What are the odds of dying in a terrorist attack in the US?
Evidence quality 4.13/5
Eight-dimension review score against the quality rubric . Each dimension scored 1–5.
- D1 Source grounding
- 4/5
- D2 Source authority
- 4/5
- D3 Arithmetic
- 4/5
- D4 Uncertainty
- 4/5
- D5 Scope
- 4/5
- D6 Prose
- 4/5
- D7 Perception honesty
- 5/5
- D8 Caveat completeness
- 4/5
Lifetime probability · lifetime, US adult
1 in 77,519
0.001% lifetime chance
Most people overestimate this.
range 1 in 400,000 to 1 in 28,571
● your factors — click this risk ▾ to reveal
≈ As likely as
Perceived
Gallup has asked Americans since the mid-1990s how worried they are about personally becoming a victim of terrorism. The most recent reading in Gallup's crime-worry battery (October 2022) had 27% of US adults saying they worry "a great deal" or "a fair amount" about being the victim of terrorism — the lowest in that wave's 13-crime list apart from workplace assault. Earlier spikes after 9/11 and again in 2015–2016 pushed the same measure close to 50%. Even the current "low" reading is orders of magnitude above the actual base rate.
Rough estimate: ~1 in a few thousand lifetime feels about right to many worried respondents
Source: Gallup (2022) — Record-High 56% in U.S. Perceive Local Crime Has Increased
Actual
~1 in 4,560,000 per year
US residents, 1975–2024 pooled, foreign-born terrorism including 9/11
Show derivation
Uses the Cato Institute's 1975–2024 foreign-born terrorism figure of 1 in 4,559,768 per year (Nowrasteh, 2025) as the central annual hazard, since that study explicitly includes 9/11 and covers a 50-year window. Domestic (non-foreign-born) terrorism adds a small but non-trivial amount — roughly another 500–600 deaths over 1975–2024 per START's Global Terrorism Database totals — but does not change the order of magnitude. Lifetime over 59 adult years: 1 − (1 − 2.19e-7)^59 ≈ 1.29e-5 ≈ 1 in 77,000. The window choice is load-bearing: the 9/11 attacks account for roughly 2,977 of ~3,500 US terrorism deaths since 1970, so any window that includes 9/11 is dominated by a single event and any window that excludes it drops the annual rate by roughly an order of magnitude. The uncertainty band below reflects that window sensitivity rather than a statistical confidence interval.
Caveats: The "1 in 77,000" figure is a pooled, window-sensitive average over fifty years …
The "1 in 77,000" figure is a pooled, window-sensitive average over fifty years of data that is overwhelmingly shaped by a single morning in September 2001. Strip out 9/11 and the annual hazard falls by roughly an order of magnitude; keep 9/11 but shorten the window to only the post-2001 years and the average rises. Neither of those is wrong, but both would tell you something different about "typical" years. The figure also says nothing about which Americans face which share of the risk: terrorism deaths in the US are concentrated by target (iconic buildings, federal facilities, large gatherings), geography (a handful of metropolitan areas), and year (a very small number of events account for the bulk of cumulative deaths). For the vast majority of residents in the vast majority of years, the annual hazard is effectively zero.
Risks at similar odds
Other risks with roughly the same likelihood — useful for calibration.
Recently viewed on this device
Stored locally — clear anytime.
Pick challenger
The Cato Institute’s long-running risk analysis, drawing on the START Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, puts the annual chance that an American dies in a foreign-born terrorist attack on US soil at roughly 1 in 4.56 million per year over the 1975–2024 window. Compounded over a 59-year adult lifetime that works out to about 1 in 77,000 — an order of magnitude lower than the lifetime odds of dying in a plane crash, and more than two orders of magnitude lower than the pooled US homicide rate. The underlying figure is driven almost entirely by one day: roughly 2,977 of the approximately 3,500 US terrorism deaths since 1970 occurred on 11 September 2001.
What is unusual about terrorism-worry is the size of the gap. Gallup’s long-running crime battery had 27% of US adults saying they worry about being the victim of terrorism as recently as October 2022, and that is one of the lower readings in the series — the post-Paris, post-San Bernardino spike in late 2015 put the same number close to half the country. A perceived risk somewhere in the “one in a few thousand” range is roughly what that worry level implies, against an actual base rate that sits closer to “one in a hundred thousand or less.” The inverted gap is larger here than for almost any other fear on this site, and it has been remarkably stable for twenty-five years even as the actual annual hazard has remained close to zero in most years.
The number is also unusually window-sensitive. Strip 9/11 out of the dataset and the 1975–2024 annual rate falls by roughly an order of magnitude, because the remaining events, while frequent in headline terms, kill far fewer people per incident. Keep 9/11 in but compute the rate only over the post-2001 years and the picture looks different again. The population-level “1 in 77,000” figure is the right answer to “what did the last fifty years average out to?” and a poor answer to “what is my risk of being killed by terrorism in a given year?” For most US residents in most years, the realised hazard is effectively zero, punctuated by rare events that dominate any long-run average they touch.
