New York ranked 20th among the 50 states in a 2026 safety study by WalletHub, with road safety lifting its overall score while workplace safety ranked lower.
The personal-finance company gave New York 55.44 points on its 100-point scale. The state ranked fourth for road safety, 10th for financial safety and 17th for personal and residential safety. It placed 26th for emergency preparedness and 34th for workplace safety.
WalletHub released the ranking Monday, Oct. 5. Vermont ranked first with 66.63 points, followed by Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Connecticut. Mississippi ranked 50th with 34.59 points.
What the ranking measures
WalletHub combined 52 measures across five categories. Personal and residential safety accounted for 40 points of the overall score; financial, road and workplace safety and emergency preparedness accounted for 15 points each. Measures included crime, traffic deaths, unemployment, workplace injuries and losses from major climate disasters.
The index blends data from different periods. Its climate-disaster measures cover 1980 through 2024, while the company said the data used in the ranking were collected as of Sept. 7, 2026. The overall ranking is a weighted comparison of states, not a measurement of current risk in any particular Finger Lakes community.
New York also ranked fourth for law-enforcement employees per capita in one of the report's individual comparisons. That figure is separate from the state's overall personal and residential safety rank.
WalletHub did not publish county-level scores in the report, so the state ranking cannot be used to rank Finger Lakes counties or towns against one another.
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