WalletHub recently analyzed the 100 largest U.S. cities to compare their residents' financial difficulties.
The financial services website used its own data — along with data from the Census Bureau, Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, and Google Ads — to assign each city a financial distress score. Six categories were considered: credit score, people with accounts in distress, average number of accounts in distress, "debt" search interest index, "loan" search interest index and the change in bankruptcy filings between December 2022 and December 2023. Read more about the methodology here.
These 25 cities have the most financially distressed populations, per Wallethub:
1. Chicago
2. Houston
3. New York City
4. Los Angeles
5. Dallas
6. Las Vegas
7. San Antonio
8. Atlanta
9. Riverside, Calif.
10. Jacksonville, Fla.
11. Baton Rouge, La.
12. Miami
13. Austin
14. New Orleans
15. Fort Worth, Texas
16. Nashville, Tenn.
17. Phoenix
18. Charlotte, N.C.
19. Baltimore
20. St. Louis
21. Winston-Salem, N.C.
22. Tampa
23. Stockton, Calif.
24. El Paso, Texas
25. San Diego