Retail Theft Statistics US Shrink, Shoplifting and Organized Retail Crime Data
Every figure on this page is attributed to a named source with the year it covers, and linked. Retail theft numbers are unusually badly reported, so we also flag the ones that are stale, contested, or retracted, including the most widely repeated stat in the industry.
The Headline Numbers, With Their Real Dates
The most reliable US retail shrink figure is 1.6 percent of sales, or $112.1 billion, from the National Retail Federation's National Retail Security Survey covering fiscal 2022. That is the newest authoritative shrink rate that exists, because the NRF retired the survey in 2024. Anyone quoting a 2025 or 2026 shrink rate is either estimating or making it up.
Shrink is not the same as theft. In that same NRF data, external theft including organized retail crime was 36 percent of shrink, internal employee theft 29 percent, and process and control errors 27 percent, with 6 percent unknown. Roughly a third of shrink is paperwork, not crime.
For shoplifting specifically, the FBI estimated 1,270,097 reported shoplifting offenses in the US in 2024, up 8.9 percent from 2023, even as overall larceny-theft fell 5.5 percent. Shoplifting is now the most common specified type of larceny-theft.
US Retail Theft Statistics at a Glance
Each row names the source and the period it actually covers. Read the period column carefully. A lot of what circulates as current retail theft data is three or four years old.
| Statistic | Figure | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retail shrink rate | 1.6% of sales | FY2022 | NRF National Retail Security Survey |
| Total shrink losses | $112.1 billion | FY2022 | NRF National Retail Security Survey |
| Prior-year shrink | 1.4% of sales, $93.9 billion | FY2021 | NRF National Retail Security Survey |
| External theft share of shrink | 36% | FY2022 | NRF National Retail Security Survey |
| Internal (employee) theft share | 29% | FY2022 | NRF National Retail Security Survey |
| Process and control errors | 27% | FY2022 | NRF National Retail Security Survey |
| Reported shoplifting offenses | 1,270,097 (up 8.9%) | 2024 | FBI, Reported Crimes in the Nation |
| Larceny-theft offenses | 4,326,531 (down 5.5%) | 2024 | FBI, Reported Crimes in the Nation |
| Shoplifting incidents reported by retailers | Up 18% year over year | 2024 vs 2023 | NRF, Impact of Retail Theft & Violence 2025 |
| Police-reported shoplifting rate, 21 cities | Down 10% year over year | 2025 vs 2024 | Council on Criminal Justice |
| Retailers reporting transnational ORC involvement | 67% | Surveyed mid-2025 | NRF, Impact of Retail Theft & Violence 2025 |
| Loss in stores with self-checkout | 33% higher (+0.42 points) | 2026 report | ECR Retail Loss Group (global sample) |
What Shrink Actually Consists Of
This is the single most misused number in retail. The $112.1 billion figure is total shrink, and shrink includes inventory that was never stolen by anybody. In the NRF's fiscal 2022 survey, external theft including organized retail crime accounted for an average of 36 percent of total loss. Internal employee theft came in at 29 percent. Process and control failures and errors, meaning receiving mistakes, pricing errors, and paperwork, accounted for 27 percent, with unknown loss at 6 percent and other causes at 1 percent.
Add those up and theft of both kinds is about 65 percent of shrink. The remaining third is an operations problem, not a security problem, and no camera will fix it. That matters when you are budgeting: if a third of your loss is coming from the receiving dock miscounting pallets, a loss-prevention program aimed entirely at shoplifters will underperform its business case.
It is also worth knowing that internal theft is close behind external theft. Retailers consistently underinvest here because it is uncomfortable, but 29 percent of shrink is walking out with people on payroll. Register exception reporting and a camera over the drawer address that; a public-facing anti-shoplifting program does not.
The NRF's fiscal 2022 survey drew on 177 retail brands representing about $1.6 trillion in annual sales and more than 97,000 locations, which makes it the broadest sample the industry has ever had. It is also the last one. After more than thirty years, the NRF stopped publishing the National Retail Security Survey in 2024, on the reasoning that a broad study of retail shrink was no longer sufficient on its own. There is no authoritative US shrink rate for 2023, 2024, or 2025.
