HOUSTON – A new study is ranking the safest and least safe big cities in the United States and Houston has found itself in the latter part of the list.
The study by Smartasset lists Houston as the second least safest big city in the United States.
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The study calculated the rankings based off several criteria. These were the statistics for Houston in the study:
- Violent crimes per 1K: 11.5
- Property crimes per 1K: 42.9
- Auto fatalities per 100K: 11.6
- Disaster risk: Very High
Of the 83 cities listed by safety, Houston was 82, surpassing only Memphis, Tennessee. Dallas was also listed among the least safe large cities coming in at 73 on the list.
However, Texas is also home to some of what the study says are the safest cities in the United States. Plano came in as the second safest large city in the country. Laredo was listed as the sixth safest large city in the country.
The study ranked cities with populations greater than 250,000 people. It calculated natural disaster risk by converting the county risk rating in FEMA’s National Risk Index, as of April 2026, for the county in which a particular city is located to a five-point numeric scale.
Smartasset says traffic fatality rates were sourced from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Property and violent crime rates were sourced from the FBI’s 2024 issue of Crime in the United States (CIUS), the most recent year available; where city data was not available via CIUS, alternate sources, such as state or agency reports were used. Each metric was weighted and combined into a composite score used to rank the cities.