Philadelphia has made progress on some of its most troublesome issues like gun violence and poverty, but don’t pop any bottles yet.
The city’s major successes have come as it has stagnated in areas that recently have buoyed the city, like income and population growth, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts’ 2026 State of the City report, which was released Tuesday and analyzes data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Philadelphia police department, and other sources.
“Some of those areas that had been the most challenging for the city in recent years have seen remarkable improvements. But some of those long term trends that the city has been relying on during that period have begun to show some strain,” said Katie Martin, project director for Philadelphia research and policy at Pew.
Encouraging progress
The number of homicides and shooting victims in Philadelphia have continued their sharp declines since the pandemic. There were 222 homicides last year, the fewest since 1966, and 935 shooting victims, the first time there have been under 1,000 since at least 2007.
» READ MORE: Philadelphia records the fewest homicides in nearly 60 years, plus other insights to 2025’s crime
It is unclear how much of these trends can be attributed to factors specific to Philadelphia, like its investments in gun violence prevention programs, or retaliatory conflicts reaching their ends as those involved have been arrested or killed. Cities across the nation have experienced similar declines in violence since pandemic peaks, and experts have thus far been unable to pinpoint the precise cause for the drop off.
Yet the “major crime” rate in Philadelphia, which includes both violent crimes and significant property crimes like car theft and burglary, has not come down to the same degree. Before the pandemic, roughly 50,000 major crimes were reported per year in Philadelphia, and the number peaked to about 74,000 in 2023. Reports of major crimes decreased to about 63,000 in 2025, but appear to be plateauing.
“The incredible increase in property crimes means that the overall major crimes are up compared to where they were previously,” Martin said.
Drug overdose deaths have also continued to decline in Philadelphia since the peak of the opioid epidemic in 2022. Last year, the city recorded the lowest number of opioid deaths in about a decade.
State and locals officials have credited the increased access to the overdose treatment drug naloxone, and the work of the city-owned Riverview drug recovery facility, which opened in January 2025, as some of the key factors bringing overdose deaths down. Still, Philadelphia had almost 59 overdose deaths per 100,000 residents in 2024, second only to Baltimore among comparable cities and counties, according to CDC data.
And last year Philadelphia finally shed its moniker of the being the poorest big city in the nation. Philly’s 19.7% poverty rate was the first time it had dropped below 20% since 1979, and has been gradually dropping over the last decade.
While the city’s poverty rate has been dropping over the decade for all racial and ethnic groups, Hispanic residents have experienced the greatest decrease. In 2014, 42.9% of Hispanic residents lived in poverty, compared to 2024, when 27.6% lived in poverty.
Deep poverty, which is defined as a household income for a family of four that is at or below $16,500, half of the standard poverty threshold, has also declined but more slowly than the overall poverty rate. In 2024, 9.4% of Philadelphians were living in deep poverty, according to census data.
Strain where there was strength
Those wins pair with a handful of concerning trends.
Philadelphia’s median household income held flat over 2023 to 2024, settling to $60,521. That is about $20,000 below the national median household income in 2024, and below most peer cities, including Baltimore, Houston, Pittsburgh, and Boston.
“Raising median income during the pandemic has really slowed down and we actually are seeing some decreases among certain Philadelphians,” Martin said.
White and Asian households showed modest decreases in household income, while Black and Hispanic households in Philadelphia had similarly small raises. Both Black and Hispanic households still fell significantly below the citywide median incomes, at $48,275 and $52,380, respectively.
Perhaps related to that trend could be Philadelphia’s rising unemployment rate, which has been ticking upward since 2023 and reached 5.1% in 2025, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Philly’s unemployment rate is slightly greater than that of the surrounding metropolitan area and the rest of the nation, and that gap widened in 2025.
Philadelphia had been steadily increasing its percentage of residents 25 and older with a college degree, but that has flattened over the past few years and landed at 36.4% in 2024, according to census data.
While that proportion of educational attainment nearly matches the nation as a whole, it lags behind peer cities. What was once an encouraging sign about Philly’s competitiveness is now a point of concern, Martin said.
Another red flag for Philadelphia is its population size. The city’s population was continuously rising since 2006 until reaching a high point of 1.6 million residents in 2019.
Then, the population dropped off to 1.56 million in 2023 and appears to have settled near that number with a 2025 population of 1,574,281 residents, according to the census.
Martin said many large cities experienced people moving out during the pandemic, but Philadelphia’s recent changes were likely driven by a significant decrease in foreign-born residents.
Yet, the city appears to be the most racially diverse it’s ever been. In 2024, the population was 37.7% Black, 32.8% white, 16.4% Hispanic, 8.3% Asian, and 4.9% other races.