Aurora Named One of the Happiest Places to Live in the Country!

Naperville gets all the best-of headlines, and that’s well deserved, but when considering a few different factors of happy residents, Aurorans are getting their recognition today!

Aurora was ranked 19th in WalletHub’s list of happiest cities of 2023!

In order to determine the happiest cities in America, WalletHub compared 182 of the largest cities — including the 150 most populated U.S. cities, plus at least two of the most populated cities in each state — across three key dimensions: 1) Emotional & Physical Well-Being, 2) Income & Employment and 3) Community & Environment.

Aurora ranked particularly high in the “Emotional & Physical Well-Being” category which considers things like depression, suicide rate, physical health, sports participation, food insecurity, and many others. You can check out the list’s full methodology here.

If we zoom in regionally, Aurora is the third highest ranking city in the upper Midwest behind Madison, WI (3rd overall) and Minneapolis, MN (17th).

Chicago is the only other Illinois city on the list at #71.

Now, to be fair, the this list only looked at the largest 182 cities in the country, and according to one list I’ve read, Naperville and Joliet are the 186th and 187th largest cities in the country, respectively. I’m sure that if the list was extended to smaller cities, more of our local municipalities would rank at the top of the list.

The top 5 happiest cities overall were Freemont, CA; San Jose, CA; Madison, WI; Overland Park, KS and San Francisco, CA.

It’s a pretty fascinating study! You can check it all out here on WalletHub’s website.