If you’ve ever come home to find a delivery photo of your parcel on the doorstep, followed by a doorstep with no parcel on it, you are not imagining it and you are not alone.
A new industry report has put hard numbers on what most online shoppers already suspect, which is that parcel theft in the UK is no longer a freak event.
It is something close to a national sport, and depending on where you live, the odds are stacked very differently.
The 2025 Parcel Theft Report from Parcel Pending by Quadient pulled Freedom of Information data from 27 UK police forces and ran a 2,000-person consumer survey on top, and the headline numbers are genuinely grim.
Reported parcel thefts are up 77% year on year.
One in six UK households (17%) had a parcel stolen in the last 12 months.
The average value of a nicked parcel is now £138, up from £102 the year before.
And the total bill for all of it comes in at an eye-watering £666.5 million.
But the real story is in the league table. Some regions are getting absolutely battered. Others are quietly getting away with it.
Here it is, counted down from tenth to first.
10. South West – 12%
The South West gets off lightest in the whole country, and honestly, that sounds about right.
Fewer tower blocks, fewer communal lobbies, more houses with actual driveways and actual porches you can tuck a parcel behind. A theft rate of 12% isn’t nothing, but it is comfortably the lowest figure on the board.
If you live in Devon or Cornwall and have been quietly smug about your Amazon boxes arriving intact, this is your scientific validation.
9. North East – 13%
The North East sits near the bottom of the table and, by the standards of this report, that counts as a win.
Bit of a tie with the East Midlands here on 13%, but the North East gets the ninth slot. Nothing to celebrate exactly, because a one-in-eight chance of having a parcel lifted is still a one-in-eight chance of having a parcel lifted.
But compared to what happens further south, it is borderline utopian.
8. East Midlands – 13%
Here is where the data starts getting weird.
On the regional figure, the East Midlands is comfortable enough at 13%.
On the police-reported figures, though, Leicestershire alone posted the highest number of recorded theft incidents of anywhere in the country, at 799 for the year.
Either the Leicestershire force is unusually good at recording these things, or Leicester is quietly having a nightmare that the regional average is flattening out.
Either way, it is a reminder that the league table tells you one story, and the force-by-force data sometimes tells you another.
7. South East – 14%
The commuter belt checks in at 14%, which for a region that includes Kent, Surrey and most of the Home Counties is probably lower than people would have guessed.
But the police data has a sting in it. Kent recorded 750 parcel theft incidents on its own, which puts it third in the country by force.
Hertfordshire (technically the East of England, but close enough geographically that we are bending the rules) came in second with 767.
The South East might look mid-table on the regional scoreboard. Individual Home Counties are very much not mid-table.
6. East of England – 16%
Sixteen percent. That’s one in every six front doors.
The East of England is interesting because it is the first region where you start to feel the creep of urban density into the numbers.
Not on the scale of London, obviously, but Hertfordshire on its own hitting 767 police-reported thefts is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.
If you live in a flat in a commuter town 25 minutes out of King’s Cross, consider yourself warned.
5. West Midlands – 16%
Into the top half of the table now, and Birmingham and the wider West Midlands land at 16%.
Dense housing, a huge parcel volume per postcode, and a lot of terraced streets where doorsteps are right on the pavement.
That is roughly the recipe for elevated theft rates across the board, and the Midlands ticks every box.
4. Scotland – 18%
Scotland cracks the top five with 18%, and the bit the consumer survey picks out specifically is Glasgow.
Glasgow was one of four cities, along with Greater London, Manchester and Bristol, where households reported more stolen deliveries than the national average.
And it is not just the theft rate. It is how people feel about it afterwards.
Glasgow was also one of the cities where residents were more likely than the national average to say parcel theft had left them feeling unsafe in their own neighbourhood, after the fact.
That is the part of the report that quietly matters. A stolen £30 order is an irritation. The lingering sense that someone is watching your front door is a different thing entirely.
3. North West – 19%
Manchester drags the whole North West up the table, and the numbers are ugly.
Nineteen percent of households hit, and Manchester specifically flagged in the consumer data as one of the cities running above the national average.
Same pattern as Glasgow too, residents in Manchester were among those most likely to say theft had left them feeling unsafe locally.
Dense housing, tight terraced streets, lots of flats, lots of parcels. The maths isn’t complicated.
2. Wales – 21%
Here is the genuine shock of the whole report.
Wales comes in second. Not London. Not Manchester. Wales. At a staggering 21%, which is more than one in every five households.
Cardiff, Swansea, Newport and Wrexham between them cover a decent chunk of the Welsh population, so the urban-density angle is there.
But 21% is still well above what you’d expect from that city mix alone.
The West Midlands, with Birmingham and Wolverhampton and Coventry all firing, sits five points lower at 16%. The North West, carrying Manchester and Liverpool, is on 19%.
So something else is going on in Wales that the report doesn’t fully explain.
It might be the mix of dense terraced streets in the South Wales valleys, where doorsteps open straight onto the pavement.
It might be the rural tail, where parcels get left in unlocked porches and outbuildings with nobody watching for miles.
It might be a reporting quirk in the consumer survey sample.
Probably a bit of all three.
Whatever the driver, the number is the number. Wales is the second most-nicked region in the country, and it is not particularly close.
1. Greater London – 27%
And at the top of the table, to absolutely no one’s surprise, Greater London.
27%. More than a quarter of London households had a parcel stolen in the last year.
Every factor the report lists as a driver of parcel theft is turned up to maximum in London.
Dense housing. Flats without concierges. Sky-high parcel volumes per postcode. Communal lobbies that give a thief access to ten unattended boxes at once. Broken buzzers that mean parcels get left in places they shouldn’t be.
Throw in the “60% of thefts happen between 9am and 5pm” finding from elsewhere in the report, and a city where most of the adult working population is out of the house between those hours, and you have something close to a perfect storm.
Unsurprisingly, London also scored above the national average on the “I feel unsafe in my neighbourhood after having a parcel stolen” question.
The Weird Outliers in the Police Data
One last bit worth flagging, because it tells you how patchy this picture gets at street level.
The forces that recorded the fewest thefts in the whole country were the City of London (3 incidents, which makes sense given almost nobody lives there) and Cheshire (16 incidents).
The forces that recorded the most were Leicestershire (799), Hertfordshire (767) and Kent (750).
That’s a gap of 799 to 3 between two forces in the same country in the same year.
Some of that is genuine regional variation. Some of it is how aggressively each force records these incidents in the first place.
And some of it is how many victims actually bother to call the police about a £40 parcel.
Which brings us to the caveat that hangs over the entire league table.
The Bit Nobody Wants To Say
The consumer survey figure of 17% of UK households, and the police-reported figure for actual incidents, are nothing like each other. Not even close.
That’s because most parcel theft never gets reported to anyone with a warrant card. It gets reported to the retailer, dealt with through a refund or a reship, and quietly closed out.
In other words, whatever the league table says, the true numbers are almost certainly worse.
So if you live in London, Wales, or the North West and you’re nodding along reading this, you are not paranoid. The data says your postcode is working against you.
And if you live in the South West and have never had a parcel go missing in your life, enjoy it.
Statistically, you are living in the safest region in the country for keeping hold of your Amazon orders.
For now.
*Data: Parcel Pending by Quadient, 2025 Parcel Theft Report, based on FOI responses from 27 UK police forces and a nationally representative survey of 2,000 UK adults conducted by Censuswide in September 2025.
