WISQARS™ National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) Help Menu

What is the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS)?

The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) is a state-based public health surveillance system that links data from 3 sources: law enforcement reports, medical examiner and coroner reports, and death certificates.

CDC now provides NVDRS funding to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. NVDRS data collection began in 2003. By the end of 2019, all states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico had begun their data collection.

• 2003: Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, South Carolina, and Virginia
• 2004: Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin
• 2005: Kentucky, New Mexico, and Utah
• 2010: Ohio and Michigan
• 2015: Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Washington
• 2017: Alabama, California, Delaware, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, and West Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico
• 2018: NVDRS received funding for nationwide expansion.
• 2019: Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming

See the NVDRS page for more information.

What types of deaths are part of NVDRS?

In NVDRS, a violent death is defined as “a death resulting from the intentional use of physical force or power against oneself, another person, or against a group or community.” NVDRS collects information about homicides, suicides, deaths by legal intervention (excluding executions), and deaths of undetermined intent that might have occurred due to violence. In addition, information about unintentional firearm injury deaths (i.e., the individual did not intend to discharge the firearm) is collected. Deaths are included based on ICD-10 codes and/or manner of death assigned in source documents. For more information about NVDRS case definitions, including ICD-10 codes, see the NVDRS coding manualpdf icon.

Each record in NVDRS contains data on all victims and alleged perpetrators (suspects) associated with a given incident. An incident is defined in NVDRS as one or more related fatal injury(ies) occurring within the same 24 hours as determined by a clear link in the source documents.

What is WISQARS^TM NVDRS?

WISQARS^TM (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, pronounced “whiskers”) NVDRS is an interactive database system that provides public access to data from NVDRS. WISQARS NVDRS allows the user to run simple, customizable queries of NVDRS data that produce information such as counts and rates of different manners of death, characteristics of these deaths including the circumstances surrounding them, and counts and rates of single and multi-victim incidents.  The process for customizing queries and selecting output options is briefly described below. The data provided in WISQARS NVDRS are updated once a year, usually in the fall.