What City Has The Most Roaches? What the Census Data Actually Shows

Among the 15 largest U.S. metro areas, Houston has the highest share of homes reporting cockroaches, and it has held that position in every recent wave of the American Housing Survey, the federal survey HUD and the Census Bureau run every two years. In the 2023 AHS public use file, 33.3 percent of occupied homes in the Houston metro reported seeing live or dead cockroaches, or cockroach feces, inside the building in the previous 12 months, against a national figure of 11.8 percent. Smaller metros can run higher still: the 2023 AHS metropolitan sample puts New Orleans at 29.7 percent, and in 2015 it measured 41.1 percent there. Note the unit of measurement. These are metropolitan areas, not city limits, and they count households that saw something, not cockroach populations.

The earlier version of this article said Orkin's 2021 rankings named Miami the most roach-infested city in the United States. That ranking does not exist. Orkin publishes annual lists for termites, rats, bed bugs, and mosquitoes, and Miami topped the 2021 termite list. There is no Orkin cockroach city ranking on its press room. This version uses the federal survey data instead, and is explicit about where each number comes from.

What the Census Survey Actually Asks

The American Housing Survey is sponsored by HUD and conducted by the Census Bureau. Its pest questions are short and specific. The 2023 items booklet gives the exact wording: "Have you ever seen signs of live or dead cockroaches or cockroach feces INSIDE your building?" If the answer is yes and it happened in the last 12 months, a follow-up asks how often: daily, weekly, monthly, or a few times.

Three things follow from that wording, and they matter more than the ranking itself.

• It is a sighting, not a census of insects. A household that saw one cockroach in a laundry room last spring is counted the same as one with a daily problem. Nationally in 2023, 11.8 percent of occupied homes reported any sighting, but only 3.1 percent reported weekly or daily, and 1.8 percent reported daily.
• "Inside your building" is broader than "inside your unit." For an apartment resident, a cockroach in a shared hallway, trash room, or basement counts. That is one reason multifamily housing reports higher rates.
• It undercounts real infestations. Cockroaches are nocturnal and spend most of their time in harborage. UC Integrated Pest Management notes that nymphs are typically the most abundant stage in field populations and that sticky traps, not eyeballs, are the reliable way to detect and monitor them. A household can have a growing German cockroach population and honestly answer "no."

All figures below are computed directly from the Census Bureau's public use files, using the survey weight and the 160 replicate weights per the Census Bureau's variance guidance. Margins of error are at 90 percent confidence, the convention the Census Bureau uses for AHS.

The 15 Largest Metros, Ranked (2023)

Share of occupied housing units reporting signs of cockroaches in the prior 12 months:

1. Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land, TX — 33.3% (±1.9)
2. New York–Newark–Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA — 20.1% (±1.7)
3. Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington, TX — 19.4% (±1.5)
4. Atlanta–Sandy Springs–Roswell, GA — 18.3% (±1.8)
5. Miami–Fort Lauderdale–West Palm Beach, FL — 18.0% (±1.6)
6. Phoenix–Mesa–Scottsdale, AZ — 15.5% (±1.6)
7. Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim, CA — 13.9% (±1.5)
8. Washington–Arlington–Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV — 10.4% (±1.3)
9. Riverside–San Bernardino–Ontario, CA — 9.5% (±1.3)
10. Philadelphia–Camden–Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD — 7.4% (±1.2)
11. Chicago–Naperville–Elgin, IL-IN-WI — 4.7% (±0.9)
12. Boston–Cambridge–Newton, MA-NH — 4.1% (±0.8)
13. San Francisco–Oakland–Berkeley, CA — 3.8% (±0.8)
14. Detroit–Warren–Dearborn, MI — 2.2% (±0.6)
15. Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue, WA — 2.0% (±0.6)

Read the error bars before you read the ranks. Houston's lead is large and unambiguous. The gap between New York and Dallas is not: their intervals overlap almost completely, and the same is true of Atlanta and Miami. Treating positions two through five as a meaningful order is reading noise.

