VacationSelector

Chicago or Washington DC?

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.

Washington DC
52
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration with your weighting.

What matters to you?

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

The verdict

Choose Chicago if the water matters: the shore is 1km from the centre with 12 beaches nearby, and there is far more for children within easy reach of the middle of the city.

Choose Washington DC if museums are the point. It has roughly twice as many, grouped tightly around the centre, and a warmer spring and autumn that widen the season either side of summer.

Scoreboard

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

ChicagoWashington DC
Beaches & swimming. Chicago leads by 35 points.35
ChicagoWashington DC
Score5318
Swim season months13
Beaches 10 km121
Coast distance10,000 km34 km
Water distance1 km34 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 4 points.4
ChicagoWashington DC
Score8177
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,1471,666
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3736
Museums & heritage. Washington DC leads by 9 points.9
ChicagoWashington DC
Score4655
Museums within 10 km4583
Museums within 2 km of centre2055
Share of museums within 2 km %4466
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Chicago leads by 1 points.1
ChicagoWashington DC
Score6261
Drinking venues within 4 km1,1231,029
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre728593
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6558
Nightclubs within 4 km5154
Nature & day trips. Washington DC leads by 4 points.4
ChicagoWashington DC
Score3842
Protected land share 50 km %610
Landscape blanket share 50 km %01
Land share of disc %10094
Park area within 2 km118 hectares96 hectares
Good for families. Chicago leads by 17 points.17
ChicagoWashington DC
Score5538
Tourist attractions within 2 km187
Park area within 2 km118 hectares96 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Washington DC leads by 6 points.6
ChicagoWashington DC
Score7076
Notable places within 2 km217305
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Chicago and Washington DC are level on 43.
ChicagoWashington DC
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Washington DC leads by 5 points.5
ChicagoWashington DC
Score5762
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C7 °C to 31.7 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm65 mm to 108 mm
Dry months00
0255075100

Where they differ

Chicago puts the water at the door: the shore is 1km from the centre, with 12 beaches nearby where Washington DC has one. It also has far more tourist attractions near the centre, more park space, an extra theme park, and a UNESCO-listed place within day-trip reach.

Washington DC has twice as many museums, tightly grouped around the centre, and a larger share of the land around it is protected. Its water is 34km out, though the sea stays at 21°C or more for three months rather than one.

Where they are alike

Nightlife is the closest match: the two hold much the same number of bars and nightclubs, so the choice is where they sit rather than how many, with Chicago's clustered nearer the centre.

They are also close on eating out, both covering a similar range of kitchens; on walkable sightseeing, with plenty of notable places near each centre; and on day trips, with protected land within reach of both. Neither gets a month at 40mm of rain or less.

Which traveller are you?

Travelling with children: Chicago. Far more attractions sit near the centre, there is more park space, an extra theme park within reach, and the lakefront beaches are 1km from the middle of the city.

A museum weekend: Washington DC. It holds about twice as many museums as Chicago and they cluster tightly around the centre, alongside more notable places within walking distance, so days need little transport.

Eating and nights out: close, with Chicago slightly ahead. Both carry similar numbers of bars and clubs and a similar spread of kitchens, but in Chicago most sit near the centre, while in Washington DC about half do.

What the numbers don't tell you

On cost, the two are identical by construction: the figure behind it is a national price level, and both cities sit in the same country, so it says nothing about which is dearer. The dataset also carries no daily budget for either, so no price comparison between them is possible at all.

No weather station near either city records sunshine hours, so that figure is missing rather than low, and the monthly ratings rest on temperature, rainfall and sea temperature alone. Chicago's beach advantage is one of access rather than season: the lake reaches 21°C or more in a single month.

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
Washington DC
7
9
13
20
24
29
32
31
27
21
14
9
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Washington DC
3
3
4
9
14
20
25
26
23
18
12
7
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Washington DC
72
65
89
82
101
107
108
83
100
93
74
86
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Washington DC
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
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). Washington DC: 1991-2020 normals, Washington National Airport (5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Chicago is at its best from June to September. August pairs highs of 28°C with the lake at 23°C, and September holds 25°C as rain eases to 85mm after a wetter May and June, when it runs above 110mm.

Washington DC works better either side of summer, in April and May and again in October, when highs run 20-24°C and rain is nearer 82-101mm. Its July is hotter than Chicago's, at 32°C, and no drier.

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoWashington DC
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
1 h 5 m
€233-271
DCA · 5 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
1 h 50 m
€141-200
ORD · 25 km
1 h 40 m
€267-307
1 stop
DCA · 5 km
MinneapolisMSP, STP
1 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 25 m
no fares
IAD · 37 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
1 h 30 m
€189-423
ORD · 25 km
1 h 20 m
€158-333
IAD · 37 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
4 h 0 m
€195-265
1 stop
ORD · 25 km
5 h 0 m
€226-372
1 stop
DCA · 5 km
BostonBOS, PSM
2 h 20 m
€220-252
ORD · 25 km
1 h 25 m
€162-173
DCA · 5 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
3 h 50 m
€253
ORD · 25 km
4 h 10 m
no fares
IAD · 37 km
TokyoHND, NRT
12 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
13 h 30 m
no fares
IAD · 37 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
8 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
7 h 35 m
€507-561
1 stop
IAD · 37 km
Abu DhabiAUH
14 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
14 h 5 m
no fares
IAD · 37 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

MeasureChicagoWashington DC
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation179 m72 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsRonald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA)5 km from centre103 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoWashington DC
City population2,746,388689,545
People per km²4,5293,896
Museums within 10 km4399
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre8782
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month3 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Chicago or Washington DC 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.