Crime Is Rising Across the Brisbane Region in 2026. These 15 SEQ Suburbs Are the Exception.

Headlines say crime is rising across Brisbane and the wider South East Queensland region. The Queensland Police Service data agrees, mostly. Across 238 SEQ suburbs eligible for our analysis (covering Brisbane City Council plus the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Moreton Bay, Logan and Scenic Rim councils), recorded crime rose by an average of 2 percent year-on-year. 92 suburbs saw offences climb more than 5 percent. Only 59 saw them fall more than 5 percent. The headlines are not the whole picture, but they are not wrong either.

What the headlines miss is the texture. The average hides genuine outliers. Some Brisbane-area suburbs are moving sharply in the opposite direction from the trend, and the ones that are can tell you a lot about where the demographics, the development pipeline and the buyer profile are shifting.

So we pulled 850,484 individual offence records published by QPS through its public Online Crime Map and asked: where in the Brisbane region did recorded crime fall most between April 2024 and April 2026? Below are the 15 suburbs from the 59 that fell, ranked by the size of the drop. These are exceptions to the broader rising trend, not the trend itself.

What we measured

Each offence record published by QPS is tagged with a small mapping area (roughly a city block, much smaller than a postcode), a suburb name, a date and an offence type. We compared two complete 12-month windows side by side:

• Prior year: 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025
• Recent year: 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026

Then we paired each suburb's crime change against the median house sold price for the most recent 12 months using PXR's database. We restricted to suburbs with at least 200 offences in the prior year so the percentages are statistically meaningful, not artefacts of a small sample.

The 15 SEQ suburbs where crime fell most

The Bardon signal

Bardon is the cleanest inner-Brisbane story in this dataset. A 22.3 percent drop in total offences in one year, paired with one of the most active building-application pipelines we have mapped (78 new-house applications and 7 renovation applications lodged in the same 24-month window, per our development applications post).

The breakdown by offence type is where the story gets sharper:

When a suburb gets renovated quickly, the resident profile shifts and the police data tends to follow the buyers. Bardon's 78 new-house applications and 22 percent crime drop are the same story told twice from independent datasets.

The Sunshine Coast pattern

Six of the 15 suburbs are on the Sunshine Coast or its hinterland: Tamborine Mountain, Palmwoods, Woombye, Alexandra Headland, Glass House Mountains and Buderim. The pattern is consistent. Modest absolute crime counts (200 to 1,300 offences a year) falling 13 to 23 percent, with median house prices already in the $1M to $1.9M range.

The standard sea-change narrative says Sunshine Coast prices are climbing because retirees and remote workers are arriving. The crime data corroborates: higher-paying buyers shift the resident profile, and recorded offences fall as the demographics rotate.

Are people leaving? No. Every one of these 15 suburbs is growing.

A reasonable challenge to "crime is falling" is: maybe people are leaving these suburbs and the absolute offence count just dropped mechanically. We checked. The answer is no.

According to the Queensland Government's most recent population estimate (the QGSO 2025 release), every one of the 15 suburbs in our table has more people now than it did in the 2021 Census. Growth rates range from a modest +6 percent in Tarragindi and Nundah to an enormous +27 percent in Pimpama. The crime drops are happening on top of population growth, not because of people leaving.

The Pimpama amplification

Pimpama is the most extreme case in the data and the most important one to understand. The Pimpama area had 27,894 residents in 2021 and 35,395 in the most recent government estimate. A 27 percent population jump in four years.

Recorded offences in Pimpama fell from 4,319 in 2024-25 to 3,661 in 2025-26. Translated to per-capita: from 154.8 offences per 1,000 residents to 103.4. A 33 percent drop per resident, against a 15 percent drop in the absolute count. The headline number understates what happened. The growth amplifies the good news, it doesn't hide bad news.

For the other 14 suburbs in the table, population growth is modest (between +6 and +15 percent over four years), so absolute and per-capita trends move together. Bardon's 22 percent absolute drop becomes a 27 percent per-capita drop. Bongaree's 21 percent becomes 26. The improvements are real either way you count them.

What this data does not tell you

Crime data has real limits, and any honest read needs to name them:

• Recorded crime is not actual crime. Reporting rates differ across suburbs, time periods, and offence types. A drop in recorded incidents can mean less crime or fewer reports.
• Suburb-level aggregation hides street-level patterns. A suburb average can be calm in one pocket and concentrated in another.
• Categories matter more than totals. A suburb high on "traffic and related offences" is a very different place from one high on unlawful entry or assault. Always read the mix, not just the headline.
• Crime trend does not equal property risk. A falling crime trend is one signal among many. Insurance premiums, flood overlay, lending appetite, school catchments and infrastructure all matter too.

Why nobody else publishes this

Two reasons.

First, data plumbing. QPS publishes offences attached to ABS meshblocks. Real estate portals work with postcodes. Joining the two takes both datasets and some geospatial work, and most portals just skip it.

Second, editorial calculus. "Crime is falling" doesn't drive the same click-through as "Crime is up". Negative stories perform better. Property portals know it.

We are paid by the buyer, not the seller. So we publish the trends both ways.

Methodology

• Offence records sourced from Queensland Police Service Online Crime Map, May 2026 snapshot. PXR holds 850,484 records, oldest dated 16 March 2024, newest 10 April 2026.
• Each offence record carries an ABS meshblock code (Mesh Block 2021), suburb name, postcode and offence type as published by QPS. We use the suburb name as published, not our own geocoding, to remain comparable with QPS official statistics.
• Suburbs included only if they recorded at least 200 offences in the prior year so percentages are meaningful.
• House sales: PXR's database, property sales where property_type is house or townhouse, sold_price between $200,000 and $15M, sold_date between 1 April 2025 and 1 April 2026 for the recent-year median.
• We do not publish percentage price change because the sale records are denser for recent years than prior years, which would skew the comparison.

Run your own address

The data in this article rolls up to the whole suburb. Your actual property sits on a much smaller patch. Search any Queensland address on Property X-Ray and we will show you the recorded offences within 500 metres of the lot, broken down to small mapping zones of roughly a city block. Much closer to what actually affects your street than a postcode-level figure. The free report shows the surrounding crime picture; the full investor report adds the comparable sales, the flood overlay and the development applications next door.

Suburb-level dives using the same method

• Goodna — Ipswich corridor, where the 12-month QPS breakdown shows total offences double Boondall's, but the residential burglary gap is much narrower than the reputation suggests.
• Beenleigh — Logan junction suburb, offences up +40 percent year-on-year with the shopping-precinct theft category dominating the mix.
• Ripley — greenfield estate, +50 percent year-on-year offence count but roughly flat per-capita against the suburb's rapid population growth.

Two companion reads round out the picture: Brisbane's worst flood-risk streets, mapped street by street, and all our Queensland suburb research.