When you travel to a city you haven’t visited before, do you appreciate that essential services for residents and travelers are readily available? Sure, each country and city has its own infrastructure, priorities, and culture that defines what is available and the way local people behave, but without key services life can be troublesome. Two organizations that produce the index for the happiest cities in the world have done a massive data collection and analysis work to categorize municipalities.

They ranked 250 cities, and here are the top 20 happiest cities in the world according to the Happy City Index.

1 Copenhagen, Denmark
2 Helsinki, Finland
3 Geneva, Switzerland
4 Uppsala, Sweden
5 Tokyo, Japan
6 Trondheim, Norway
7 Bern, Switzerland
8 Malmö, Sweden
9 Munich, Germany
10 Aarhus, Denmark
11 Zurich, Switzerland
12 Barcelona, Spain
13 Espoo, Finland
14 Oslo, Norway
15 The Hague, Netherlands
16 Ballarat, Australia
17 Aalborg, Denmark
18 Yokohama, Japan
19 Lugano, Switzerland
20 Reykjavik, Iceland

European cities dominate the top 20 – only three cities out of 20 are non-European (two in Japan and one in Australia).

As you can see in the results, the Happy City Index has included more cities in the review than many other organizations that rank cities by similar factors. The initial stage of the Happy City 2026 review included 3417 municipalities around the world. The process started by selecting cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants that were among the 30 biggest municipalities in their countries, and above all, cities that could provide all the required data for the analysis.

Overall, the data that affects this particular ranking measures the quality of infrastructure and services the society provides to residents. Does it measure happiness of people or actually something else can be debated, but it is called Happy City Index anyhow. 64 indicators make up the final analysis in six categories that are Citizens, Governance, Environment, Economy, Health and Mobility. The methodology for ranking the cities is fully explained on this page.

This web page lists all the ranked 250 municipalities. If you are interested in the worst cities, five cities at the bottom of the index features three US cities.

246 Indianapolis, United States
247 Bucharest, Romania
248 Dallas, United States
249 Nashville, United States
250 Guadalajara, Mexico