The Retail Theft Stat You Should Stop Quoting
You have probably seen the claim that organized retail crime accounts for nearly half of all retail shrink, often attached to a $45 billion price tag. It is not true, and the organization that published it withdrew it.
The claim came from an April 2023 report the NRF produced with K2 Integrity, which stated that shrink was $94.5 billion in 2021, "nearly half of which was attributable to ORC." Reporting by Retail Dive established that the number was built by fusing NRF survey data with 2021 Senate testimony whose $45 billion figure actually traced back to an NRF estimate of total shrink from all causes in 2016, not ORC. The NRF removed the claim from the report on December 1, 2023. Its own survey data showed external theft, of which ORC is only one part, at 36 percent of shrink.
Two other habits worth breaking. Do not describe $112.1 billion as theft losses, because roughly a third of it is process error and unknown loss. And do not present 1.6 percent as a current shrink rate, because it describes fiscal 2022 and nothing newer exists.
This is not pedantry. If you are building a business case for a loss-prevention investment, a finance director who recognizes a retracted statistic in your deck will discount everything else in it.
Is Retail Theft Going Up or Down?
Honestly, the sources disagree, and you should know that before you cite any of them. The NRF's 2025 report, based on a survey of 70 retail companies conducted in mid-2025, found an 18 percent increase in average shoplifting incidents in 2024 compared with 2023, and a 17 percent rise in threats or acts of violence during theft events. The FBI, counting offenses reported to police, found shoplifting up 8.9 percent in 2024. But the Council on Criminal Justice, tracking police reports across 21 cities, found the average reported shoplifting rate in 2025 was 10 percent lower than in 2024, and about 4 percent below where it stood in 2019.
These are not necessarily contradictory, because they measure different things. Retailer-reported incidents capture events a store logged whether or not police were called. Police data captures only what was reported to police, and the CCJ notes plainly that police-reported figures almost certainly undercount total shoplifting because retailer reporting practices vary and change. A chain that adopts a new policy of reporting every incident will appear to have a crime wave; a chain that tells staff not to intervene will appear to have solved the problem.
The one trend that shows up consistently across sources is compositional rather than directional: shoplifting is rising as a share of theft even where total larceny falls. In 2024 the FBI recorded 1,270,097 shoplifting offenses against 874,510 thefts from motor vehicles, and noted that in both 2023 and 2024 shoplifting surpassed theft from vehicles as the most common specified type of larceny-theft, while overall property crime fell 8.1 percent.
The practical read for a retailer: do not build a budget on the national trend line, because it is genuinely ambiguous. Build it on your own shrink number, broken out by source, measured store by store. That is the only figure that will survive scrutiny.
Employee Theft and Self-Checkout Loss
Employee theft cases are individually larger than shoplifting cases. Jack L. Hayes International's long-running retail theft survey, covering 26 retailers and 22,182 stores on 2022 data, put the average dishonest-employee case at $1,136.93 against an average shoplifting case of $802.01. The same survey recorded 44,834 dishonest employees apprehended against 295,654 shoplifters. Treat those as directional: it is a small self-selected sample of retailers, not a government dataset, and the data is from 2022.
On self-checkout, the best-evidenced figure comes from the ECR Retail Loss Group's Self-Checkout Loss Report published in June 2026, which drew on 39 retailers with more than a trillion euros of combined turnover. It found losses 33 percent higher in stores with self-checkout, a difference of 0.42 percentage points against stores without it, and estimated that every additional 1 percent of transactions moved through self-checkout adds between 0.030 and 0.048 percent of additional loss. That sample is largely European, so read it as a strong signal rather than a US number.
