The 10 Most Stressed Out Cities

1. Washington, DC
2. New York, NY
3. Miami, FL
4. San Francisco, CA
5. Jersey City, NJ
6. Oakland, CA
7. Chicago, IL
8. Newark, NJ
9. Philadelphia, PA
10. Los Angeles, CA
As we found when researching this ranking, there are lots of factors that contribute to stress. Some are expected (long commutes) while others not as much. So, we created a set of seven criteria we felt best encapsulated the root of stress for most people, and used these to rank the nation’s 100 largest cities:

• Commute time
• Unemployment
• High cost of living
• Crime per 100,000 residents
• Hours worked
• Population density
• Percentage of income spent on rent

The higher any of these was, the more stressful the city was. We got our data from the U.S. Census’ American Community Survey for 2008-2012 and the FBI. Using it, we gave each city a score of 1 to 100 (with one being worst) in the seven individual criteria.