When it comes to planning the perfect Halloween, there’s a lot of questions to consider: Which neighborhood has the best candy? Which amusement park has the scariest haunted house? What or who are you going to dress up as?
These are all questions WalletHub took into consideration when compiling its just-published list of the best U.S. cities to visit for the Fall holiday.
In order to find the best Halloween spots, the personal finance website compared 100 of the most populated U.S. cities across three categories: Trick-or-Treater Friendliness, Halloween Fun and Halloween Weather.
But, these categories aren’t as simple as they seem. The website considered a number of varying factors to determine scores for each. When looking to score cities on their Trick-orTreater Friendliness for example, WalletHub examined population density, walkability, crime rate, and car accident rate.
For the Halloween Fun category, cities were scored on things like the average price of their Halloween tickets, number of costume stores, number of pumpkin patches and number of haunted houses, to name a few.
The Halloween Weather category is a bit less exciting, and merely examines a city’s average temperature and forecasted precipitation for the big day.
Each category was scored on a scale of one to 100, with one denoting the highest score.
The total score compiled the results of each category and gave each city a rating on a percentage scale of one to 100, with a 100 denoting the highest score.
With all that out of the way, let’s take a look at the top five U.S. Cities to visit for Halloweekend:
Total Score 67.34
Trick or Treater Friendliness: 1
Halloween Fun: 3
Halloween Weather : 88
Total Score 61.02
Trick or Treater Friendliness: 6
Halloween Fun: 26
Halloween Weather : 2
Total Score: 60.55
Trick or Treater Friendliness: 9
Halloween Fun: 8
Halloween Weather : 30
Total Score: 60.48
Trick or Treater Friendliness: 20
Halloween Fun: 6
Halloween Weather : 19
Total Score: 60.27
Trick or Treater Friendliness: 25
Halloween Fun: 4
Halloween Weather : 10
If you’d like to see if your city made the cut, you can check out the full list here.
