The World's Safest Cities After Dark 2026 — Night-Safety Ranking

Key findings — free to cite

Kyoto, Japan is the safest on this ranking for 2026, scoring 92/100 on night-safety score — against a set average of 63.4 across 327 cities.

Kyoto leads the field at 92/100.
Scale is no barrier. Tokyo (9.7m people) still makes the top 15, scoring 92/100.
The average across all 327 qualifying cities is 63.4/100, so anything in the mid-80s and up is genuinely exceptional.
Ranked on Kakapo's night-safety score, built from national travel advisories from seven governments plus crime, transport and healthcare data.

The ranking

Ranked by Kakapo's night-safety sub-score — how safe the streets are in public after dark. These are the easiest cities to land late in, or walk back from dinner. East Asia and the Gulf dominate.

#	City	Night-safety score	Overall
1	Kyoto, Japan	92	95
2	Tokyo, Japan	92	94
3	Sagamihara, Japan	92	94
4	Singapore, Singapore	92	93
5	Yokohama, Japan	91	95
6	Sapporo, Japan	91	95
7	Fukuoka, Japan	91	95
8	Hiroshima, Japan	91	95
9	Nagoya, Japan	91	94
10	Kobe, Japan	91	94
11	Hamamatsu, Japan	91	94
12	Shizuoka, Japan	91	94
13	Osaka, Japan	91	93
14	Québec, Canada	90	88
15	Taipei, Taiwan	89	94

A score is a comparison, not a verdict. These are model estimates that let you rank cities like-for-like — not incident counts. A high-ranked city can still have a bad night, and a lower-ranked one can be perfectly enjoyable with the right habits.

And the other end of the table

For contrast, these are the lowest-scoring cities in the same pool on this metric — useful for calibrating what a given score actually means.

#	City	Night-safety score	Overall
323	Damascus, Syrian Arab Republic	21	31
324	Aden, Yemen	21	29
325	Port-au-Prince, Haiti	13	46
326	Caracas, Venezuela	5	42
327	Aleppo, Syrian Arab Republic	2	20

How we measured it

We queried the live Kakapo index for every city above 500,000 residents in scope, deduplicated by city (keeping the largest-population entity), and ranked them by night-safety score. The metric is the night-safety sub-score, distinct from daytime personal safety. Scores draw on national travel advisories from seven governments plus crime, transport and healthcare data; full weighting is at https://kakapo.travel/about/methodology. Scores are comparative model estimates, updated continuously, not incident counts — this page reads them live, so the numbers match the rest of the site.

Cite this study

This analysis is free to cite in journalism, research, or content — all we ask is a link back. Copy the attribution below:

Ready-to-use citation

Kakapo Editorial Team (2026). The World's Safest Cities After Dark 2026. Kakapo. https://kakapo.travel/blog/safest-cities-after-dark-2026

Writing a travel-safety story? We give journalists and researchers custom data pulls at no cost — a specific region, a deeper table, or a city-by-city breakdown. Email [email protected] and we usually reply the same day.

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].