Which US cities have experienced the most terrorist acts since 2001?
Executive summary
Since 2001, public data sets and academic analyses consistently show that New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles are the U.S. cities with the largest tallies of recorded terrorist incidents, with New York leading that list in multiple START analyses [1]. That pattern is shaped both by the catastrophic September 11 attacks and by how databases define and count “terrorist acts,” so the raw city rankings must be read alongside methodological caveats [2] [3].
1. The headline numbers: which cities top the list
Analysts using the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) data report that, for the 2001–2011 window, New York City experienced the most recorded terrorist attacks , followed by Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles ; California and New York state also had the highest state totals in that period [1]. Broader compilations that extend the GTD/START records through later years likewise place New York, Washington and other large metropolitan areas near the top of city-level tallies, a finding repeated in journalistic summaries that rely on that same database [4] [5].
2. One day that dominates a decade of counting: the 9/11 effect
The September 11, 2001 attacks — nearly 3,000 deaths across New York, Pennsylvania and the Washington, D.C. area — loom so large that any post-2001 accounting is materially influenced by their inclusion; researchers and government timelines consistently single out 9/11 as the deadliest U.S. terrorist event and a turning point in how incidents are tracked and prevented [6] [2]. Because those attacks involved multiple municipal jurisdictions, New York and the D.C. area’s positions in city rankings reflect both the scale of 9/11 and the fact that most other U.S. terrorist incidents have been far smaller and fewer [2] [1].
3. How researchers count attacks — and why rankings shift
Different data sets use different definitions: the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and START focus on incidents by non-state actors for political, ideological, or religious goals, while U.S. government summaries and specialized studies may include plots, foiled attacks, or pre-incident activities; the National Institute of Justice notes the American Terrorism Study counted 296 terrorism incidents and 617 pre‑incident activities from 2001–2019, underlining how raw incident totals vary by methodology [3]. Journalistic lists that claim “cities with the most terrorism” typically draw on GTD/START but may extend the years covered or include different categories, producing different rankings depending on whether foiled plots or low-casualty acts are counted [4] [1] [2].
4. Changing patterns: who commits the attacks and where
Beyond geography, the ideological drivers and types of incidents have shifted: environmental and animal‑rights groups accounted for many attacks in early 2000s START tallies, while recent analyses emphasize a rise in far‑right incidents and a long-term decline in jihadist operational lethality in the U.S., apart from episodic high‑casualty events [1] [7] [8]. CSIS and other analysts note that jihadist plots and attacks have been relatively uncommon in the post‑9/11 years compared with domestic extremist violence, a pattern that shapes city-level risk differently than international terror networks did in 2001 [7] [8].
5. What the numbers do — and do not — prove
The concentration of recorded attacks in large, symbolic, and densely populated cities like New York and Washington is real in multiple data sets, but that fact does not mean residents of those cities face a routine level of risk comparable to 9/11; researchers caution that the absolute number of terrorism incidents in the U.S. has been small relative to other forms of violence and that daily homicide totals often exceed terrorism incidents over long spans [3]. Moreover, public-facing lists and media pieces that rank cities rely heavily on the GTD/START architecture and on choices about years and incident types, so any definitive “most terrorist acts” list must be tied to a named dataset and timeframe [1] [2] [3].
6. Bottom line
According to START/GT D-based reporting and related journalistic summaries, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles emerge as the U.S. cities with the most recorded terrorist acts since 2001, but that conclusion is inseparable from the outsized effect of 9/11 and from methodological choices about what counts as an attack; clear interpretation requires naming the dataset and period used [1] [6] [3].