Here at Time Out, we’re all about letting you know all the very best places around the UK (and the world) to visit. But what about how good those places are to actually live in? That’s a whole other ball game. The Sunday Times has had its say on the country’s best places to live, the Telegraph has named the best places to retire to and the Guardian has declared the happiest places to live in. Now, the Economist has weighed in.
Every year, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) unveils its Global Liveability Index – a list of 173 cities across the world ranked according to the quality of their living conditions. Obviously, a bunch of UK cities featured on the ranking, but there was one that pipped all the rest to the post to be named the country’s most liveable city. And it wasn’t London
Before we get into it, let’s clarify what ‘liveability’ actually means. The EIU bases it on five broad categories: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. Within those categories, the researchers looked at factors like crime rates, quality of public healthcare, levels of censorship, quality of road networks and dining options. Each category was rated acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable.
Okay, now that’s out of the way, we can reveal that Manchester was the highest ranking UK city in the Global Liveability Index 2025. It ranked joint 52nd (alongside Rotterdam) with an overall score of 89.3 out of 100. Don’t get too smug though, Mancunians – you only beat London by a hair’s breadth. The capital city was 54th on the list with a score of 89.2, and you can read more about that here.
The bad news is that Manny was knocked down nine places compared to 2024 (and a whopping 24 places since 2022). Addressing why UK cities fared worse this year, 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).’
Manchester’s score still puts it in the highest tier of liveability, though. EIU said that any score between 80 and 100 indicates that ‘there are few, if any, challenges to living standards’.
See which cities made the top 10 on the Global Liveability Index 2025 here.
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