Boston Among Nation's Best Cities For Work-Life Balance: Study

BOSTON — When it comes to maintaining a healthy balance between the office and home, Beantown ranks among the nation's best cities to live in. That’s according to a report by the folks at the keyless security company Kisi, who tried to evaluate how well cities implement policies that enable residents to work smarter and enjoy their leisure time.

The analysis evaluated 40 large U.S. cities that were dubbed “in-demand” metropolitan areas. Among the factors considered: hours worked in a week, work arrival time, minimum vacation days offered and taken, unemployment rate, paid maternal and paternal leave, commute time, access to mental health care and LGBT-friendly policies. Safety, happiness, fitness, and environmental scores were also considered.

With an overall score of 47.42 out of 100 possible points, Boston ranked 7th in the nation. That’s just ahead of Omaha and behind Sacramento.

Among the various indicators, Boston ranked first in access to both health care and to mental health care and second in gender equality. But it fared poorly in rankings on such measures as average commute times — 31 minutes, good for 35th among the 40 cities —and 30th for length of the average work week, at nearly 43 hours.

Nationwide, San Diego ranked the No. 1 city with an overall score of 54.82. The authors gave high marks to the California city for its society and institutions and city livability at 84.8 and 90.5, respectively. But like many American cities, those scores were dragged down by an 80.3 work intensity score, where a lower number is considered better because it indicates residents are less stressed.

“For the total score, a value of 100 does not mean a city is perfect in terms of work-life balance and has zero room for improvement,” the authors wrote. “Rather, it means that the city has the healthiest work-life balance out of all the cities in the index.”

A score of 1 means the city performs the poorest relative to the other cities in the study. The final score is calculated by adding up the weighted average scores of the indicators in the society and institutions and city livability factors, then subtracting the weighted average score of the factors in the work intensity category.

Here are the top 10 cities for work-life balance in America, according to the researchers:

1. San Diego, 54.82
2. Portland, OR, 51.52
3. San Francisco, 51.02
4. Minneapolis, MN, 49.86
5. New York, 49.5
6. Sacramento, CA, 47.44
7. Boston, 47.42
8. Omaha, NE, 47.01
9. Colorado Springs, CO, 45.66
10. Seattle, 45.66

Meanwhile, with a score of 29.65, Detroit ranked the poorest for work-life balance, according to the report, followed by Memphis, Tennessee, and Atlanta.

Patch national staffer Dan Hampton contributed to this report.