A good night out depends on who you ask. For some, it’ll be your classic sticky dancefloor and a cab home the next morning, soundtracked by the dawn chorus. For others, it might mean a curbside card game over shisha, checking out a vibey new vinyl bar, or even sweating it out in a sauna.
Nightlife in 2025 is evolving – we’re talking sober clubs and supperclubs, art gallery-dancefloor hybrids, listening bars – and, ultimately, it looks different wherever you go. At Time Out, we’ve been champions of nightlife since our foundation – that’s why we set out to find out the world’s greatest cities for going out at night in 2025. We quizzed thousands of people in hundreds of the world’s best cities, asking them to rate both the quality and affordability of their city’s nightlife scene, from clubbing to bars, pubs and nighttime entertainment.
After crunching all that data, we narrowed down the selection by excluding cities with lower overall scores and only including the highest-scoring city for each country. To create the final ranking, a panel of nightlife experts, including Time Out’s city editors and arts and culture writers, voted on their faves.
The resulting list of the world’s best cities for nightlife in 2025 reflects an incredible spectrum of after-dark culture. There’s clubbing, of course, and drinking, obviously; but there’s also street life and community, late-night cafes and neighbourhood hangs. On the world’s dancefloors, people are getting down to everything from amapiano and gqom to deep house and dancehall.
Some of the cities on our ranking are true nightlife veterans; others might take you by surprise. But, as our clued-up local experts attest below, every one of them has a unique nocturnal culture just waiting to be explored. So, get on your dancing shoes – these are the world’s greatest cities for nightlife right now.
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