Police in England and Wales recorded 117 religious hate crimes per 10,000 Jewish residents and 13 per 10,000 Muslims in the year to March 2026.1 The Crime Survey, which asks people directly, estimates that more Muslims than Jewish people are victims in a typical year.1
The Home Office published its annual hate crime statistics on 8 October. Police in England and Wales recorded 146,825 hate crimes in the year to March 2026, up 7%.1 Race hate crime rose 9% and religious hate crime 13%, while disability, transgender and sexual orientation hate crimes fell.1
Within religious hate crime, 46% of offences targeted Muslims and 28% targeted Jewish people. The Home Office says it cannot read trends from police records, because forces have improved how they record crime and identify hate crime since 2014.1 Offences against Muslims rose 15% and against Jewish people 10% in the year.1
The Home Office also gives rates per resident, using 2021 Census population estimates. Jewish people are a small population, so 3,162 offences gives a rate of 117 per 10,000. That is the highest of any religious group, and about nine times the rate of 13 for Muslims.1
The Crime Survey for England and Wales asks a sample of residents about crimes they have experienced, whether or not they reported them. In surveys covering the three years to March 2025, it estimated that 0.8% of Muslims experienced a religious hate crime per year on average, against 0.4% of Jewish people.1 The Home Office says the different pattern may reflect how likely crimes are to be reported to police, and what each source covers. The survey leaves out public order offences, which are 53% of police-recorded hate crime.1
The units differ, so the two sources cannot be set side by side without care. The police count offences, and one victim can account for several. The survey counts people. Dividing the police rate by 10,000 gives the most the share of people victimised could be if every offence had a different victim: 1.17% for Jewish people and 0.13% for Muslims. On that basis the survey figure for Muslims is about six times what police records could account for, while the police figure for Jewish people is nearly three times the survey estimate. That is the desk's arithmetic, not a published comparison.
Data from 33 forces show the pattern by month. Recorded offences against Muslims peaked at 618 in August 2024, after the Southport murders and the disorder that followed, and rose again to 464 in September 2025 and 421 in March 2026. Those against Jewish people peaked at 274 in October 2025, following the Heaton Park synagogue attack.1
The bulletin does not give confidence intervals for the survey estimates in the figures quoted here, and the Jewish population is small enough that a survey sample will be thin, so the gap between 0.4% and 0.8% may be within the margin of error. The two sources also cover different periods. We do not know how many victims lie behind the police offence counts. The data do not show why police and survey patterns differ.