Most best-of lists in this genre are built from reputation, which means they recommend shows that stopped publishing a year ago. Before writing this one we opened all twenty feeds and checked the date on the most recent episode. Four of them had changed since we last published this page: one changed its name, one changed networks, one went on hiatus, and one we could not confirm is still producing at all.

Slaycation is a true crime podcast, so these are our competitors, and we say so plainly wherever our own show comes up. What follows is grouped by how you actually listen: the weekly habit, the daily short, the season-long investigation, and the travel cases. Every show carries the date of the last episode we could verify, checked on September 17, 2026.

How We Checked

Every show on this page was verified against its own feed or publisher page in September 2026, not against last year’s list. A show is called active only if we could see a recent episode. Where a show has changed name, network or schedule, the entry says what changed and when. Where we could not confirm a show is still producing, it is in a separate section rather than in the recommendations, because “probably still going” is not something a list should imply.

What Changed Since Last Year

Four shows on this list are not where you left them.

Killer Queens is now This Feels Criminal. The rename landed in August 2025, and the feed carried over, so if you were subscribed you have been listening to it under a new name without necessarily noticing. Still twice weekly.

Morbid moved to SiriusXM. The show left Wondery for a multiyear SiriusXM deal effective September 1, 2025. For most listeners this changes the ad reads and the back-catalogue access rather than the show itself.

Housewives of True Crime is on hiatus. The hosts announced a pause on their August 12, 2026 episode. Nothing suggests it is over, but nothing new has landed since.

In The Dark is a question mark. Its last confirmable season is the 2024 Pulitzer-winning Haditha investigation. We could not verify a 2025 or 2026 season, which is worth saying out loud because Google’s own AI Overview currently recommends it as a current top pick. The back catalogue is still among the best investigative work in the format. Just do not subscribe expecting new episodes on a schedule.

The Weekly Habit

These are the shows that fill a commute and show up on a predictable day. If you want one recommendation from this section: Crime Junkie, Mondays, still the most reliable on-ramp to the genre.

• Crime Junkie. Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat, audiochuck. Weekly on Mondays. Tight, case-per-episode structure and the biggest audience in the genre.
• Morbid. Alaina Urquhart and Ash Kelley, now SiriusXM. Twice weekly. Banter-forward, which is either the appeal or the dealbreaker.
• This Feels Criminal. Formerly Killer Queens. Tuesdays and Thursdays, case deep dives with a legal bent.
• Murder with My Husband. Garrett and Payton Moreland. Weekly, conversational, and now with a 2026 Netflix tie-in.
• Moms and Mysteries. Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a recurring Florida cases strand.
• Last Podcast on the Left. Biweekly, comedy-horror framing, the least reverent show on this page by a distance.
• True Crime Creepers. Thursdays, indie, and quick to cover cases the bigger shows skip.
• Every Town. Weekly, one American town per case, strongest when the town is the story.
• Murder in America. Fridays, Bloody FM, road-trip framing across states.
• MURDERISH. Weekly, plus short mini-episodes between full ones.
• Love and Murder. Sundays, domestic cases where the relationship is the motive.

Picture a 35-minute each-way commute, five days a week. That is roughly six hours of listening, which one weekly hour-long show does not fill. This is the section to build a rotation from: two twice-weekly shows and a daily, and you never hit an empty queue on a Tuesday.

When You Have Ten Minutes

Morning Cup of Murder is the only genuinely daily show on this list, publishing a short case every morning, most recently on September 17, 2026. It is the one to put in the rotation for the walk to the train rather than the drive to work.

The Season-Long Investigations

Different format, different expectation: one case, reported over a season, closer to documentary than to conversation. If you want one: The Burden, whose seventh season examines police misconduct cases.

• The Burden. Steve Fishman and Dax-Devlon Ross, Orbit Media. Seasonal. Season 7 is built around bad-cop cases.
• Missing. Tim Pilleri and Lance Reenstierna, Crawlspace Media. Weekly, focused on disappearances, and unusually good at staying with a case after the news cycle leaves.
• Crawlspace. Same team, irregular schedule, deep-dive trials and long-running investigations. We have a relationship with this one in both directions: they sat down with the Crawlspace hosts, and there is the reverse interview as well.
• The Generation Why. Aaron Habel and Justin Evans, distributed by Wondery. One of the genre’s originals, with episodes confirmed through July 2026.
• Dateline NBC. The broadcast institution, in podcast form, weekly and then some.

When the Crime Happened on a Trip

This is our lane, so here is the disclosure up front: Slaycation is our show. It is on this list because travel true crime is a real subgenre with almost nobody in it, not because we ranked ourselves first. Hosted by Jerry Kolber, Adam Davis and Kim Davis, weekly, covering murders and disappearances that happen on cruises, at resorts and on the flight home.

If that subgenre is what you are after, the case pages are the written version of the same beat: a case currently heading to federal trial after a death aboard a cruise ship, and the Laos methanol deaths that killed six travelers in a single week.

New in 2025 and 2026

Reputation lists take about two years to notice a new show. These six launched recently enough that most of them are not on any of the lists ranking above this page.

