NJ’s 25 Towns With the Most Car Thefts

You walk outside with your coffee, keys in hand, and the driveway is empty. It's one of the worst feelings there is, and in some New Jersey towns it happens a lot more often than in others.

Car theft has been one of the biggest public safety stories in NJ over the last few years. Thieves figured out that a lot of us leave key fobs in cupholders and cars running in the driveway on cold mornings. State officials have pushed back hard with tougher penalties and dedicated task forces, and the numbers have started to come down. Still, more than 14,000 vehicles were reported stolen across the New Jersey towns and cities in the latest FBI data.

So where is it happening the most? We went through the FBI's town-by-town crime numbers for 2024 and ranked every New Jersey municipality with at least 5,000 residents by car thefts per capita. That's 329 towns in all.

For context, the average across all reporting New Jersey towns is about 170 thefts per 100,000 residents, or roughly one stolen car for every 587 people. The town at the top of this list is running more than six times that rate.

Here's the full ranking, how we built it, and a few simple things you can do to keep your car right where you parked it.

YOU'LL ALSO LIKE: Ranked: These Are NJ's 25 Most Dangerous Towns

How we ranked these towns

Every figure here comes from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program for 2024, which collects the crimes each local police department reports. We used the town-level file compiled by PlainCrime, which pulls straight from FBI Table 8. It's the same FBI dataset behind our Most Dangerous and Safest Towns lists.

The math

We took each town's reported motor vehicle thefts and divided by its population, then multiplied by 100,000. That gives a rate per 100,000 residents, so a town of 6,000 and a city of 300,000 can be compared fairly. We only included towns with at least 5,000 residents, because in tiny towns one or two thefts can swing the rate wildly.

Some takeaways from my research

These are rates, not totals. Newark had the most thefts by far (2,706), but it ranks third once you account for its size.
Seasonal towns get a bump. Rates use year-round population. A shore town that swells every summer will look worse on paper than it feels.
Where it was stolen, not who owns it. Thefts are counted in the town where they happened, so a mall or a train station lot can inflate a town's number.
Camden reports through the Camden County Police Department, which patrols Camden.
Motor vehicle theft means the whole vehicle was taken. Break-ins and stolen catalytic converters are counted separately and aren't included.

These 25 NJ Towns Have the Highest Car Theft Rates in the State

Car theft is still a real problem in parts of New Jersey, and some towns are hit much harder than others. We used FBI crime data to rank every NJ town with at least 5,000 residents by car thefts per 100,000 people. A few big cities top the list, but some smaller suburbs and one shore town might surprise you.

Gallery Credit: Matt Ryan

These Are New Jersey's 25 Safest Towns (2026 Ranking)

We flipped the script on our dangerous towns list and dug through the same FBI crime data to find New Jersey's 25 safest towns for 2026. Turns out you don't have to leave the state to feel safe, and you might not even have to leave your own backyard. A Monmouth County town claims the number one spot, with quiet suburbs from Bergen, Morris, and beyond rounding out the rest of the list. See where your town landed.