Kyoto, Japan is the safest major city for families in 2026, with a blended score of 93/100. We ranked the world's big cities on the three things families weigh most: healthcare, personal safety and getting around.
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.
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 |
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 |
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.
This analysis is free to cite in journalism, research, or content — all we ask is a link back. Copy the attribution below:
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].