← Home

The Loneliest Big Cities in America

According to this NexSpark Friends analysis of CDC loneliness estimates across every census tract in 16 major U.S. metros, weighted by where people actually live, Baltimore ranks as the loneliest big city in America and Phoenix as the least lonely. Full ranking, an interactive map and the methodology are below.

The headline number

Across 16 major U.S. metros, population-weighted loneliness ranges from 41.2% in Baltimore to 32.3% in Phoenix, a spread of nearly 9 percentage points between the loneliest big city in this ranking and the least lonely. Los Angeles is close behind Baltimore at 41.1%, and the two cities are effectively tied at the top. Across all 16 metros combined, weighted by their total population, 37.2% of adults live in a tract where loneliness is the modeled norm.

The full ranking

Every metro below is ranked by population-weighted loneliness: the share of adults in a tract reporting frequent loneliness to the CDC, averaged across every tract in the metro and weighted by how many people actually live there. Third-place access, where available, is shown as a percentile against all other U.S. census tracts scored by the Third Place Index; higher means more community gathering spaces per capita. Four metros, marked with a dash, aren't covered by the Third Place Index dataset.

Where the third-place data points the same way, and where it doesn't

Twelve of the 16 metros also have a Third Place Index score, an independent measure of how many community gathering spaces (parks, cafes, libraries, faith spaces, and similar) a place has per capita, scored as a percentile against every other U.S. census tract. New York has the strongest third-place access of the 12 (72nd percentile) despite mid-pack loneliness, while Atlanta has the weakest (37th percentile) alongside a similar loneliness rate. Across those 12 metros, third-place access and loneliness move in the same direction as often as opposite ones; the correlation is a weak, positive r = 0.29, the reverse sign of the moderate negative correlation (r = −0.23) found tract-by-tract within metro Atlanta.

Methodology

Loneliness figures come from the CDC's PLACES project (2025 release, using 2023 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data), which models tract-level loneliness prevalence from a national health survey rather than a direct census count, the standard, peer-reviewed way small-area health estimates are produced when a full census isn't possible. For each metro, we pulled the loneliness estimate and total population for every census tract in its core county or counties, then computed a population-weighted average: each tract's loneliness rate weighted by its own population, not a flat average across tracts. Third-place scores come from the Third Place Index, built by data communicator Evan O'Neil from OpenStreetMap location data, and are population-weighted the same way, for the metros where that dataset has coverage.

The pull originally covered 25 major metros. Nine were dropped because CDC PLACES does not publish a loneliness measure at all for their states (Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Tennessee), and one metro (Denver) returned zero usable tract data outright. The 16 metros shown here are every metro from the original pull with complete, verifiable loneliness coverage. Data was pulled August 2026.

For journalists and researchers

The full 16-metro dataset is public and free to query, no key required: api.nexspark.com/api/loneliness-index/metros. A static snapshot of the same data used to build this page is at nexspark.org/data/national-metros.json. Both source datasets are public: CDC PLACES on data.cdc.gov and the Third Place Index. For a tract-by-tract deep dive into one of these 16 metros, see the Atlanta Loneliness & Third-Place Index, an interactive map and sortable table of all 1,006 census tracts across metro Atlanta. We're glad to answer questions about the methodology, drop us a line via nexspark.org.

Common questions

Keep reading