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Candy, costumes, haunted houses, horror movies: if you count down to Halloween from the first cool day of fall, you’ve spent time thinking about Saturday night. We ranked the big metros on what you can find on a map. Among the 55 metro areas in the 50 states with 1 million people or more, Providence, Rhode Island, comes out first in our Halloween index, narrowly ahead of Hartford, Connecticut, and Chicago. The three scored 84.4, 83.3 and 82.6 out of 100, on five equally weighted measures from map data as of October 2026.
Each is a whole metro area as the Census Bureau defines it. Metro Providence covers all of Rhode Island plus Bristol County, Massachusetts. Metro Hartford covers Hartford and the towns around it in central Connecticut.
The index scores five things you can find on a map:
It does not count ghosts.
This year Halloween falls on a Saturday, the last night of daylight saving time in most of the country. Clocks fall back at 2 a.m. on November 1, as NBC Chicago reported. WalletHub’s 2026 ranking of the 100 largest cities, built on 20 measures from crime to candy shops, puts New York first and Chicago fifth, as FOX 32 Chicago reported. Ours ranks whole metro areas, suburbs included, and leaves out crime and weather.
What we found: Providence edges Hartford and Chicago for the top spot in our Halloween index of the 55 big metros. The counts are places listed in Overture Maps, an open map dataset, as of October 2026. Chicago has the most haunted houses of any big metro, 88, and all 10 of the top metros are in the Northeast or around the Great Lakes.
Key takeaways
Best cities for Halloween 2026 (metro areas of 1 million people or more, score out of 100):
At the bottom: Raleigh, North Carolina (22.6), Atlanta (26.3), Memphis (28.9), Charlotte (30.0) and San Jose (31.1).
Best vs. worst:
Top five and bottom five of the 55 metros on each measure:
How our list compares with WalletHub’s: WalletHub ranks the 100 largest cities proper, so Providence and Hartford, our top two, are not in its sample. Chicago is fifth on its list and third on ours. Cleveland is 85th on its list and fourth on ours. WalletHub gives 60 of its 100 points to trick-or-treater friendliness, such as crime rates and walkability, where it ranks Cleveland 89th. We do not measure those. Memphis is last on WalletHub’s list and 53rd of 55 on ours.
The pieces of this index sit in different datasets. Businesses are points in Overture Maps places. Cemeteries are outlines in Overture Maps land use. Metro areas and population come from the U.S. Census Bureau, as boundaries, survey tables and a population grid.
In one Wherobots job run, we placed each haunted house, Spirit Halloween store and psychic inside its metro area. We counted them per million residents, so larger metros do not rank higher only because they have more people. We kept only the Spirit Halloween stores listed by the chain this season. We clipped every cemetery outline to each metro and merged overlapping outlines before measuring the area, so no cemetery land is counted twice. We used the 2020 Census counts on squares 500 m across to find each metro’s population center, the average location of its residents, and computed the Halloween sunset there.
Providence, Rhode Island is the best metro for Halloween in our index, at 84.4 out of 100. It has the third-highest share of land in cemeteries, 0.36%, and the fifth-most psychics per million residents, 14.8. The sun sets at about 5:43 p.m. on Halloween, the fourth-earliest of the 55 metros. It has 15 haunted houses, or 8.9 per million residents, the sixth-highest rate. Its weak spot is Spirit Halloween: 7 stores, or 4.2 per million residents, 29th of 55.
Hartford, Connecticut is second, at 83.3, and it ranks in the top 15 on every measure. It is seventh for psychics per million residents (13.0) and seventh for earliest sunset (about 5:48 p.m.). It is ninth for cemetery land, 13th for Spirit Halloween stores (6 stores, 5.2 per million) and 14th for haunted houses (8, or 6.9 per million).
Chicago is third, at 82.6, and it has more haunted houses than any other big metro: 88. Per million residents, it ranks third, with 9.4. It also has the fifth-highest share of land in cemeteries, 52.7 square kilometers in all, and ranks eighth both for psychics per million and for earliest sunset, about 5:49 p.m. Spirit Halloween is its weak spot too: 39 stores, or 4.2 per million residents, 28th of 55.
The rest of the top 10: Cleveland, Rochester, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Boston and Pittsburgh (tied for eighth) and Philadelphia.
The limit: the five measures count equally, and that weighting is our choice. Drop a measure or change the data, and the order within the top four changes, as “How we checked this” shows.
Five of the six metros with the most haunted houses per million residents are near the Great Lakes or the Ohio River. The sixth is Providence.
The limit: these are places listed as haunted houses in Overture Maps as of October 2026. A pop-up attraction that is not listed is not counted.
Spirit Halloween opens pop-up stores each fall. The chain says it is opening a record 1,575 stores this season, as NJBiz reported. Its store-locator records for the U.S., collected from August to October 2026, list 1,409 stores open now. 797 of them are inside the 55 big metros.
Map data mixes past seasons with this one. Overture Maps lists 3,515 places named Spirit Halloween in the U.S. Of the 3,403 costume-store listings with a confidence score of 0.5 or more, all but 21 carry that name, and some of their sources date back to 2017. All 1,409 of this season’s stores are filed as party supply stores instead. So we counted only the stores in the chain’s 2026 records, and left the costume store category out.
