Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Wharton County government or any of its offices. This is an independent criticism and commentary website. Facts are cited; opinions are labeled.

Wharton County Facts

An independent, cited review of Wharton County, Texas

Wharton County Crime Rate

Short answer

Honest answer: the sources disagree, and anyone who quotes you just one of them is selling something. County-level aggregators say above-average; FBI-based city data says below-average. Both are below, cited.

Third-party data — commercial aggregator, treat with more caution

BestPlaces reports Wharton County property crime at 43.1 vs. 35.4 for the U.S., and violent crime at 23.2 vs. 22.7. CrimeGrade assigns the county a “C-” and ranks it in the 31st percentile for safety — safer than only 31% of U.S. counties.

Source: BestPlaces; CrimeGrade (commercial aggregators, county-level)

Fact — government / primary source

FBI-based data for the city of Wharton shows a 2019–2024 violent-crime rate 46.5% below the national average.

Source: FBI-based city data via CrimeExplorer (2019–2024)

Why the gap? Different geographies (county vs. city), different source data, and different methodologies. Commercial crime scores are modeled estimates, not counts; FBI-based figures depend on what local agencies report. We consider the FBI-derived data stronger, which is why it gets the blue box — but it covers the city, not the county.

Our take — opinion

Crime is not the reason to avoid Wharton County — the schools, floods, and tax-to-income math do that work on their own. We include this page because aggregator safety scores are the first thing relocation searches surface, and they deserve the asterisk.