The national estimate for 2023 is 15,727,587 occupied units, or 11.8 percent, with a margin of error of about 594,000 units. That matches the Census Bureau's own published estimate exactly, which is a useful check that these numbers are being computed the way the agency computes them.

The Biggest Metros Are Not the Worst

The AHS runs a separate metropolitan sample that rotates through a different set of areas. In 2023 it covered five: New Orleans, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, and Milwaukee.

• New Orleans–Metairie, LA — 29.7% (±2.2)
• Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN — 6.2% (±1.0)
• Cleveland–Elyria, OH — 3.2% (±0.7)
• Denver–Aurora–Lakewood, CO — 2.5% (±0.6)
• Milwaukee, WI — 2.5% (±0.7)

New Orleans would slot in just behind Houston. And it has come down: the same metro measured 41.1 percent in 2015 and 29.8 percent in 2019. Earlier metropolitan waves also caught San Antonio at 35.5 percent (2017), Tampa at 34.2 percent (2017), and Birmingham at 31.8 percent (2017), all of which would outrank every metro on the top-15 list except Houston.

This is the biggest limitation of any "worst city" list. The AHS gives metro-level estimates only for the 15 largest areas plus whichever areas fall in the rotating metropolitan sample. Dozens of mid-size Gulf Coast and Deep South metros are never measured separately, so nobody actually knows whether Houston or some unsurveyed city in Mississippi or south Louisiana holds the real top spot.

How the Rankings Have Moved

Comparing the same 15 metros across three waves shows the ranking is less stable than the headlines suggest:

• Houston: 35.2% (2019), 37.0% (2021), 33.3% (2023)
• Atlanta: 29.4%, 30.9%, 18.3%
• Miami: 26.0%, 25.0%, 18.0%
• New York: 11.1%, 16.1%, 20.1%
• Chicago: 4.5%, 3.6%, 4.7%
• Seattle: 0.7%, 1.3%, 2.0%

Houston is genuinely persistent. Atlanta and Miami fell sharply between 2021 and 2023, and New York nearly doubled across four years. Changes that size deserve caution: some is real, some is sampling variation, and some may reflect how much time people spent at home noticing things. The AHS does not explain the movement, and neither should anyone quoting it.

Why Pest-Company Lists Disagree

Most "roachiest cities" articles are not measuring the same thing.

Treatment-count lists. Orkin's annual rankings are built, in its own words, from "treatment data from the metro areas where Orkin performed the most first-time customer termite treatments" in a 12-month window. Substitute any pest. That counts one company's customers. A metro with more Orkin branches, more commercial accounts, or more people who hire a national brand instead of a local operator will rank higher regardless of insect density. These lists are marketing, released on a press-release schedule, and they are useful for nothing except knowing where that company does business.

Composite index lists. In November 2023, Pest Gnome, a pest-control lead-generation marketplace, published a "25 Roachiest Cities" ranking that trade press covered widely, putting Houston first at 37 percent of homes. That 37 percent is the AHS 2021 Houston figure, used accurately. But the ranking itself blended the AHS share with the number of extremely hot days from NOAA and pest control workers per 10,000 residents from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, then averaged the scores. Adding a labor-market variable to an insect question changes what is being ranked. The study page no longer resolves on Pest Gnome's site, which is its own caution about building on this kind of source.

Search-volume and "pests per capita" lists. Some rankings are derived from Google search interest or from arithmetic on Census counts the Bureau does not publish. If a ranking does not tell you the survey, the year, the question asked, and the margin of error, it is not evidence.

The distinction worth holding onto: the AHS is a probability survey with published methodology and calculable uncertainty. Everything else on this topic is a company's own book of business, an index somebody designed, or both.

What Actually Drives a City's Number

Four factors do most of the work, and only one of them is climate.