The limit: a store missing from the chain’s store-locator records is not counted.
In Arizona and New England. Arizona does not use daylight saving time, so in October its clocks read the same as California’s, although it lies farther east. Boston sits near the eastern edge of the Eastern time zone. At 6 p.m. on Saturday, October 31, 2026, the sun has already set in 15 of the 55 metros.
The limit: each time is for one point, the metro’s population center. Across a large metro, sunset can differ by several minutes.
Metros in the Northeast. Four of the top five are on the East Coast.
The limit: the areas come from cemetery outlines mapped in OpenStreetMap and carried into Overture Maps. An unmapped cemetery is not counted.
In one Wherobots job run, we joined 3,448 Halloween businesses and 55 metro areas home to 190 million people with every mapped cemetery inside them and the population grid. The queries ran in under a minute. The same steps work for any place type in Overture Maps and any set of boundaries, from pumpkin farms by county to costume stores by ZIP code.
The jack-o’-lantern at the top of this post is real geometry too. In a second Wherobots job run, we drew a jack-o’-lantern template, sampled points along each stroke and moved each point to the nearest U.S. city of 10,000 people or more. Joining those cities in order traces the pumpkin through 171 real places, from Minot, North Dakota, to Del Rio, Texas.
A retailer planning seasonal stores could use the same count: stores of one type per million residents, metro by metro. An event planner could time an outdoor event with the same sunset calculation. A city could compare its cemetery land, parks or any other mapped land use with other metros in one query.
The index follows the standard steps for building a composite indicator. They are set out in the Handbook on Constructing Composite Indicators, published in 2008 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. On each measure, a metro gets a percentile rank: the share of the other 54 metros it beats, from 0 (last) to 1 (first). The five percentile ranks are averaged with equal weights, 20 points each, and the total is shown out of 100. An earlier sunset ranks higher.
The five measures and their points:
Unlike WalletHub, we rank whole metro areas, not cities proper, so suburbs count too. We do not measure safety, walkability or weather.
We first ranked the 334 U.S. cities of 100,000 people or more. Small counts drove that ranking: the top city had one haunted house, and the fourth had none. So we moved to metro areas of 1 million or more, where counts are larger. After review, we replaced costume stores with this season’s Spirit Halloween stores, because most costume-store listings are Spirit Halloween storefronts from past seasons. That moved Chicago from first to third. We then re-ranked the metros seven times.
The verdict: Providence, Hartford and Chicago stay in the top four under every re-ranking, but their order changes. The gaps between them are small, so the top three are best read as a near tie, with Providence ahead on the main index.
Providence, in our index of the 55 metro areas in the 50 states with 1 million people or more. Hartford and Chicago came second and third, close behind. All three stayed in the top four in each of seven re-rankings that drop a measure or swap in different data.
The index measures where Halloween businesses, cemeteries and early sunsets come together on the map. It does not measure ghost reports, crime or how much people celebrate.
It measures different things. WalletHub ranks the 100 largest cities on 20 measures, including candy shops, crime, walkability and weather. We rank whole metro areas on five measures from the map.
Providence and Hartford, our top two, are not among WalletHub’s 100 largest cities proper, so they are not on its list. Both lists put Memphis near the bottom: last of 100 in WalletHub’s, and 53rd of 55 in ours.
Metro Chicago, with 88 places listed as haunted houses in Overture Maps as of October 2026. New York has 50, in a metro with more than twice as many people. Per person, Pittsburgh leads, with 11.1 haunted houses per million residents.
A seasonal attraction that is not listed is not counted.
Spirit Halloween says it is opening a record 1,575 stores this season. We counted the U.S. stores in the chain’s own store-locator records, collected from August to October 2026. AllThePlaces, an open project that gathers chain store lists, collected them, and Overture Maps carries them. They list 1,409 U.S. stores this season, 797 of them in the 55 big metros. The chain’s 1,575 also covers Canada.
Older Spirit Halloween listings on the map, some from as far back as 2017, are left out, because those storefronts may have closed after past seasons.
Among the 55 big metros, it is earliest in Tucson, where the sun sets at about 5:36 p.m. on Saturday, October 31, 2026. Phoenix follows at about 5:38 p.m. and Boston at about 5:41 p.m. The latest is San Antonio, at about 6:49 p.m.
Times are in local clock time. Arizona and Hawaii stay on standard time all year. Elsewhere, clocks fall back at 2 a.m. on November 1.
Metro New York. Cemeteries cover 74.6 square kilometers (28.8 square miles) there, or 0.47% of its land. Boston follows with 0.44%, and Providence with 0.36%.
The areas come from cemetery outlines in Overture Maps land use, which is based on OpenStreetMap. An unmapped cemetery is not counted.
With one Wherobots job run, we placed 3,448 haunted houses, Spirit Halloween stores and psychics from Overture Maps inside 55 Census metro areas. We clipped and merged cemetery outlines to measure the cemetery land in each metro. We used 2020 Census counts on squares 500 m across to find each metro’s population center, and computed its Halloween sunset there. The queries ran in under a minute.
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