in two cases, partly rural. Fewer people go there, so fewer things are recorded there.
Boundaries matter more than you would expect
Where you draw the line changes the answer. Analyses that place a one-kilometre circle around each ward centre produce a different order from this one, because a circle drawn on the city centre catches a neighbouring ward’s high street while a circle on a large outer ward misses most of its own territory.
We used the published boundary of each ward instead — the real polygon, between 100 and roughly 1,700 coordinate points depending on the ward’s shape — so each ward is measured as itself and nothing is counted twice. It is a slower method and it produces a less dramatic headline, but every incident in this table sits inside the ward it is credited to.
The violent crime split
Violence and sexual offences are published as a single merged category by the police, for a deliberate reason: separating them at street level would risk making victims identifiable. Across Cardiff that merged category accounted for 1,399 of the 4,505 incidents, a little under a third.
The share varies by ward in a way the totals hide. In Trowbridge and Ely it is around 41 per cent of everything recorded; in Adamsdown, where vehicle crime and shoplifting dominate, it is 22 per cent, and in Butetown 23 per cent — despite both wards sitting near the top of the overall table. A ward can be busy without that activity being violent, and a quiet ward can have a high violent share of a small number.
How this was measured
Street-level crime data published by South Wales Police through data.police.uk, covering July 2026, the most recent month available at the time of writing. For each of the 28 wards we queried every crime falling inside the published ward boundary and counted the results by category. Figures are exact counts from the raw data, not estimates.
Two caveats that apply to every number here. First, this is recorded crime — incidents reported to and logged by the police. Anything not reported is not in it. Second, the published location of each crime is snapped to a nearby anonymised point rather than the exact address, so a single street corner in the data may represent several addresses around it. That is a privacy protection working as designed, and it means these figures describe areas, not addresses.
Look up a specific address
A ward is still a large thing. To see twelve months of data around one postcode, or to compare two directly, use our address checker. A few Cardiff comparisons to start from:
For the ward-by-ward narrative rather than the full table, see safest areas in Cardiff. For how Cardiff compares with other cities, see crime in Cardiff and the police force crime rate ranking. Ward-level ranks for other cities: Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield. Whatever the numbers say about an area, they are no substitute for calling 999 in an emergency.
Crime data: South Wales Police street-level crime via data.police.uk, July 2026, Open Government Licence v3.0.