Species mix. Texas A&M AgriLife Extension notes that "German cockroaches spend their lives indoors" and "do not live outdoors in Texas," while American, oriental, and smokybrown cockroaches "live mostly outdoors but may move indoors in search of food or water." German cockroach rates depend on buildings and movement of infested items, not on weather. Sightings of the big outdoor species depend heavily on climate. A Houston or New Orleans number blends both; a Seattle number is almost entirely the indoor species. Our guide to how common roaches are in Florida works through the same split for the Southeast.

Climate, for the outdoor species. Smokybrown cockroaches, the extension bulletin notes, are "common outdoors, especially in the more humid areas of Texas and other southern states," living in ground cover, mulch, palm fronds, and soffits. Warm humid regions give those populations a large outdoor reservoir that pushes indoors during heat, drought, and heavy rain. The AHS census divisions line up with this: West South Central 24.1 percent, South Atlantic 19.3 percent, New England 2.7 percent, East North Central 3.0 percent.

Housing type. In the 2023 national data, 19.3 percent of apartment households reported sightings, against 9.0 percent of single-family households and 14.4 percent of mobile homes. Shared walls, shared trash rooms, shared plumbing chases, and a shared pest-management budget all matter. Extension guidance is blunt that once established, cockroaches "can readily move within structures such as from apartment to apartment," which is why a neighbor's infestation becomes your problem.

Tenure and control over the building. Renters reported sightings at 18.2 percent, owners at 8.5 percent. That is not a statement about tenants. It is a statement about who can authorize sealing a wall void, replacing a dumpster, or funding a building-wide baiting program.

Your Building Matters More Than Your City

Even in Houston, two out of three households reported no cockroaches at all in a year. Even in Seattle, some did. The metro rate tells you about background pressure. It tells you almost nothing about your unit.

Infestations start from a specific event, usually something carried in. Extension sources describe cockroaches arriving in groceries, boxes, appliances, and furniture, then establishing near warmth, moisture, and food. Our walkthrough of how a roach infestation starts covers the common paths. If you are trying to work out whether you have a problem at all rather than a one-off sighting, the signs worth checking are droppings, egg cases, and trap counts, not how many you happen to see.

There is a health reason to take a persistent indoor population seriously rather than a cosmetic one. EPA lists cockroaches among asthma triggers, noting that "droppings or body parts of cockroaches and other pests can trigger asthma." The National Survey of Lead and Allergens in Housing, published by Cohn and colleagues in Environmental Health Perspectives, found detectable cockroach allergen in an estimated 63 percent of U.S. homes at one or more sampling location, with high-rise apartments of five or more floors far more likely to exceed the level associated with asthma morbidity.

What To Do If You Live in a High-Rate Metro

Living in Houston, New Orleans, or Tampa does not change the plan. It changes how often you have to run it.

1. Monitor instead of guessing. Put sticky traps behind the refrigerator and stove, under the sink, and in the bathroom cabinet. Count what you catch weekly. That is the only way to know whether numbers are rising or falling.
2. Cut water first. Fix drips, dry the sink at night, empty pet bowls. Water is the tighter constraint for cockroaches than food.
3. Bait rather than spray for indoor infestations. Gel baits and bait stations placed in harborage outperform perimeter sprays, which can scatter a German cockroach population into new voids.
4. Seal and screen for the outdoor species. In the Gulf South, most of what walks in is coming through door sweeps, utility penetrations, floor drains, and unscreened soffits. Extension guidance notes that American and oriental cockroaches commonly enter through floor drains.
5. Pull mulch, leaf litter, and firewood back from the foundation. That is the outdoor reservoir the extension bulletin describes.
6. In an apartment, report it in writing. A unit-only treatment rarely holds when the building is the source.

The full sequence, including bait placement and the timeline to expect, is in our step-by-step plan for getting rid of roaches, and the maintenance side is covered in keeping them away for good.

Frequently Asked Questions

So is Houston officially the roach capital of America?

It is the highest of the 15 largest metros in every AHS wave since 2019, which is the strongest claim the data supports. It is not a measurement of every U.S. city. Mid-size Gulf Coast metros are mostly unsurveyed, and the ones the AHS has sampled, like San Antonio at 35.5 percent in 2017, have measured higher than Houston did that year.

Why do so many articles say Miami or Atlanta?

Because they are quoting older AHS waves or a pest-company list. Atlanta was at 29.4 percent in 2019 and Miami at 26.0 percent, both well above where they landed in 2023. Miami's frequent top billing also comes from Orkin's termite ranking, which is a different insect entirely.

Does a low number mean a city has no cockroaches?

No. Seattle's 2.0 percent reflects a climate where outdoor species do not establish and indoor German cockroach infestations stay localized to individual buildings. Those buildings still exist, and for the household inside one, the metro rate is irrelevant.

Is the survey counting infestations or single sightings?

Any sighting of a live or dead cockroach, or of cockroach feces, inside the building in 12 months. The frequency follow-up is the better infestation proxy. Nationally, 11.8 percent reported any sighting and 1.8 percent reported daily sightings.

Can I look up my own metro?

Only if it is one of the 15 largest or was in the rotating metropolitan sample. The Census Bureau's AHS Table Creator and the public use files are free, and the metro sample rotates between two panels of about ten areas, so an area may be measured once every four years or not at all.

Does moving to a low-rate city fix a roach problem?

Not by itself, because German cockroaches travel with belongings. Boxes, small appliances, and used furniture are the common vehicles. Moving from a high-rate to a low-rate metro reduces the outdoor pressure from American and smokybrown cockroaches. It does nothing about an existing indoor population that comes along in the truck.

Why are apartment rates so much higher?

Three reasons stack: the survey counts anything seen inside the building including shared spaces, cockroaches move between units through walls and plumbing chases, and residents cannot fix building-level conditions. The 2023 gap is 19.3 percent for apartments against 9.0 percent for single-family homes.

Sources

• U.S. Census Bureau: American Housing Survey program page — sponsorship, biennial schedule, and the national and metropolitan sample structure.
• AHS 2023 Public Use File — the national and metropolitan microdata used for every percentage in this guide, including the ROACH variable and the 160 replicate weights.
• AHS 2023 Items Booklet — the exact cockroach question wording and the daily/weekly/monthly/a-few-times follow-up.
• Census Bureau: Quick Guide to Estimating Variance Using Replicate Weights — Fay's method, 160 replicates, and the 4/160 variance formula used for the margins of error here.
• Census Bureau: Residents of 14 Million Housing Units Reported Seeing Roaches — the Bureau's own write-up of the 2019 AHS pest results, including the renter and regional patterns.
• Orkin: 2021 Top Termite Cities — the Miami ranking the earlier version of this article misattributed to cockroaches, plus the stated treatment-count methodology.
• Orkin press room — the full set of annual rankings the company publishes, which does not include cockroaches.
• Pest Management Professional: Top 25 Roachiest Cities in America — trade coverage documenting the Pest Gnome index, its November 2023 date, and its Census, BLS, and NOAA inputs.
• Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, E-359: Cockroach Biology and Management — indoor versus peridomestic species, German cockroaches not living outdoors, smokybrown habitat, and apartment-to-apartment spread.
• UC Integrated Pest Management: Cockroaches Pest Notes — why sightings underestimate populations, and sticky traps as the monitoring standard.
• EPA: Asthma Triggers, Gain Control — cockroach droppings and body parts as an asthma trigger, and the sanitation and exclusion steps recommended.
• Cohn et al., *Environmental Health Perspectives*: National Prevalence and Exposure Risk for Cockroach Allergen in U.S. Households — 63 percent of homes with detectable Bla g 1, and the elevated levels in high-rise apartments.