VacationSelector

Chicago or Los Angeles?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Chicago
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and good for families with your weighting.

Los Angeles
53
match

Wins on year-round weather and nature & day trips with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

ChicagoLos Angeles
Beaches & swimming. Chicago leads by 24 points.24
ChicagoLos Angeles
Score5329
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km120
Coast distance10,000 km
Water distance1 km
Beaches 25 km11
Warmest sea temp20.2 °C
Scoring variantbeachScoreWideRing
Declared2026-08-25
Registerseed/editorial-overrides.json
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 15 points.15
ChicagoLos Angeles
Score8166
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,1471,337
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3722
Museums & heritage. Los Angeles leads by 3 points.3
ChicagoLos Angeles
Score4649
Museums within 10 km4569
Museums within 2 km of centre2023
Share of museums within 2 km %4433
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Chicago leads by 8 points.8
ChicagoLos Angeles
Score6254
Drinking venues within 4 km1,123660
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre728432
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6565
Nightclubs within 4 km5164
Nature & day trips. Los Angeles leads by 24 points.24
ChicagoLos Angeles
Score3862
Protected land share 50 km %626
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10080
Park area within 2 km118 hectares20 hectares
Good for families. Chicago leads by 22 points.22
ChicagoLos Angeles
Score5533
Tourist attractions within 2 km1811
Park area within 2 km118 hectares20 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Chicago leads by 16 points.16
ChicagoLos Angeles
Score7054
Notable places within 2 km21788
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Chicago and Los Angeles are level on 43.
ChicagoLos Angeles
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Los Angeles leads by 30 points.30
ChicagoLos Angeles
Score5787
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C18.6 °C to 24.7 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm0 mm to 76 mm
Dry months08
0255075100

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Chicago
0
3
9
15
22
27
29
28
25
17
10
3
Los Angeles
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
24
22
19
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Los Angeles
15
15
15
15
17
18
20
20
20
19
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Los Angeles
73
76
44
16
7
2
1
0
3
13
21
57
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Los Angeles
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
10
10

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Chicago: 1991-2020 normals, Chicago Midway Airport (14.5 km from centre). Los Angeles: 1991-2020 normals, Los Angeles Airport (18.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoLos Angeles
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
Salt Lake CitySLC
3 h 0 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
PhoenixPHX, AZA
3 h 25 m
€182-307
1 stop
ORD · 25 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
DenverDEN, APA
2 h 20 m
€113-184
ORD · 25 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
TokyoHND, NRT
12 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
11 h 0 m
€785-892
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
3 h 55 m
€250-272
1 stop
ORD · 25 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
1 h 50 m
€141-200
ORD · 25 km
4 h 20 m
€288
LAX · 19 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
3 h 50 m
€253
ORD · 25 km
3 h 35 m
€261-303
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
11 h 25 m
€600-640
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
16 h 25 m
€964-1015
LAX · 19 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-08 to 2026-10, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureChicagoLos Angeles
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation179 m106 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsLos Angeles International Airport (LAX)19 km from centre180 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoLos Angeles
City population2,746,3883,898,747
People per km²4,5292,994
Museums within 10 km4338
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre8746
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 monthNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Chicago or Los Angeles somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.