Is Asunción Safe? A Practical Guide for Foreign Residents
What the evidence supports about Asunción specifically — including where the data runs out.
Last verified 2026-08-19Next review 2026-11-192 official sources
Asunción is not among the five Paraguayan departments the U.S. State Department singles out for a higher advisory level. Those are Alto Paraná, Amambay, Canindeyú, Concepción and San Pedro, all in the north-east. Asunción and the surrounding Central Department fall under the national Level 1 — Exercise Normal Precautions.
What we cannot give you is a city crime rate. Published Asunción-level crime data with a stated methodology is not something we were able to source, and we are not going to substitute a perception index for one.
What can actually be said
| Claim | Supported? | By what |
|---|---|---|
| Asunción is outside the flagged departments | Yes | The advisory names five departments; Asunción and Central are not among them |
| Paraguay's national homicide rate is around 6.8 per 100,000 (2023) | Yes, as a national figure | World Bank / UNODC series |
| Asunción's homicide rate is X | Not established | No city-level source located |
| Asunción is safer than [European city] | Not established | No comparable city-level dataset |
| Asunción is completely safe | No | No city is, and nothing supports this |
Why we do not quote a city figure
Two of the sources people commonly reach for do not do the job:
- National statistics applied to a city. Paraguay's national homicide rate describes the whole country, including the departments the advisory flags. Presenting it as Asunción's number would understate some places and overstate others, and it would be a comparison of unlike things.
- Crowd-sourced perception indices. Numbeo and similar services measure how safe respondents feel. That is a real thing to measure and it is not a crime rate. Using it to say one city is safer than another gives a number with a decimal point and no underlying record behind it.
Our full position on this is in the methodology, which exists precisely so that pages like this one can be checked.
Open: city-level Paraguayan crime data. We have not established whether the Policía Nacional del Paraguay or the Ministerio del Interior publishes department- or city-level crime statistics with a documented methodology. If they do, this page will carry them with the source and the year. If they do not, this page will keep saying so.
Open: the current advisory wording and date. The State Department page did not respond to automated retrieval on 19 August 2026; the level and departments above come from corroborating sources. The advisory is linked below — check it directly before relying on it.
What foreign residents actually report
We can describe the practical texture without pretending it is data. In Asunción, as in most Latin American capitals of comparable size, the everyday concern is opportunistic property crime rather than violence directed at foreigners: phone snatching, theft from vehicles, distraction thefts in busy areas. The usual capital-city precautions apply, and they are the precautions Level 1 describes.
Neighbourhoods differ, as they do everywhere. Anyone advising you that a whole city is uniformly fine, or uniformly not, is not describing a real place.
What to do rather than read a number
- Read the current advisories yourself — the US State Department, and your own government's, which sometimes emphasise different areas.
- Rent before you buy. A few months in a neighbourhood tells you more than any index.
- Ask about the specific area, not the city. "Is Asunción safe" has no useful answer; "what is this street like at night" does.
- Separate the border departments from the capital in your research. They are different questions with different answers.
Where this sits in the decision
Safety is often the first thing people research about Paraguay and rarely the thing the decision turns on. If Asunción were the problem, the advisory would say so, and it does not. The questions that decide whether a move works are usually the residency process, the cost of living, and the tax position — including whether your home country will actually let go of you.
We would rather you arrived with accurate expectations than reassuring ones. Those are not always the same thing, and in this industry they are frequently confused.
Common questions
- Is Asunción safe for foreigners?
- Asunción and the Central Department are not among the areas the US State Department singles out for a higher advisory level. Petty crime is the ordinary concern in any capital, and no dataset reviewed supports a claim that Asunción is free of crime.
- Is there published crime data for Asunción specifically?
- City-level Paraguayan crime data with a stated methodology was not located in our research. We do not substitute crowd-sourced perception indices for recorded crime data, so this page states what is available rather than inventing a city crime rate.
Sources
Every legal, fee and procedural statement on this page is taken from the sources below and was checked on 2026-08-19. Where they change, this page changes.
- U.S. Department of State — Paraguay Travel Advisory — Advisory level and the departments assigned a higher level
- World Bank — Intentional homicides per 100,000 people (Paraguay) — Paraguay homicide rate, UNODC-derived series