The Safest Cities for Families 2026 — Ranked by Real Data

Key findings — free to cite

Kyoto, Japan is the safest on this ranking for 2026, scoring 93/100 on family score — against a set average of 70.2 across 327 cities.

Kyoto leads the field at 93/100.
Scale is no barrier. Tokyo (9.7m people) still makes the top 15, scoring 92/100.
The average across all 327 qualifying cities is 70.2/100, so anything in the mid-80s and up is genuinely exceptional.
Ranked on Kakapo's family score, built from national travel advisories from seven governments plus crime, transport and healthcare data.

The ranking

Ranked by a blend of the three sub-scores families weigh most — healthcare, personal safety and transport — each weighted equally. It rewards cities with reliable medical care, safe streets and transport you can use with kids in tow.

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

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	Family score	Overall
323	Port-au-Prince, Haiti	31	46
324	Sadr City, Iraq	31	31
325	Aden, Yemen	31	29
326	Caracas, Venezuela	23	42
327	Aleppo, Syrian Arab Republic	14	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 family score. The metric is a mean of the healthcare, personal-safety and transport sub-scores. 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). Safest Cities for Families 2026. Kakapo. https://kakapo.travel/blog/safest-cities-families-2026

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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].