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The 5 midsize American cities with the highest safety scores in 2026

Some midsize cities feel far more secure than others for good reason. SmartAsset ranked the five safest by crime, crashes, and disaster risk

Steve Wrzeszczynski on Unsplash

Ask most people what makes a place feel livable, and safety tends to come up before schools, jobs, or restaurants ever do. Parents want a street where kids can walk to a friend's house without a second thought. Retirees want a town where a late-night grocery run doesn't require checking the neighborhood forum first. Renters and buyers alike weigh crime statistics right alongside square footage, even when nobody says so out loud. The trouble is that most safety talk stays vague, built on gut feeling, cable news, or a single bad headline about a city that doesn't always reflect daily life on the ground there.

Midsize cities complicate that picture even further. They're too big to feel like everyone knows everyone, yet too small to show up in most national crime rankings that focus on the biggest metros. A place with 60,000 or 150,000 residents can post crime numbers that rival the safest small towns in the country, and most house hunters would never find that out without digging through county-level data themselves. Add in the risk of floods, wildfires, or earthquakes, a factor that rarely enters the conversation until after a family has already moved somewhere, and the full safety picture gets even harder to piece together on a Saturday afternoon of house hunting, let alone from a listing photo or a quick drive through downtown.

SmartAsset examined more than 300 cities with populations between 65,000 and 250,000 to find the ones that combine low crime, safe roads, and manageable disaster risk into a single composite score. The findings draw on FBI crime data, CDC traffic fatality records, and FEMA's disaster risk index, giving a fuller picture than crime statistics alone ever could. The five cities at the very top of that list prove that real safety often shows up in places most national rankings never think to check.

Andreas Miller / Unsplash

Broomfield, Colo., sits between Denver and Boulder, and it tops SmartAsset's safety ranking for a reason that shows up in nearly every category the study measured. The city's violent crime rate runs at 1.48 incidents per 1,000 residents, and its property crime rate sits at 18.56 per 1,000, both well below the typical midsize city. Add a modest auto fatality rate of about 5.02 per 100,000 residents, and Broomfield already looks like a safe bet before disaster risk even enters the equation.

The disaster risk category is where Broomfield truly stands apart. It's the only city in the entire study to post the lowest possible disaster-risk score on FEMA's scale. The score factors in projected losses from floods, wildfires and severe storms, along with how vulnerable local residents are and how well the community tends to recover once a disaster hits. Wildfires, floods, and severe storms all pose some risk almost everywhere in the country, so a rating this clean puts Broomfield in a category........

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