In 2021, approximately 75,000 people died from violence-related injuries in the United States. This report summarizes data from the CDC's National Violent Death Information System (NVDRS), corresponding to violent deaths that occurred in 48 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico during 2021. The results are broken down by sex, age group, race and ethnicity, method of injury, type of place where the injury occurred, circumstances of the event and other selected characteristics. This report incorporates new variables on incidents and circumstances, including specific information on child victims. In addition, it adopts the revised race and ethnicity categories from the U.S. Census. Department of State, which are now considering the possibility of identifying people of more than one race, as well as the categories of native Hawaiian islanders or other Pacific Islanders, using updated denominators for calculating rates in these populations. The NVDRS collects information on violent deaths from death certificates, records from forensics and medical examiners, and reports from law enforcement agencies. The data presented here correspond to violent deaths that occurred in 2021. Information was included from 48 states (excluding Florida and Hawaii), the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Forty-six states provided full statewide data, while two states provided partial data for certain localities (31 California counties, representing 64% of its population, and 13 Texas counties, comprising 63% of its population). In addition, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico reported data corresponding to their respective jurisdictions. NVDRS integrates information on each violent death and links those related deaths (for example, multiple homicides, homicide followed by suicide, or multiple suicides) into a single incident. In 2021, NVDRS collected information on 68,866 fatal incidents involving 70,688 deaths that occurred in 48 states (46 with full coverage, 31 counties in California and 13 in Texas) and the District of Columbia. The deaths recorded in NVDRS represented 86.5% of all homicides, deaths due to legal intervention, suicides, accidental firearm injuries, and deaths of undetermined purpose in the United States during that year. Additionally, information was collected on 816 fatal incidents with 880 deaths in Puerto Rico, whose data were analyzed separately. Of the 70,688 deaths reported, the majority (58.2%) were suicides, followed by homicides (31.5%), deaths of undetermined intent that could be attributed to violence (8.2%), deaths due to legal intervention (1.3%) —that is, deaths caused by law enforcement officers or other persons legally authorized to use lethal force in the exercise of their functions, excluding legal executions— and finally, accidental deaths caused by firearms that accounted for less than 1.0%. The term “legal intervention” is a classification included in the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, and does not imply the lawfulness or legality of the circumstances in which a law enforcement officer caused death.