Related tidbits
A US adult is roughly 3-4× more likely to die in a terrorism incident than to be killed by lightning (~1 in 78,000 vs ~1 in 280,000). Both round to negligible against any everyday risk like driving.
About 1 in 6 US adolescents will attempt suicide during their teenage years. The lifetime odds of a US civilian dying in a terrorist attack are roughly 1 in 3,500,000. One gets security budgets; the other gets underfunded hotlines.
Claim ledger
Every number below is what each source reported, with the verbatim quote we relied on and how we arrived at our figure. Click any link to verify directly.
-
[1] Cato Institute (Alex Nowrasteh) — Terrorism and Immigration: 50 Years of Foreign-Born Terrorism on US Soil, 1975–2024
Terrorism and Immigration: 50 Years of Foreign-Born Terrorism on US Soil, 1975–2024- Statistic
Annual chance of dying in a foreign-born terrorist attack on US soil: 1 in 4,559,768 (1975–2024, including 9/11)- Excerpt
“"The average chance of dying in an attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist on US soil was 1 in 4,559,768 a year. For perspective, the annual chance of being murdered by a common criminal in the United States was about 330 times as great as dying in an attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist on US soil." ”
- Source data from
- 2025-03-01
- Accessed
- 2026-04-11 · archived copy
- Calculation
- Cato divides 3,046 deaths (2,979 of which occurred on 9/11) across the 1975–2024 window by average US population, yielding 1 in 4,559,768 per person-year. Converting to a lifetime figure for a 59-year adult horizon: 1 − (1 − 1/4,559,768)^59 ≈ 1.29 × 10⁻⁵, i.e. ~1 in 77,000. Domestic (non-foreign-born) terrorism adds a modest additional hazard that the uncertainty band absorbs. The "foreign-born" restriction is the main reason we treat the Cato figure as a lower bound on the all-terrorism rate rather than a ceiling.
- Independence
- Cato's underlying death counts are drawn from the START Global Terrorism Database (University of Maryland) and RAND's terrorism incident database, so this is not independent of those sources — it is a curated risk-ratio calculation built on top of them.
-
[2] Cato Institute (Alex Nowrasteh) — Terrorism and Immigration: A Risk Analysis
Terrorism and Immigration: A Risk Analysis- Statistic
Annual chance of dying in a foreign-born terrorist attack on US soil: 1 in 3.6 million (1975–2015)- Excerpt
“"The chance of an American perishing in a terrorist attack on US soil that was committed by a foreigner over the 41-year period studied here is 1 in 3.6 million per year. The annual chance of being murdered was 252.9 times as great as dying in an attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist on US soil." ”
- Source data from
- 2016-09-13
- Accessed
- 2026-04-11 · archived copy
- Calculation
- Used as a corroborating earlier vintage of the same risk analysis. The shorter 1975–2015 window gives a denominator of 1 in 3.6 million per year; the longer 1975–2024 window used in our normalization gives 1 in 4.56 million. The direction of that drift (lower annual risk as the window lengthens past 9/11 without a comparable repeat event) is the expected behaviour for a distribution dominated by a single extreme event.
- Independence
- Same author and underlying datasets as the 2025 update. Included as a longitudinal consistency check, not as an independent estimate.
-
[3] Our World in Data (Max Roser, Bastian Herre, Hannah Ritchie) — Terrorism
Terrorism- Statistic
Terrorism caused roughly 1 in 2,000 global deaths in 2019; North American terrorism deaths are typically low outside 9/11- Excerpt
“"Deaths from terrorism in North America are typically low – but the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001 stand out. [Globally in 2019 terrorism] caused an estimated 1 in 2000 deaths that year." ”
- Source data from
- 2024-01-01
- Accessed
- 2026-04-11 · archived copy
- Calculation
- Used as an independent check on the order of magnitude and on the 9/11-dominated shape of the US distribution. OWID draws on the START Global Terrorism Database and IHME Global Burden of Disease, which are upstream of (but largely independent of) Cato's risk-analysis pipeline.
- Independence
- OWID's death counts come from START GTD and IHME GBD directly. Cato also uses START GTD but layers its own per-visa-class and per-window accounting on top, so the two sources share underlying event data but produce their statistics independently.
-
[4] Gallup — Record-High 56% in U.S. Perceive Local Crime Has Increased
Record-High 56% in U.S. Perceive Local Crime Has Increased- Statistic
27% of US adults worry a great deal or fair amount about being a victim of terrorism (October 2022)- Excerpt
“"At the other end of the spectrum, Americans worry least about being assaulted or killed by a coworker on the job (9%) or being the victim of terrorism (27%)." ”
- Source data from
- 2022-10-18
- Accessed
- 2026-04-11 · archived copy
- Calculation
- Used for the perceived-risk side only. The 27% figure is the share of respondents reporting "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of worry; Gallup does not elicit a subjective probability. Historical peaks in the same item reached roughly 47–49% in the months after the 2015 Paris attacks and San Bernardino shooting.
- Independence
- Gallup telephone polling, entirely separate from the START Global Terrorism Database, RAND, and Cato pipelines that feed the probability estimate. Used only for the perceived-risk axis — measures public worry, not incidence.