Living in Wilmington, DE

Crime rates in Wilmington are a touch above the national midpoint. The violent crime index comes in at 113 and property crime at 130, where 100 represents the U.S. average. That's not alarming, but it's enough that you should spend real time researching specific neighborhoods rather than assuming everywhere is equally fine. Talk to people who live there, walk the streets at different hours, and check the local police department's crime map. FBI UCR data.

Most households manage fine. Median rent in Wilmington is $1,187/month, and the typical household pulls in $55,269/year — a 25.8% rent-to-income ratio. That's under the 30% threshold where housing costs start to pinch, though not by a huge margin. If you're a single earner or have significant debt payments, run your own numbers carefully. For dual-income households, the math works out comfortably. Census ACS 2023.

The average worker in Wilmington spends about 20 minutes getting to the office. Driving solo is the default (62.2%), with 14.5% working remotely and 8.4% on public transit. It's a fairly typical commute — not a selling point, not a dealbreaker.

Everything on this page is built from public government sources: rent and income figures from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS 5-Year Estimates, 2023); commute and transportation data from Census ACS tables B08303 and B08006; crime rates from the FBI Uniform Crime Report. We refresh each dataset monthly through an automated pipeline and cross-check for anomalies. No surveys, no user-submitted guesses — just official federal data presented in a way that's actually useful for people researching a move.