County crime profile · 2024 · mid-size county · violent-led
Nicholas County (24,604 people) sits in the mid-size county band in West Virginia. This page opens with reported offense counts, then rates where a Census join exists.
Data updated 2026-08-24
Nicholas County, WV reported 480 violent crimes per 100,000 in FBI UCR 2024
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Nicholas County, WV agencies reported 118 violent and 8 property offenses. That equals about 480 violent and 33 property crimes per 100,000 using a verified Census population join. Table 10 coverage is a voluntary subset of U.S. counties.
Offense mix
Violent offenses are 93.7% of the 126 Part I offenses reported in Nicholas County for 2024, against a median of 18.7% across comparable West Virginia counties — a gap of 74.9 points. Offense mix is shaped by which agencies report and how incidents are classified as well as by the underlying offenses, so it describes the reported record rather than a settled difference in conditions.
Position in the state cohort
At 479.6 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Nicholas County ranks 1 of 32 — above 31 of the 31 other West Virginia counties whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test and carries a matched Census denominator. That is +662.8% against the cohort median of 62.9. Counties that did not report, or that reported implausibly low totals, are excluded from this cohort rather than counted as low-crime.
Property-offense composition
Larceny-theft is 100.0% of reported property offenses in Nicholas County, against a cohort median of 68.6%. The remainder is burglary (0) and motor vehicle theft (0). Composition differences of this size usually track what kinds of places and property are present in a jurisdiction.
2020–2024 direction
Across 5 comparable reporting years, the rate moved from 703.1 per 100,000 in 2020 to 479.6 in 2024 (-31.8%). The highest observed value was 703.1 in 2020 and the lowest 321.1 in 2022. Years whose submission failed the completeness test are left out of this comparison rather than plotted as change.
Mid-size county rows still aggregate voluntary UCR submissions. Per-100,000 rates need a matched 2020 Census population; unmatched stay count-only. County-wide totals rarely describe any single town inside the line.
| Category | Count |
|---|---|
| Violent Crime | 118 |
| Murder | 0 |
| Rape | 0 |
| Robbery | 0 |
| Aggravated Assault | 118 |
| Property Crime | 8 |
| Burglary | 0 |
| Larceny-Theft | 8 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 0 |
| Arson | 0 |
Nicholas County's crime figures on this page originate from Nicholas County Sheriff's Office's submission to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
This agency reports via NIBRS, the incident-based system that captures more detail per offense (multiple crimes per incident, victim/offender data) than the older summary counts.
A per-capita rate is easiest to read against places of similar scale, so these are the West Virginia counties closest to Nicholas County in population. Their populations run from 21,382 to 27,791, against 24,604 here. Or launch the side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two jurisdictions directly.
State atlas: West Virginia · Compare · Rankings
Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, Crime in the United States (CIUS) Table 10.
FBI Table 10 supplies county offense counts but no resident population. Where this page shows a per-100,000 rate, the denominator is a separately matched 2020 U.S. Census Bureau county population; unmatched county rows remain count-only. Statewide comparisons draw on the state UCR program. Verify with FBI.gov UCR and Census.gov QuickFacts.
Read our methodology , how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.
Every figure on PlainCrime is rendered directly from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) source data, no number is typed in by an editor. This page draws directly on FBI Uniform Crime Reporting source data, no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.