Plano is the second safest big city in the United States, according to a new SmartAsset study, trailing only Virginia Beach.
The study ranked 83 U.S. cities with populations of at least 250,000, which the firm says covers more than 90 percent of the country's big cities. Plano finished ahead of Madison, Wisconsin; Honolulu; and Chesapeake, Virginia, which rounded out the top five.
What the ranking measured
The composite score combined four measures rather than crime alone.
Two came from the FBI's 2024 Crime in the United States report: violent crimes per 1,000 residents and property crimes per 1,000 residents. A third, motor vehicle fatalities per 100,000 residents, came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The fourth was disaster risk, drawn from FEMA's National Risk Index as of April 2026 and converted to a five-point scale.
Plano's figures were 1.5 violent crimes per 1,000 residents, 14.7 property crimes per 1,000 residents, and 6.9 auto fatalities per 100,000 residents.
The number that did not help Plano
One of the four measures worked against the city. Plano's disaster risk was graded "Relatively High," and it finished second overall despite that rather than because of it.
The disaster component mattered elsewhere too. Irvine, California finished 12th and Santa Ana 20th, both held back by earthquake and wildfire exposure despite moderate crime rates. A city's ranking in this study is therefore not a pure crime ranking, and two cities with similar crime numbers can land far apart.
Texas at both ends
Twelve Texas cities were included, and the study's own summary notes that the state is home to some of America's safest and least safe cities.
Plano at No. 2 and Laredo at No. 6 put two Texas cities in the top 10. At the other end, Dallas and Houston both appear in the bottom 10, with Houston second from last.
That spread is worth reading with the methodology in mind. The study used county-level data as a proxy for city-level conditions on some measures, which is a meaningful limitation in a state where a single county can contain both dense urban cores and low-density suburbs. It affects large central cities more than smaller suburban ones.
What a ranking like this does and does not tell you
Rankings of this kind are built from a defensible set of public data sources, and the inputs here are all official: the FBI, the CDC and FEMA. That is more transparent than many lists that circulate.
The limits are equally real. The crime figures are from 2024, so they describe conditions a year or more old. FBI crime data depends on voluntary reporting by local agencies, and cities differ in how they classify and report offenses. And a composite score is a weighting choice: change how much disaster risk counts against crime, and the order changes with it.
For residents, the practical value is comparative rather than absolute. A single year's rank is noise; the same city appearing near the top across several years and several different methodologies is signal.
Plano has been a fixture in this category of list for years, and its underlying numbers in this study, particularly 1.5 violent crimes per 1,000 residents, are the reason.
Sources
https://smartasset.com/data-studies/americas-safest-big-cities-2026-study
