We scored 956 cities and averaged the whole world. The typical destination lands at 82/100 — comfortably safe — and 84.8% of cities clear the bar. But the world has one consistent weak spot: it is worst at night safety, the dimension that most often turns a fine city risky after dark.
Averaged across all 956 scored cities, the world's safety score is 80.9/100, with a median of 82 — meaning the typical destination a traveller picks is comfortably above the pass line, not on a knife-edge.
Almost every travel-safety story is about the extremes — the ten safest cities, the places to avoid. This one is the opposite: we took Kakapo's entire scored index and asked a plainer question. If you average the whole world, how safe is it? Across 956 cities — one row per city, largest population, deduplicated, unscored cities dropped — the mean safety score is 80.9/100 and the median is 82. On Kakapo's school-grade scale, where 60 is the pass line, that median sits in the "Safe" band. The typical destination is not a gamble.
Grouped into Kakapo's three headline tiers, the picture is clear — the world's cities cluster well above the pass line, and outright failures are rare.
| Grade band | Score range | Cities | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Safe (Caution grade or better) | 73–100 | 811 | 84.8% |
| Marginal (Unsafe / Risky) | 61–72 | 100 | 10.5% |
| Fail (Dangerous) | 0–60 | 45 | 4.7% |
Breaking the same 956 cities into the full eight-band ladder shows how top-heavy the distribution really is. Nearly two-thirds of all cities score 80 or above, and the "Safe" and "Very Safe" bands alone account for more than four in ten.
| Band | Score range | Cities | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fantastic | 92–100 | 75 | 7.8% |
| Excellent | 88–91 | 159 | 16.6% |
| Very Safe | 84–87 | 192 | 20.1% |
| Safe | 80–83 | 217 | 22.7% |
| Caution | 73–79 | 168 | 17.6% |
| Risky | 68–72 | 71 | 7.4% |
| Unsafe | 61–67 | 29 | 3% |
| Dangerous | 0–60 | 45 | 4.7% |
Every Kakapo score breaks into four sub-scores. Averaging each one across all 956 cities reveals which kind of safety the world handles well — and which it doesn't.
| Sub-score | Global mean | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | 79.2 | access to capable medical care for a visitor |
| Transport | 75.0 | getting around — roads, transit, taxis |
| Personal | 70.4 | everyday crime, scams and personal security |
| Night safety | 68.5 | how safe the same city feels after dark |
The ranking is consistent and revealing. Healthcare (79.2) and transport (75.0) are the world's strong suits — most cities can treat an injured visitor and move them around. Personal safety (70.4) sits lower, and night safety (68.5) is the weakest of all, nearly 12 points below the overall average. The same city that feels fine at noon routinely loses its footing after dark — which is why the single most useful thing a traveller can check isn't a city's headline score but its night number.
A mean of 80.9 and a median of 82 is a useful corrective to how travel risk is usually talked about. The world is not, on the whole, dangerous: 84.8% of destinations clear the "Caution" grade, and the genuinely failing cities are a small 4.7% tail. But the average also hides the thing that actually catches travellers out — the spread within a city across its four dimensions. A place can post a reassuring overall score while its night-safety or personal-safety sub sits far lower. The headline number tells you the city is broadly fine; the sub-scores tell you when and how to be careful.
We queried Kakapo's live index for every city with a non-null safety score, kept one row per city (the largest-population entry), excluded New York City's boroughs to avoid double-counting, and computed the mean, median and band distribution across the resulting 956 cities. Sub-score means are the average of each city's night, personal, transport and healthcare values. Each score is Kakapo's 0–100 measure, built from national travel advisories, local crime data, healthcare infrastructure and night-safety signals; full weighting is at https://kakapo.travel/about/methodology. Scores are comparative model estimates, not a guarantee of any individual traveller's experience.
Free to cite in journalism, research or content — all we ask is a link back. Copy the attribution below:
Kakapo Editorial Team (2026). The State of Global Travel Safety 2026. Kakapo. https://kakapo.travel/blog/global-safety-state-2026
Writing about global travel safety, risk or the state of the world in 2026? We give journalists custom data pulls at no cost — the full band distribution, a specific region or country, or a sub-score breakdown across the index. Email [email protected] and we usually reply the same day.
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Kakapo publishes real safety scores for every destination, drawing on national travel advisories, local crime data, healthcare infrastructure, and night-safety measures. Kakapo Studies is our research imprint — independent editorial, no advertiser influence on scores. Contact: [email protected].