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Every year, a bunch of smart people at the Economist Intelligence Unit put their heads together to analyse 173 cities across the world and rank them based on their living conditions for the Global Liveability Index. This year, it’s not great news for Londoners – the Big Smoke is officially a worse place to live than it was last year.
According to the survey, ‘liveability’ is determined by five overarching categories: stability (ie. threat of conflict, civil unrest and crime rates); healthcare (like availability of over-the-counter drugs, quality of public healthcare); culture and environment (temperatures, levels of censorship, cultural offering, food and drink); education (availability and quality of private education) and infrastructure (quality of road networks, public transport and water and energy provision). Each factor in each city was rated as either acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable.
London tumbled nine places down the ranking to number 54. The fall is largely down to worse stability in the UK, but it’ll also be a result of other cities, like Hong Kong, Miami and Milan, being bumped up the index.
The report said: ‘Three major UK cities lower down the rankings—Manchester, London and Edinburgh—also saw their scores in the stability category fall. The UK saw widespread rioting in 2024, sparked by an attack by an individual on a children’s centre in Southport (during which three children were killed).’
It’s not all bad, though. London still got an overall score of 89.2 out of 100, which puts its into the highest tier of liveability. The report says that any score between 80 and 100 indicates that ‘there are few, if any, challenges to living standards’.
There’s also some reassurance in the fact that London has been ranked significantly higher in other global city rankings. It was named the second best city in the world in the Oxford Economics’ Global City Index and the number one city in the Resonance World’s Best Cities ranking.
See which cities the Economist named the top 10 for liveability in 2025 here.
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