If you've found that one of your deliveries has gone missing this holiday season, you're far from alone. Porch pirates, the colloquial name for thieves who snatch deliveries from people's homes while customers are at work or before they've had a chance to step out and pick them up, have cost consumers an estimated $15 billion in the past year.
The number's even worse for retailers, who saw $22 billion in losses, bringing the grand total cost of porch piracy to $37 billion. On average, thieves are stealing 250,000 packages per day, according to a new survey from safety research company Safewise.
There is some good news. The study found that porch pirate incidents were actually lower in 2024-2025 than they were in 2023, with the total number of incidents falling from 120 million to 104 million, a 13% decline.
That's little comfort, however, to the people who open their door, expecting to grab a present or necessity only to find an empty porch. The problem has gotten to the point that Josh Gottheimer, a U.S. House Democratic representative from New Jersey, has introduced a bill called the Porch Pirates Act, which would make stealing any package a federal crime, with fines of up to $250,000 and prison sentences of as much as 10 years.
Currently, packages delivered by the U.S. Postal Service are covered by federal law, but those delivered by FedEx $FDX, UPS, Amazon $AMZN, Walmart $WMT and other private companies are not.
Chicago was ranked as the worst city for porch pirates in the Safewise study, with an estimated 6.5 million incidents. New York, Miami, Houston, and Baltimore rounded out the Top five. Among states, California saw the most incidents, followed by New York, Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania.