Tampa Scores in the Fun Department: Study

TAMPA, FL — When it comes to the best places in the country for having fun, it’s hard to top Tampa.

That’s according to WalletHub, the website dedicated to all things personal finance. Tampa ranked 11th overall in WalletHub’s 2016’s Most Fun Cities in America report.

“To help Americans find the cities with the greatest number and variety of cheap, fun activities, WalletHub’s number crunchers compared the 150 largest cities across 51 key metrics, ranging from ‘number of fitness centers per capita’ to ‘movie costs’ to ‘average open hours of breweries,’” WalletHub’s Diana Popa explained.

Tampa’s 11th-place ranking was boosted by high scores in such metrics as:

• Number of festivals per capita – 4th
• Number of restaurants per capita – 9th
• Access to bars – 25th
• Number of fitness centers per capita – 7th
• Number of dance clubs per capita – 9th
• Number of attractions – 26th

While Tampa’s score put it in the Top 20, it wasn’t the highest-rated Florida city. That honor went to Orlando, which came in number two in the study to Las Vegas’ number one. Miami earned third-place honors while Fort Lauderdale came in seventh. St. Petersburg made the top 50 in 39th place while Tallahassee came in 53rd.

The bottom of the ranking of 150 cities across the country went to Oxnard, California. Yonkers, New York, came in 149th with Freemont, California only narrowly beating it out for 148th place.

To view the full report, visit WalletHub online.

Photo via the City of Tampa's Facebook page