Is Egypt Safe for Expats — What the Road Data and the Advisory Maps Show
EGYPT · SAFETY
Ask is Egypt safe and the map answers differently for the Nile Delta, the Red Sea coast and the Sinai.
Key facts
What this is — Egypt is a north African country of Nile valley and desert, and Cairo on the Nile is its capital.
The biggest risk — Egypt’s statistics agency counted 5,829 road deaths in 2025, up almost 11 percent on 2024.
What governments say — The United States rates Egypt level two of four, and marks North Sinai and the Western Desert off limits.
The catch — The newest homicide rate published for Egypt covers 2017, so no current crime comparison exists.
Who to call — Police answer on 122 in Egypt, ambulances on 123, and the tourist police on 126.
Which way it moves — Road deaths fell in 2024 and rose in 2025, while tourist arrivals climbed 21 percent.
Egypt’s statistics agency counted 5,829 road deaths in 2025, up almost 11 percent on the year before. Anyone preparing a move types the same three words first: is Egypt safe.
The number Cairo publishes every June
Egypt publishes its road toll once a year, and the 2025 edition landed in June 2026. The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics counted 5,829 deaths.
That was 10.8 percent more than the 5,260 deaths of 2024. Injuries rose by 10.7 percent in the same year, to 84,553.
The year before had moved the other way. Deaths fell 10.3 percent in 2024, down from 5,861 in 2023.
The death rate per 100,000 people tells the story twice over. It ran 5.6 in 2023, then 4.9 in 2024, then 5.4 in 2025.
Ahram Online reported each of those bulletins as the agency released them. A resident who drives the Cairo ring road meets that arithmetic more often than any other risk here.
Britain’s Foreign Office writes the practical version of it in one line. Do not drive outside main cities and resorts at night.
Four governments, four maps
The American advisory keeps Egypt at Level 2, Exercise Increased Caution, citing terrorism, crime and health. The State Department repeated that level in a public post on 3 March 2026.
Three places carry its strongest label. They are the northern and middle Sinai Peninsula, the Western Desert without a licensed tour company, and the border areas.
Britain’s Foreign Office cuts the country more finely. It advises against all travel to the North Sinai Governorate, and against all travel within 20 kilometres of the Libyan border.
El Salloum, the crossing town on that border, is the exception and carries the lighter warning. The Hala’ib Triangle in the south-east and the Bir Tawil trapezoid beside it carry it too.
West of the Nile Valley the advice thins into a list of exceptions. Luxor, Aswan, Abu Simbel, the Valley of the Kings, Faiyum, Siwa and the Marsa Matruh road are all named.
The main Egypt page was updated on 4 August 2026. An advisory grades a governorate, and a life gets lived on a street.
North Sinai is not the Red Sea
Almost everything a foreign resident does happens inside a thin green strip. The Nile Delta and the valley south of Cairo hold the cities, the jobs and the hospitals.
North Sinai is a governorate rather than a region of the country’s daily life. The Red Sea resorts of Sharm el-Sheikh and Dahab sit in South Sinai, a separate governorate.
Between them runs a security arrangement that has outlasted several governments. Egypt lifted its nationwide state of emergency in October 2021, and Al Jazeera reported it that month.
Sinai kept measures of its own after that. Egypt Today reported in March 2022 that a presidential decree extended security measures there for another six months.
Egypt’s government has not published a running count of attacks in the governorate since. Foreign ministries keep it shaded anyway, and that shading is the most durable feature of every map.
The crime rate nobody has updated
The number a newcomer would most like to see is also the oldest one on file. The World Bank’s homicide series for Egypt, built on United Nations data, stops at 2017.
It records about 1.3 intentional homicides per 100,000 people in that year. The same series shows around 3.0 in 2013, 1.7 in 2014 and 1.5 in 2015.
So the trend it captures runs downward and is nine years out of date. Nobody has filed a comparable figure since.
Egypt’s statistics agency moves its traffic bulletin into English within months of the year ending. Its crime tables do not make the same journey.
What fills the gap is the ordinary texture of a very large city. Pickpocketing in crowds, bag snatching and arguments over a price are the complaints that recur.
Nineteen million people came anyway
Set against those maps is a figure the government publishes with some enthusiasm. Egypt received a record 15.7 million tourists in 2024, its State Information Service reported.
For 2025 the same service put arrivals at around 19 million. That is a rise of 21 percent, still described as an estimate at the end of December 2025.
