This US city ranks 1st for the most people in financial distress

The city ranked 1st for having the most people in financial distress is Chicago, Illinois.

The ranking comes from WalletHub’s recent “Cities with the Most People in Financial Distress” analysis, which various outlets report as identifying Chicago as number one based on distressed accounts, skipped payments, and related credit indicators.

Here’s WalletHub’s current top 25 “cities with the most people in financial distress,” based on the 2026 reporting (latest coverage only publishes the top 10 explicitly, so 11–25 are not all individually named in open summaries).

Top 10 most financially distressed cities

These are the only positions clearly documented in multiple outlets summarizing the WalletHub study.

WalletHub’s underlying ranking actually covers 100 large U.S. cities and uses nine metrics around credit scores, distressed accounts, bankruptcy trends, and “debt”/“loans” search interest, but the full 1–100 list is only available directly on WalletHub’s site or in their data table and is not fully reproduced (11–25 included) in the secondary news coverage I can see.