The world's safest cities in 2017, by Numbeo's Safe City Index

Ask which city feels safest and the answer depends entirely on who you ask. One widely watched attempt to put a number on it — Numbeo's Safe City Index — ranked more than 370 cities in 2017, and its verdict for the top spot went not to Tokyo or Zurich but to Abu Dhabi.

In the 2017 edition of the index, Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, ranked first with a score of 84.49 out of a possible 100. It edged out Munich (84.28) and Taipei (84.24), with Basel (84.18) and Aarhus (83.99) close behind. Every city in the top ten cleared 80 points, and the top four were separated by barely three-tenths of a point — a reminder that at the safe end of the scale, the ranking is finely balanced.

How the ranking is built

The Safe City Index is a crowd-sourced perception measure, not a tally of police reports. Numbeo asks visitors to its website how safe they feel walking at day and at night, and how worried they are about specific crimes — mugging, robbery, car theft, physical attack and harassment among them. Those responses are aggregated into a single figure from 0 to 100, where a higher score signals lower perceived crime. The maximum attainable value is 100. Numbeo relies on its own survey data rather than official statistics, citing the inconsistency of government crime reporting across countries.

That design matters when reading the table. A high score reflects how safe residents and visitors say a place feels, which can diverge from recorded crime rates — and, because the survey is continuously updated, the historical values for a given year are periodically recomputed. The figures here are the ranking as it stood for 2017.

The top ten, and how close it is

Beyond the leaders, the 2017 top ten read: Abu Dhabi, Munich, Taipei, Basel, Aarhus, Heidelberg, Doha, Singapore, Mangalore and Zurich. Europe supplied five of the ten, Asia four — including two Gulf entries in Abu Dhabi and Doha — and every one of them scored 80 or above. The clustering is the real story: nine points of index value separated first place from tenth, so a modest shift in survey responses could reorder the list.

At the top of the table the margins are wafer-thin — barely three-tenths of a point separated the four safest cities of 2017.

The safest regions

Averaging each ranked city's score by region turns the individual results into a broader picture. Europe came out narrowly ahead with a mean index of 59.40 across 164 cities, just 0.48 points clear of Asia at 58.92 across 112 cities. Oceania sat mid-table at 55.66, Africa at 50.31, and the Americas — grouping North and South together — trailed at 40.62, nearly ten points below Africa. Across the whole ranked field, the median score was 55.82 and the mean 56.08.

The other end of the scale

Caracas, Venezuela finished last on the 2017 index with a score of 13.39 — roughly a sixth of Abu Dhabi's. That result tracks with the city's wider reputation for violence: one widely cited estimate from the Citizens' Council for Public Security put Caracas near the top of the world's homicide tables, at around 120 murders per 100,000 residents in 2016, though Venezuelan figures are heavily disputed and vary by source. Several South African and Brazilian cities also clustered near the bottom of the table.

Numbeo versus the Economist's index

Because more than one organisation publishes a "safest cities" list, it is easy to conflate them. The Economist Intelligence Unit's separate Safe Cities Index also appeared in 2017, but it scores cities on four expert-assessed pillars — digital security, health security, infrastructure security and personal security — and its 2017 edition ranked Tokyo first, ahead of Singapore and Osaka. The two indices reach different conclusions because they measure different things: Numbeo captures felt crime risk from a public survey, while the EIU weighs institutional resilience alongside crime. Neither is "wrong"; they answer different questions about what makes a city safe.

How to read a safety ranking

• Check the method: a perception survey and an expert index can rank the same city very differently.
• Watch the margins — at the top, cities are often separated by less than a point.
• Treat crowd-sourced scores as a guide to how safe a place feels, not a substitute for local, recorded crime data.
• Remember the year: these are 2017 figures, and both the index and real-world conditions move over time.

Frequently asked questions