Ecofin Agency carried the 19 million figure on 6 January 2026, quoting the tourism minister. Nineteen million arrivals and three closed zones describe the same country.
Neither of those facts cancels the other. The visitors go where the advisories are quiet, and that is most of Egypt.
What the street costs a woman
Egypt wrote sexual harassment into its penal code in June 2014, by presidential decree. The amended article set imprisonment of at least six months, or a fine of 3,000 Egyptian pounds (about US$58).
A repeat offence carried a year and a fine of 5,000 to 10,000 pounds (about US$96 to US$192). In 2021 parliament reclassified the offence as a felony and raised the penalties again.
The reason that law exists sits in a study published in 2013. UN Women found that 99.3 percent of Egyptian women and girls surveyed had experienced some form of sexual harassment.
That study is thirteen years old, and no comparable national survey has replaced it. It remains the figure every later account is measured against.
Both the law and the study describe public space rather than private life. The adjustments residents make concern transport and hours, not whether to live in the city.
Where the price gets set at the last moment
Prices in Egypt are often settled at the moment of payment rather than before it. The Foreign Office puts one example of that in writing.
Some hotel doctors have overcharged for treatment and medicines, its health page says. Pharmacies outside hotels will often supply medication at lower prices.
The same habit turns up in taxis without a running meter and at tour desks inside hotels. Agreeing the price first is the whole defence, and it works.
Cash machines inside bank branches carry less exposure than the ones standing open on a street. Residents learn that distinction in the first month.
Every dollar figure here uses 52.06 Egyptian pounds to the dollar, the open exchange-rate reading on 16 September 2026.
Which of the four numbers to dial
Egypt splits its emergency lines by service rather than folding them into one. Police answer on 122, ambulances on 123 and the fire service on 180.
A fourth number, 126, reaches the tourist police. The Foreign Office lists all of them on its Egypt help page, updated on 11 April 2026.
Mobile phones also reach an operator on 112. Egyptian networks still publish the service numbers, Orange Egypt among them.
Knowing which of the four to dial matters more here than in countries with a single line. A resident who has them saved has done the cheapest piece of safety work available.
Good care in Cairo, and distance beyond it
The Foreign Office asks two things of anyone going to Egypt. Check that the destination can provide the healthcare you may need, and hold insurance for local treatment or unexpected medical evacuation.
That health page was updated on 24 August 2026. The word doing the work in the sentence is evacuation.
Cairo holds the country’s specialist hospitals and Alexandria holds most of the rest. Distance from those two cities is the variable that decides an emergency.
A resident in the Delta reaches a large hospital within an hour. A resident at a desert site or a dive town on the Red Sea measures the same trip in a different unit.
Health is the third reason the American advisory names, after terrorism and crime. It is also the one most residents will actually use.
Where Egypt sits on the scale
Put the pieces on a single scale and Egypt lands at neither end. It is a large, heavily policed, heavily visited state with hard edges at its borders.
The direction of travel is mixed rather than one-way. Road deaths fell in 2024 and rose again in 2025, while arrivals climbed 21 percent across the same window.
The advisory maps have barely moved in years. The same governorates carry the same shading, revised on schedule rather than on events.
What no agency has refreshed is the crime picture itself. The newest homicide rate anyone can quote for Egypt belongs to 2017, and the traffic bulletin arrives each June without a companion.
A person who drives carefully, agrees prices first and carries evacuation cover has covered most of the ground. The rest of the answer is geography, and most of that geography is open.
More: Africa news in English
Sources: Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), Ahram Online, US Department of State, UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Global Affairs Canada, Australian Smartraveller, Al Jazeera, Egypt Today, World Bank and UN Office on Drugs and Crime homicide series, UN Women, Egyptian State Information Service, Ecofin Agency, Orange Egypt. https://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/1235/571613/Egypt/Urban–Transport/Road-accident-deaths-in-Egypt-rise–to-,-in–CAPMA.aspx and https://www.capmas.gov.eg/Admin/News/PressRelease/2025515145236_%D8%AD%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%AB%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B7%D8%B1%D9%82.pdf and https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/egypt/regional-risks and https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/egypt/health and https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/egypt/getting-help and https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/traveladvisories/egypt-travel-advisory.html and https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/26/egypt-lifts-state-of-emergency-in-force-since-2017 and https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=EG and https://sis.gov.eg/Story/204112/A-record-15.7-million-tourists-visited-Egypt-in-2024?lang=en-us and https://www.ecofinagency.com/news-industry/0601-51778-egypt-tourist-arrivals-jump-21-in-2025-to-19-million
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