Atlantic City water temperature
Atlantic City shark attacks
0
unprovoked bites on record in New Jersey in 2025
The International Shark Attack File recorded no unprovoked bites anywhere in New Jersey in 2025.
Unprovoked bites are extremely rare. The International Shark Attack File confirmed 65 of them worldwide in 2025, in line with the 2020–2024 average of about 61 a year — that is every coast on earth, for a whole year.
The file puts the lifetime odds of dying in a shark-related incident in the United States at 1 in 4,332,817. For a lightning strike it puts them at 1 in 79,746. Its own odds table.
What the number counts
The number counts unprovoked bites: in the file's words, a bite on a live human in the shark's natural habitat with no human provocation. Bites that happen while somebody is handling a shark, or unhooking one, are counted separately as provoked and are not in this number.
The file publishes this total for New Jersey as a whole, not beach by beach, so it covers every mile of coast in it over that year — not Atlantic City on its own.
New Jersey is not in the file's 2025 state table at all. The states it does list add up to the national total of 25 printed underneath them, so the file recorded no unprovoked bite anywhere in New Jersey that year.
How the record is kept
One year is one year. A quiet season is not a promise and a busy one is not a trend — the file counts afresh every year, and its own summary notes that swings from year to year are expected.
A published total is not a census. The file is a compilation built from the reports that reached it — its own director notes that a significant fraction of incidents likely go unreported — and it is still documenting cases from decades past, so the early years are thinner than the recent ones.
Read from the International Shark Attack File, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, on August 20, 2026.
What this page is not
None of this says anything about today. A count reaching back more than a century is a record, not a reading of the water in front of you.
Warm water says nothing about surf, rip currents, or bacteria — check local lifeguard flags and advisories.
Looking for the water instead? Atlantic City water temperature.