• DOUBT: The Case of Lucy Letby. iHeartPodcasts, February 2026. Hosted by Amanda Knox, re-examining the convictions of the British neonatal nurse. Knox spent two years on it, and her own experience of a contested conviction is the reason it is not just another retrial-by-podcast. We have the case that made her a household name if you want that background first.
• Devil in the Desert. ABC Audio and 20/20, June 2025, hosted by Matt Gutman. The Hossein Nayeri kidnapping case. It went to number one on Apple Podcasts and stayed there for weeks.
• Liberty Lost. Wondery, June 2025, hosted by T.J. Raphael. An investigation into the treatment of pregnant teenagers at a home connected to Liberty University.
• Scam Factory. Wondery, February 2025, hosted by Denise Chan. People trafficked into scam compounds in Myanmar, which is the crime story of this decade and still underreported.
• Chameleon. Relaunched under audiochuck in November 2025. An anthology about con artists and impersonators.
• Love Trapped. iHeartPodcasts and Glass, February 2026, hosted by Stephani Young. A celebrity paternity investigation, and a good example of where the genre is drifting.

True Crime Is Now the Biggest Genre in Podcasting

This stopped being a niche some time ago, and in 2026 it became official. Research by Edison Research with audiochuck, using second-quarter 2026 survey data and published in September 2026, found that true crime overtook comedy as the most-consumed podcast genre among weekly US podcast listeners: the first time it has led since Edison began tracking in 2019. The weekly true crime audience has grown from roughly 6.7 million listeners in 2019 to well over 19 million.

The ranker data says something slightly different, which is worth holding alongside it. In the Podtrac Top 200 for March 2026, true crime accounted for 24 shows, behind news at 58 and comedy at 35. Reach and chart concentration are not the same thing: true crime has the most listeners spread across the most shows, while the very biggest individual shows are still news.

One caution if you see a statistic on another list. The widely quoted figures that 84 percent of Americans consume true crime and 42 percent listen to true crime podcasts come from Edison’s 2024 report, not from this year’s, and they get recycled as current constantly.

How to Pick One

The deciding factor is not which show is best. It is what you are doing while you listen.

If you are listening in short daily blocks, the deciding factor is cadence. A weekly hour-long show leaves you empty four days out of five, so build a rotation around a daily like Morning Cup of Murder plus one twice-weekly show.

If you listen in long stretches, the deciding factor is depth. Pick a season-long investigation and go in order. The Burden or Missing will hold a four-hour drive in a way that a case-per-episode show cannot.

If banter is your dealbreaker, the deciding factor is hosting style, and it splits the list cleanly. Morbid and Last Podcast on the Left are conversation-forward. Dateline, The Burden and Missing keep the hosts mostly out of the way.

Say you have tried three shows and abandoned all of them in the first ten minutes. That is almost never the case selection. It is usually a twenty-minute preamble before the case starts, and it means you want the reported end of this list rather than the conversational end.

Three steps that take about five minutes:

1. Decide whether you want a case per episode or one case per season.
2. Check the status table above so you do not subscribe to a paused show.
3. Start with the most recent episode, not episode one, for the conversational shows, and episode one for the seasonal ones.

And if you would rather watch than listen, this year’s documentary releases are catalogued the same way, with dates and runtimes attached.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best true crime podcast in 2026? Crime Junkie remains the most reliable weekly listen, and it is the show most people in this genre started with. For reported, season-long work, The Burden is the strongest currently publishing.

Is In The Dark still making episodes? We could not verify a season after the 2024 Haditha investigation. The back catalogue is excellent and worth starting from scratch. Treat new episodes as a maybe.

What happened to Killer Queens? It was renamed This Feels Criminal in August 2025. Same feed, same cadence.

What are the best new true crime podcasts? DOUBT, hosted by Amanda Knox, and Devil in the Desert from ABC Audio are the two strongest recent launches. Scam Factory is the most underrated.

Which true crime podcast is best for a commute? Morning Cup of Murder for short trips, since it publishes daily. Crime Junkie for a drive of about an hour.

Is true crime really the most popular podcast genre? As of Edison Research’s second-quarter 2026 data, published in September 2026, true crime overtook comedy as the most-consumed genre among weekly US podcast listeners.

Where Slaycation Fits

Slaycation covers one specific corner of this genre: the crimes that happen while people are travelling. Cruise ships, resorts, road trips, the holiday that ended in a case file. It is the corner almost nobody else works, which is why we built the show and why the written case files on this site read the same way.

“You’re not thinking, but it almost makes you realize that you can never truly let your guard down.”

Kim Davis, on a case where the person who turned out to be dangerous had holidayed with the victim’s family for years

If the shows above are your weekly habit, the Slaycation episode library is the one to put in the rotation for the trips that went wrong.

Sources

• Show status, hosts, cadence and last-episode dates verified against Apple Podcasts show pages, publisher sites and Podchaser, checked September 17, 2026.
• Genre data: the True Crime Consumer Report from Edison Research and audiochuck, second-quarter 2026 data published September 2026.
• Ranker data: Podtrac Top 200 Multi-Channel Podcast Publishers, March 2026.
• Network and launch announcements: The Hollywood Reporter, Podnews, ABC Audio, Wondery and iHeartMedia press releases.