Best Cities for Single Men and Women on New Year’s

Advice to the love-lorn: If you're single and hoping that you’ll meet that special someone on New Year's Eve, you might want to travel somewhere to improve your odds.

If you're a guy, you should consider booking a ticket for New York City, where there are more single women than single men. Single women outnumber single men by a significant margin in many of the cities that make up the Bos-Wash Corridor, for example D.C., Philly, Boston, and Baltimore.

All the single ladies, to quote Beyonce, should avoid New York and the East Coast in general and head West—to L.A., Phoenix, San Diego, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, or Las Vegas.

We define “single” as adults who have never been married or are divorced (but not those that are widowed). For men, we take the surplus of single women over men in a metro, and we do the opposite for women, taking the surplus of single men to women—those surplus numbers for each city are below. Our “singles” measure is inspired by a terrific “singles map” that appeared several years ago in National Geographic. Charlotta Mellander crunched the numbers based on data from the American Community Survey.

Best Places to be a Single Man on New Year’s Eve

1. New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island 149,219 2. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria 48,177 3. Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington 30,929 4. Baltimore-Towson 26,575 5. Boston-Cambridge-Quincy 16,192 6. Memphis, Tennessee 12,856 7. St. Louis, Missouri 11,639 8. Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, Ohio 8,694

Best Places to be a Single Woman on New Year’s Eve

1. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana 111,470 2. Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale 88,288 3. San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos 64,295 4. Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, California 59,498 5. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas 55,816 6. Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown 53,273 7. Seattle-Tacoma, Bellevue 48,401 8. Las Vegas-Paradise 47,255

Richard Florida is director of the University of Toronto's Martin Prosperity Institute and author of The Great Reset.