Domestic Abuse Numbers: Prevalence, Fatalities, and Costs

Domestic abuse statistics in the United States show that roughly one in three women and one in six men have been subjected to physical violence, sexual violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime. In raw numbers, that is about 43.5 million women and 20.7 million men.¹ Because more than half of incidents never reach law enforcement, the real total is almost certainly larger.

How Common It Is

The most detailed national picture comes from the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. In the 2023/2024 data brief, 34.0% of women and 17.0% of men reported experiencing contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lives.¹ An earlier NISVS wave reported higher figures, roughly 41% for women and 26% for men, though the CDC cautions that methodology changes make direct comparisons between waves unreliable.²

Severe physical violence accounts for a large share of what survivors report. In the 2023/2024 data, 18.2% of women said they had been beaten, burned, choked, or subjected to another form of severe physical violence by a partner. Among men, 8.6% reported the same.¹

Who Is Affected Most

Race and Ethnicity

Lifetime victimization rates for women vary sharply by racial and ethnic group. The most detailed breakdowns come from the NISVS 2022 report, which found the following lifetime rates of contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner:

Non-Hispanic multiracial women: 63.8%
Non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native women: 57.7%
Non-Hispanic Black women: 53.6%
Non-Hispanic white women: 48.4%

Women between 18 and 34 face the highest per capita rates of victimization.²

Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Rates within the LGBTQ+ community consistently exceed those reported by heterosexual and cisgender people. NISVS data shows that about 61% of bisexual women and 44% of lesbian women reported experiencing rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner over their lifetimes. Among men, 37% of bisexual men and 26% of gay men reported the same, compared to 29% of heterosexual men.²

Transgender individuals face particularly elevated risk. An estimated 54% have experienced intimate partner violence, and 24% reported severe physical violence.²

Disability

People with disabilities are victimized at higher rates than those without. A study using NISVS data found that women with disabilities experienced physical violence from a partner at a 12-month rate of 7.1%, compared to 3.3% for women without disabilities. The stalking gap was wider still: 6.5% versus 2.1%. Men with disabilities also showed elevated rates of psychological aggression, at 25.0% versus 16.3%.³ Financial dependence, reliance on the abuser as a caregiver, and inaccessible shelters all make leaving harder.

Forms the Abuse Takes

Psychological Aggression

Non-physical abuse is at least as common as physical violence. The 2023/2024 NISVS data brief found that 30.2% of women (about 38.6 million) and 22.3% of men (about 27.3 million) reported psychological aggression by an intimate partner during their lifetime.¹ An earlier NISVS wave reported roughly half of both women and men experiencing this form of abuse.²

Stalking

About 12.2% of women and 4.2% of men reported being stalked by an intimate partner at some point in their lives.¹ Stalking often intensifies after separation, and it is one of the strongest predictors of future physical violence or homicide.

Sexual Violence and Reproductive Coercion

About 19.7% of women in the United States, roughly one in five, have experienced contact sexual violence by an intimate partner, which includes rape, sexual coercion, and unwanted sexual contact.¹

Reproductive coercion, where a partner pressures pregnancy or sabotages birth control, is a less-discussed form of abuse. Among women who experienced intimate partner violence, an estimated 15.3% reported some form of reproductive coercion over their lifetime. Among male IPV victims, 17.5% reported the same, often involving a partner who attempted to become pregnant without consent.⁴

When Abuse Turns Deadly

Between 2018 and 2021, 3,991 women were killed by an intimate partner in the United States, according to the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System. That is close to three women every day. Sixty-eight percent of these homicides occurred at the victim’s residence.⁵

Firearms drive those numbers. Among female intimate partner homicide victims during 2018–2021, 66.6% were killed with a firearm.⁵ Research has found that women are up to five times more likely to be killed by an abuser when a firearm is present in the home.⁶

A large share of these killings end with the perpetrator’s death as well. An analysis of NVDRS data from 2014 to 2020 found that in roughly one out of every three cases where a woman was killed by an intimate partner, the perpetrator then died by suicide. These murder-suicides almost always involve firearms and frequently kill bystanders, including children in the home.

Pregnancy offers no protection. A CDC analysis of data from nine U.S. jurisdictions between 2016 and 2022 found that 5.4% of women experienced intimate partner violence during pregnancy, with emotional abuse the most common form at 5.2% and physical violence at 1.5%. About 40% of homicides among people known to be pregnant or within a year of giving birth are related to intimate partner violence.⁷

Children in the Home

An estimated 15.5 million children are exposed to domestic violence in their homes every year. Exposure includes hearing violence through walls, seeing a parent’s injuries, and living in an atmosphere of fear and control, not only witnessing an assault directly. Nearly half of all residents of domestic violence shelters funded through the Family Violence Prevention and Services Program are children.⁸

Domestic violence and direct child abuse often overlap in the same household. Children raised in violent homes face elevated risks of behavioral problems, depression, academic difficulties, and involvement in violent relationships as adults.

What It Costs

The CDC estimated the population-level lifetime economic burden of intimate partner violence at nearly $3.6 trillion in 2014 dollars, based on 43 million U.S. adults with a history of victimization.⁹ Applying per-victim cost estimates to the number of people victimized in the previous 12 months produced an approximate annual burden of $594 billion, covering healthcare, lost productivity, and other costs.¹⁰

Survivors lose an estimated 8 million paid workdays per year, the equivalent of more than 32,000 full-time jobs. Abusers often interfere with employment directly by showing up at a workplace, sabotaging transportation, or inflicting injuries that make working impossible. The average cost of medical care after a single physical assault by a partner exceeds $4,200, and many survivors face those costs repeatedly.

What Doesn’t Get Reported

Official crime data captures only a fraction of what actually happens. The 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey found that 53% of intimate partner violence incidents went unreported to police, so just 47% appeared in law enforcement records.¹¹ Only about 34% of people injured by intimate partners receive professional medical care, so the healthcare system misses most cases as well.² Survivors cite fear of retaliation, financial dependence, distrust of the criminal justice system, and the belief that nothing will change. Every published figure on this page understates the reality.

Rural and Urban Gaps

Where a person lives shapes both the odds of experiencing abuse and the chance of finding help. A clinic-based survey found that women in small rural areas reported a 22.5% one-year prevalence of intimate partner violence, compared to 15.5% for women in urban areas. Rural women also reported greater severity of physical abuse.¹²

Access to services differs even more sharply. The mean distance to the nearest intimate partner violence resource was three times greater for rural women than for urban women. Over 25% of women in small rural and isolated areas lived more than 40 miles from the closest program, compared to less than 1% in urban areas.¹² That distance can decide whether a survivor is able to leave at all.

1
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. NISVS 2023/2024 Intimate Partner Violence Data Brief
2
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. NISVS Report on IPV 2022
3
PMC. The Association Between Disability and Intimate Partner Violence in the United States
4
PMC. Prevalence of Intimate Partner Reproductive Coercion in the United States: Racial and Ethnic Differences
5
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. MMWR – Intimate Partner Homicide Among Women, 2018-2021
6
PMC. Domestic Firearm Violence Against Women (2018-2021)
7
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Intimate Partner Violence and Pregnancy and Infant Health Outcomes
8
Administration for Children and Families. Expanding Services for Children and Youth Exposed to Domestic Violence Fact Sheet
9
CDC Stacks. Lifetime Economic Burden of Intimate Partner Violence Among U.S. Adults
10
PMC. Lifetime Economic Burden of Intimate Partner Violence Among U.S. Adults
11
Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2023 NCVS – Domestic Violence
12
CDC Stacks. Rural Disparity in Domestic Violence Prevalence and Access to Resources