One popular self-checkout statistic we deliberately leave out is the frequently repeated split between accidental and deliberate self-checkout loss. We could not verify it in the underlying research, and ECR's own report says estimates of malicious intent vary from 6 percent to 80 percent. Nobody actually knows, so we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Sources
- National Retail Federation, National Retail Security Survey 2023 (fiscal 2022 data)
- National Retail Federation, The Impact of Retail Theft & Violence 2025
- FBI Crime Data Explorer, Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2024
- Council on Criminal Justice, Crime Trends in U.S. Cities: Year-End 2025 Update
- ECR Retail Loss Group, Self-Checkout Loss Report 2026
- Jack L. Hayes International, Annual Retail Theft Survey (2022 data)
Figures on this page were verified against the sources above in July 2026. If you cite them, cite the original source and the year, not us.
What the Numbers Mean for a Loss-Prevention Budget
The composition of shrink tells you where to spend. If external theft is 36 percent and internal theft 29 percent, then a program that only addresses the sales floor is leaving nearly a third of the addressable loss untouched. The camera over the register and the exception report against the POS log are, dollar for dollar, usually the highest-yield controls a mid-size retailer can add, because internal cases are individually larger and internal loss is chronic rather than episodic.
The other lesson is that recording is not detecting. Nearly every store in the country already has cameras, and shrink stayed at 1.6 percent anyway. Footage that nobody reviews produces evidence after the loss, not prevention before it. What changes the number is analytics that surface the events worth a manager's attention in time to act on them, paired with a visible response so that staff and customers know the footage is actually looked at. That is the mechanism behind the deterrence research we cover in our guide on whether security cameras deter crime.
Finally, measure your own number before you buy anything. Split your shrink into external, internal, process error, and unknown, per store, for two quarters. Retailers who do this routinely discover their loss is not where they assumed, and it reframes the entire investment. Reconciling what the register says against what actually settled in the bank is a decent place to start, and if your point-of-sale exports and your bank statements live in different formats, it is worth the afternoon it takes to get both into one spreadsheet so the variance is visible.
Once you know the shape of your loss, the controls follow. We lay out the camera coverage that addresses each loss point on our page for store security cameras, and the full program in our guide to retail theft prevention.
Common Questions About Retail Theft Statistics
How much does retail theft cost per year?
Total retail shrink was $112.1 billion in fiscal 2022, the most recent authoritative figure, from the NRF's National Retail Security Survey. Theft is only part of that: about 36 percent was external theft and 29 percent internal employee theft, so theft of all kinds accounts for roughly $73 billion of it. The rest is process error and unknown loss.
What is the average shrink rate for retail?
1.6 percent of sales, on fiscal 2022 data from the NRF's National Retail Security Survey, up from 1.4 percent the prior year. That is the newest reliable figure available, because the NRF discontinued the survey in 2024. Rates vary widely by sector, with grocery and general merchandise running higher than the average.
Is shoplifting increasing in the US?
It depends on the source. The FBI recorded 1,270,097 reported shoplifting offenses in 2024, up 8.9 percent, and retailers surveyed by the NRF reported an 18 percent rise in incidents. But the Council on Criminal Justice found police-reported shoplifting across 21 cities fell 10 percent in 2025. Retailer-reported incidents and police reports measure different things and are diverging.
What percentage of shrink is organized retail crime?
Nobody has a credible number. The often-quoted claim that ORC is nearly half of shrink was retracted by the NRF in December 2023 after the underlying arithmetic was shown to be wrong. What the NRF's survey does say is that all external theft, of which ORC is a subset, was 36 percent of shrink in fiscal 2022. ORC is necessarily smaller than that.
How much of retail theft is employee theft?
Internal employee theft accounted for 29 percent of total shrink in the NRF's fiscal 2022 survey, close behind external theft at 36 percent. Individual employee cases also tend to be larger: Jack L. Hayes International put the average dishonest-employee case at $1,136.93 against $802.01 for the average shoplifting case, on 2022 data.
Does self-checkout increase theft?
The evidence says it increases loss. The ECR Retail Loss Group's 2026 report, covering 39 retailers, found losses 33 percent higher in stores with self-checkout, a gap of 0.42 percentage points, with each additional 1 percent of transactions through self-checkout adding roughly 0.03 to 0.05 percent more loss. How much of that is deliberate rather than accidental is genuinely unknown.
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