The Hub City just took another collective shot to the groin, and this one landed squarely in the “fun” department.
For years, I’ve believed that any city can be fun if you know where to go. Fun doesn’t always require roller coasters, water slides, or giraffes wandering around behind a fence. Sometimes it’s a live band on the right night, a weird little local event, or a bar that just gets it. And honestly, most of the time I’ve felt like Lubbock could deliver something when I wanted to get out of the house and do more than sit on the couch.
But then comes the cold splash of reality — usually delivered by someone who doesn’t live here.
That’s exactly what happened when WalletHub dropped its latest list of “The Most Fun Cities in America.” This wasn’t a vibes-based ranking or a “trust us” kind of list. They used actual metrics, categories, and numbers. The kind that don’t care about hometown pride or nostalgia.
And those numbers were… not great.
How Lubbock Stacked Up (Or Didn’t) As A Fun City
Out of 182 cities surveyed, Lubbock landed at #128 overall. That’s not just “middle of the pack” bad — that’s “oof” bad.
It gets worse when you dig into the breakdowns:
That places us squarely toward the bottom in both categories that usually define whether a city is considered fun. No amusement park. No zoo. No public pools. A narrow entertainment menu that doesn’t leave a lot of room for spontaneity or choice.
We weren’t completely helpless, though.
The One Thing Lubbock Has Going For It
Lubbock did manage to rank #39 in Costs, which means doing the few things we can do won’t drain your savings account. And that’s the tradeoff in a nutshell: less to do, but cheaper when you do it.
It’s not nothing — affordability matters. But it’s hard to feel like that fully balances out a lack of options, especially for visitors or younger residents deciding where they want to put down roots.
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This report doesn’t mean Lubbock is a joyless wasteland. It does mean that when viewed objectively, with a measuring stick instead of local loyalty, the Hub City comes up short in the fun department.
And maybe that’s the real gut punch — not the ranking itself, but the realization that outside eyes see something we’ve learned to work around instead of fix.
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