The Best Cities To Live In, According To The Global Liveability Index

Forbes

17-06-2025

The release of the 2025 Global Liveability Index from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has seen a new city take the crown as the world's most liveable. After three years at the top of the rankings, Austria's capital Vienna has finally been usurped by Denmark's capital city, Copenhagen.
Welcome to the world's best city to live in. Copenhagen achieved near perfect scores across the board.
The EIU's annual index assesses 173 locations around the world, ranking their liveability based on a variety of indicators and criteria. This ranking attempts to quantify the challenges someone might face to their lifestyle in any of the given locations, to help assess which offer the best and worst living conditions.
Each city is measured across 30+ qualitative and quantitative factors in five categories described as stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. Qualitative factors are decided by a panel of expert EIU analysts and in-city contributors. Quantitative factors are based on the relative performance of a range of external data points. Each factor is then assigned a rating as acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable.
The EIU Index then assigns a score to each category, which are compiled and weighted to create an easy reference 1-100 score, where 1 is intolerable and 100 is ideal.
Copenhagen has been crowned the world's most comfortable city to live in 2025, earning perfect scores for stability, education and infrastructure. Its overall Index score reached 98 of a possible 100.
Although Vienna has lost the top spot, it remains one of the great cities to live in—or just to visit.
It beats the longstanding leader, Vienna, into second place, although the Austrian capital also scored perfectly for education and infrastructure, as well as healthcare. Vienna shares second this year with Zurich, which ranked perfectly in both the education and healthcare categories. Another Swiss city, Geneva, ranked fifth overall, showcasing the dominance of Western European cities in the index with four of the top five positions.
The only city to break that European grip is Melbourne in Australia, which takes fourth spot with an overall score of 97 out of 100. The Southern Hemisphere comes into its own for the remaining top ten places with Australia's Sydney and Adelaide in sixth and ninth places respectively, Osaka in Japan in seventh and Auckland in New Zealand in eighth. Just sneaking into the top is North America's sole representative, Vancouver.
London remains the UK's most liveable city but has dropped out of the top 50 globally.
While Western European cities dominate the Index, it's notable that all the UK cities covered—London, Manchester and Edinburgh—have dropped down the rankings and sit well outside the top ten. This is due to a combination of political instability and growing civil unrest that has impacted scores. In 2025, London dropped from 45th to 54th place, Manchester from 43rd to 52nd and Edinburgh from 59th to 64th.
The reason for Vienna's fall from the top spot comes down to its declining stability score, impacted by a variety of factors including terrorism scares, one of which saw Taylor Swift's summer 2024 concert canceled.
The 2025 Global Liveability Index Top 10
Deputy industry director at EIU, Barsali Bhattacharyya commented, 'Global liveability has remained flat over the past year, and as in 2024, scores for stability have declined at a global level. Pressure on stability has led Vienna to lose its position as the most liveable city after a three-year stint. As in 2024, stability scores have declined for western Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. In this edition, they have also declined for Asia, amid intensified threats of military conflict for cities in India and Taiwan.'
While the average overall liveability score across the Index was consistent with 2024 at 76.1 out of 100, stability scores fell by 0.2 points overall. This comes amid huge global geopolitical tensions, civil unrest and a growing global housing crisis. Conversely, the Index has also seen overall gains in scores for healthcare, education and infrastructure.
There have been some very notable movements both up and down the Index in 2025. Canadian cities in particular have suffered, with Calgary dropping from fifth place in 2024 to 18th place in 2025 after a marked drop in its healthcare score. This has impacted all four Canadian cities in the Index after the well-publicized strain on the country's healthcare system thanks to a shortage of staff, among other factors. Toronto saw its ranking drop from 12th to 16th.
While those numbers don't look great, it's still important to look at them in context. Alongside the other 20 North America cities ranked, all reported the highest possible tier of liveability according to the Index's criteria, scoring above 80 out of 100. The highest U.S. city on the list was Honolulu in Hawaii, which ranked 23rd overall.
Improvements in healthcare and education have seen Middle Eastern cities like Al Khobar great improve liveability scores.
Moving up the Index, Al Khobar in Saudi Arabia's Persian Gulf saw the biggest leap, climbing 13 places from 148th to 135th thanks to improved healthcare and education. This reflects a trend across regions in the Middle East and North Africa, which saw the most significant global gains in overall liveability, largely driven by advancements in healthcare and education within cities in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Propping up the Index once again is war torn Damascus in Syria, which has seen no improvement in its liveability score despite the fall of ex-president Bashar al-Assad and subsequent regime change in December 2024. While this should increase its potential for improvement dramatically, the legacy of a years-long civil war will realistically take years to recover from.
Despite a regime change, years of civil war have left Damascus rooted to the bottom of the Global Liveability Index.
This is reflected in the significant jump to the second and third worst ranked cities, Tripoli in Libya and Dhakar in Bangladesh.