There’s a common denominator that all safe small cities have.
They are the places where people sleep safer at night, where shootings and beatings don’t dominate the local news. The best small towns in America to raise kids, and awesome places to retire.
Because if crime is really low, everyone wants to be there.
The small cities below all share those qualities. There might be some surprises on this list, but when you look at the unbiased data with Saturday Night Science, it’s hard to argue against.
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The receipts
Compare the top ten
Pick a metric. The bars rescale. The red line is the United States’s statewide median.
On the map
Where the safest small cities in America are
Saturday Night Science
How We Determined The Safest Small Cities In The US
To rank the safest small towns in America, we turned to Saturday Night Science to research FBI crime data.
We defined a “small city” as a population under 50,000 and over 5,000. And then we measured the following two criteria for each of these 2,509 US cities:
We ranked each city on both criteria and averaged the rankings together to create a “Crime Index.” The city with the lowest Crime Index, Bellefonte, was named the safest small city in the United States.
- Violent Crime Per Capita
- Property Crime Per Capita
We updated this report for 2026. This report is our eleventh time ranking the safest small cities in America.
The full list
Safest Small Cities In The United States
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Source: FBI crime data. US cities with populations between 5,000 and 50,000.
Summary
There You Have It — The Safest Small Cities In The US
We looked at FBI crime data to find the Safest small cities in the U.S. for 2026. We analyzed each city’s violent and property crime rates per capita and combined them into a Crime Index.
The safest small cities in the United States are Bellefonte, PA, Matawan, NJ, Munroe Falls, OH, Emerson, NJ, St. Clairsville, OH, Hawthorn Woods, IL, Mount Arlington, NJ, Campton Hills, IL, Broadview Heights, OH, and Pingree Grove, IL.
