Boston was just named the nicest-smelling city in America

If you’ve ever walked past a bakery and briefly considered abandoning all your plans, Boston has good news for your nose: A new study has named it the nicest-smelling city in America.

The ranking comes from McLuck, which studied the 30 largest U.S. cities by population and gave Boston a “smell score” of 9.64 out of 10. Washington, D.C., finished second with 9.32, followed by San Francisco at 9.23. Seattle and Philadelphia completed the top five.

Researchers looked at the density of bakeries, florists, candle stores and perfume shops, along with cleanliness indicators such as air quality, garbage disposal and tidiness. Boston placed among the top three cities across the measures used in the study, according to the company, and earned a cleanliness score of 9.2 out of 10—the highest of any city in the top 10. Only Columbus, Ohio, scored higher on cleanliness across the full study, at 9.5.

Still, you may want to hold off on declaring every Boston sidewalk a perfume counter. Nobody conducted a citywide sniff test: The store counts came from Yelp and OpenStreetMap, while the cleanliness figures came from user-submitted data on Numbeo. Researchers then combined those measures into a weighted score. The data was collected in April 2026.

The results did produce a few surprises: San Francisco had the highest density of candle stores, bakeries, florists and perfumeries among the top 10 cities, but its 5.5 cleanliness score left it in third place. Detroit made the list at No. 9 despite a cleanliness score of just 2.5. Portland, Denver, Baltimore and Las Vegas also landed in the top 10.

As for Boston, the ranking gives us a fresh reason to appreciate the scents that make a walk around town better: bread coming out of the oven, flowers outside a shop and whatever someone’s ordering at the table next to yours. On a less aromatic day, remember that being named the best-smelling city is a citywide average.