Abstract: The article examines social danger and its characteristics based on legislative definitions of an offence in different countries. It offers a comparative and legislative analysis of the concept of "offence" based on regulatory legal acts of different countries. The authors assert that all offences but not only crimes can be characterized as socially dangerous. A conclusion is made that a punishment which exceeds a criminal punishment can not be imposed if an offence does not involve social danger. To a certain extent we can judge about the nature and degree of social danger by the type of sanctions and the amount of adverse abridgment of rights that shall be imposed on the entity that has violated the legal norm.The purpose of this article is to corroborate the presence of the social danger characteristic not only in one type of offences – a crime, but also in different types of offences by using legislation of Russia and other countries. Methods of research. A dialectical approach was applied in the process of the research, based on which the phenomena and notions were defined in their integration and interconnection with social relations. The historical legal, formal legal, comparative legal methods were used.