10 U.S. Cities Where People Have the Most Financial Stress

This story originally appeared on SmartAsset.

According to a recent poll from the National Endowment for Financial Education, nearly nine in 10 Americans say COVID-19 has triggered stress on their personal finances.

Money — or lack thereof — creates anxiety-inducing burdens for individuals and families even in normal times. But this is especially true now in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, whose attendant economic fallout has included soaring unemployment.

Some cities, though, see their residents under more strain than others, so SmartAsset crunched the numbers to find the cities under the most financial stress.

We compared data for 99 of the largest U.S. cities across the following eight metrics: unemployment rate, percentage of the population living below the poverty line, percentage of households severely burdened by housing costs, recent housing insecurity, recent food insufficiency, percentage of the population who reported not seeing a doctor because of cost, four-year change in median household income and divorce rate.

First, we ranked each city in each metric. We then found the average ranking for each city, giving equal weight to every metric except for unemployment, which we gave a double weight. We used this average ranking to create our final score. The city with the highest average received a score of 100, while the city with the lowest average ranking received a score of 0. Data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau, and Kaiser Family Foundation.

Following are the cities with the most personal financial stress.