These Are the 17 Safest Cities in the U.S.

Do you know how safe it is where you live? An even better question might be: How do you define safety to begin with?

There are so many different factors that contribute to the overall sense of safety — or danger — a person can feel while living in a city. Of course, some of the most immediate and obvious ones that come to mind are whether you feel safe walking home alone late at night, and how many break-ins might be taking place in your neighborhood.

But there are other elements to consider, too. For example, the quality of roads in a city can contribute to the level of driving safety, and the general location of a city might mean that its residents are more or less likely to experience a natural disaster, like an earthquake or a wildfire.

In a 2021 survey, WalletHub analyzed over 180 cities in the United States, measuring their level of safety across 44 key indicators. Those indicators include assaults per capita, unemployment rate, road quality, traffic fatalities per capita, number of law enforcement employees per capita, natural disaster risk levels, and more.

The great thing about this survey is that it highlights all of the various strategies cities can take to create a safer world for their residents and it does so by providing specific details like these:

• South Burlington, Vermont has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, along with one of the lowest percentages of uninsured people in the country.
   
• Portland, Maine is a top city when it comes to the percentage of its population that has an emergency savings account.
   
• Buffalo, New York has one of the lowest natural disaster risk levels of any city in the country.

Without further ado, here’s the full list of the 17 safest cities in America, per WalletHub’s analysis: 

Curious about how your hometown stacks up in other ways? You might want to check out our list of the happiest cities in America, or our list of the most sustainable cities in America, too.