ZIP Code 26525

Is ZIP code 26525 safe? Honest data snapshot

ZIP code 26525 sits within Preston County, WV. The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program does not publish crime statistics by ZIP code, crime is reported by individual law-enforcement agencies, which don't align with postal-code boundaries. The figures below are Preston County's own FBI UCR numbers for 2024, the most accurate available statistic for this location, not a ZIP-specific calculation.

Preston County reported a violent-crime rate of 21 per 100,000 residents and a property-crime rate of 117 per 100,000 in 2024, drawing on county-level agency submissions.

Based on just 7 reported violent incidents across a county population of 34,216, this count is too low to support a reliable per-100K rate comparison. It may reflect a genuinely low-crime county, or it may reflect incomplete agency-level reporting to the FBI UCR Program for this county and year, small county-level counts are common in FBI Table 10 and should be treated as a data point, not a precise safety ranking.

ZIP 26525 itself has a Census-reported population of 8,079, spread across 142.16 square miles (about 57 people per square mile). For a full breakdown of Preston County's crime categories and year-over-year trend, see the Preston County crime page linked below.

Why not a ZIP-native rate? ZIP codes are a postal delivery construct, not a law-enforcement jurisdiction. The FBI UCR Program collects data from police departments and sheriff's offices, which report by agency and county, never by postal code. Any site claiming a precise "ZIP code crime rate" is deriving it the same way this page does, from the containing county or a nearby agency, whether or not they disclose it.

This page's county attribution comes from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 ZCTA-to-county relationship file, which maps every ZIP Code Tabulation Area to the county or counties its land area overlaps. A handful of ZIP codes straddle more than one county line; where that happens, this page attributes the ZIP to whichever county holds the larger share of its land area, the standard plurality-allocation approach used across public-data reference sites. Some U.S. territories and a small number of ZIP codes in states with limited county government (Connecticut, Rhode Island, and a few others) aren't yet covered by this crosswalk and don't have a page here.