Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates is the safest under-the-radar city for 2026, scoring 95/100. We ranked mid-sized cities — 500,000 to 1.5 million people — on Kakapo's composite index to surface the safe places the big lists skip.
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates is the safest on this ranking for 2026, scoring 95/100 — against a set average of 77.6 across 169 cities.
Ranked by Kakapo's overall safety score, limited to mid-sized cities of 500,000 to 1.5 million people — big enough to visit, small enough to be overlooked. Many out-score the famous capitals that get all the attention.
| # | City | Safety score | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates | 95 | 95 |
| 2 | Kyoto, Japan | 95 | 95 |
| 3 | Hiroshima, Japan | 95 | 95 |
| 4 | Hamamatsu, Japan | 94 | 94 |
| 5 | Sagamihara, Japan | 94 | 94 |
| 6 | Shizuoka, Japan | 94 | 94 |
| 7 | Madinah, Saudi Arabia | 92 | 92 |
| 8 | Helsinki, Finland | 92 | 92 |
| 9 | Hamilton, Canada | 92 | 92 |
| 10 | Newcastle, Australia | 91 | 91 |
| 11 | San Diego, United States | 90 | 90 |
| 12 | Copenhagen, Denmark | 90 | 90 |
| 13 | Muscat, Oman | 90 | 90 |
| 14 | Frankfurt am Main, Germany | 90 | 90 |
| 15 | Prague, Czech Republic | 89 | 89 |
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 | Safety score | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|
| 165 | Thembisa, South Africa | 56 | 56 |
| 166 | Port-au-Prince, Haiti | 46 | 46 |
| 167 | Ibb, Yemen | 33 | 33 |
| 168 | Sadr City, Iraq | 31 | 31 |
| 169 | Aden, Yemen | 29 | 29 |
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 safety score. The pool is every city between 500,000 and 1.5 million residents with a live Kakapo score. 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 Under-the-Radar Cities 2026. Kakapo. https://kakapo.travel/blog/safest-under-the-radar-cities-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].