Chiang Mai has finished first in Southeast Asia in Numbeo’s 2026 safety ranking with a score of 77.9, placing 19th worldwide and edging Singapore, which scored 77.5, as the region’s highest-rated city.
The table is published by Numbeo, a cost-of-living and quality-of-life database operated in Serbia and running since 2009. The ranking is built from public perception surveys submitted by users, rather than from recorded police crime figures.
What the Chiang Mai entry measures is how safe people say they feel.
Chiang Mai’s underlying entries put perceived safety when walking alone at 92.82 by day and 80.95 at night, both in the database’s very high band.
Concern about being attacked scored 13.52 and concern about being mugged or robbed scored 14.83, according to data published in February.
However, the same database rates Chiang Mai’s pollution index at 77.82, which it classes as high, and the city’s air quality collapses each year during the northern burning season.
Its health care index of 84.69 sits in the very high band, which is the figure most often cited by residents weighing the two against each other.
Crowdsourced indexes of this kind are widely quoted in tourism marketing and in property listings, although they measure what respondents report feeling about a place rather than anything recorded by an authority.
Numbeo does not publish how many Chiang Mai respondents contributed. Nor was the number of cities assessed given.
The 2026 entry is expected to be updated as further responses are submitted during the year. No Thai agency has endorsed the ranking, and no other Thai city was named in the Southeast Asian table.
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