Chula Vista families can breathe a little easier handing out candy this Halloween: a new national study ranks the South Bay city among the 50 safest in the country for trick-or-treating, outpacing both San Diego and Oceanside. The city posted the lowest property-crime rate of any California city included in the analysis, along with low rates of registered sex offenders, violent crime and pedestrian fatalities.
The rankings come from SafeHome.org, which examined 152 of the largest cities in the United States, according to CBS 8. The study pulled from crime, traffic and law-enforcement staffing data, weighing five specific factors: violent crime, property crime, registered sex offenders, pedestrian fatalities and the number of law enforcement officers on the ground, with violent crime carrying the most weight in the overall score. SafeHome.org says it standardized each metric per 10,000 residents so that cities of different sizes could be compared fairly.
San Diego came in 58th in the same study, while Oceanside landed at 71st. Nationally, Pembroke Pines, Florida, took the top spot as the safest city in the country for trick-or-treating in 2026, while Memphis, Tennessee, finished last among the 152 cities analyzed, per SafeHome.org's research.
Chula Vista's Numbers Improved, but Its Rank Still Slipped
Here's the twist: even though Chula Vista's underlying numbers improved or held steady across every category the study measured, the city still fell in the rankings compared with previous years. SafeHome.org researchers told the station that the slide likely reflects faster improvement happening elsewhere in the country rather than any backsliding at home.
That pattern isn't isolated to this one study, either. The same trend turns up in a separate report from WalletHub, which ranked Chula Vista 34th, Oceanside 58th and San Diego 124th out of 182 cities nationwide, according to Patch. That report noted all three San Diego County cities actually ranked higher in 2025 than they did this year, and that Chula Vista was the only county city to crack the nation's top 50 safest cities overall. WalletHub's broader methodology compared cities across home and community safety, natural-disaster risk and financial safety — Juneau, Alaska, topped that list, while New Orleans ranked last.
Why Oceanside's Drop Stands Out
Oceanside's fall was especially steep: the city dropped from 48th to 71st in the SafeHome rankings. San Diego, by contrast, actually improved by two ranking places from the previous year even while landing well outside the top 50.
California still performed strongly overall, with six cities placing in the study's top 25 safest spots nationwide. Texas and Arizona had the strongest state-level showing of all, each landing three cities in the top 10.
What Safety Officials Recommend for Halloween Night
Rankings aside, researchers advised parents to keep taking precautions regardless of where their city landed, pointing to traffic as one of the biggest safety concerns on Halloween night. Families are encouraged to plan their trick-or-treating routes ahead of time, travel in groups, stick to sidewalks and stay especially alert when crossing streets.
Colliton recommended using reflective tape or glow sticks to make costumes more visible to drivers after dark. Parents were also urged to choose costumes that won't cause kids to trip or block their vision, and to seek out well-lit neighborhoods with lower speed limits and lighter traffic when mapping out where to trick-or-treat.
