Best Places For New Year’s Eve: Tucson Makes The List

TUCSON, AZ — New Year’s Eve is tonight, and deciding on the right city to celebrate the dawn of a new decade in can be tricky.

The personal finance website WalletHub recently released its Best Places for New Year’s Eve Celebrations rankings.

Tucson ranked No. 38 overall among the 100 best cities for celebrating the new year.

• Entertainment & Food Rank: 44
• Costs Rank: 20
• Safety & Accessibility Rank: 51
• Overall Score: 50.49

Unsurprisingly, New York City ranked as the best place in the nation to celebrate New Year’s Eve, according to WalletHub, followed by Denver and Las Vegas.

Some other highlights from the report:

Durham, North Carolina, finished as the city with the lowest average price of a New Year’s Eve party ticket. New York City also took home the top spot in most nightlife options per capita, most restaurants per capita and most luxury shops per capita.

At the other end of the rankings, Fremont, California, ranked as the worst city for celebrating New Year’s Eve. The bottom five were rounded out by North Las Vegas, Stockton, California, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Newark, New Jersey.

WalletHub compared the 100 biggest cities in the United States across 28 key metrics of New Year’s experience, including the legality of fireworks, the average price of a New Year’s Eve party and the precipitation forecast for Dec. 31.

Each relevant metric was then listed with its corresponding weight, and the cities were subsequently graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the best possible New Year’s celebration experience.

New Year’s Eve in 2019 is expected to see 88 percent of Americans stay up until midnight, according to John Kiernan, an editor for WalletHub. Kiernan also projects that 112.5 million people will travel at least 30 miles to celebrate the holiday and that over 360 million glasses of champagne will be guzzled.

Here are the top 10 places for celebrating New Year’s Eve in 2019:

1. New York, New York: 67.79
2. Denver, Colorado: 67.71
3. Las Vegas, Nevada: 67.47
4. San Diego, California: 66.42
5. Los Angeles, California: 65.98
6. Atlanta, Georgia: 64.20
7. Orlando, Florida: 63.21
8. San Francisco, California: 62.59
9. Miami, Florida: 62.04
10. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 61.30

The full New Year’s Eve report is available on WalletHub.