Editorial
We maintain a structured record of 3,631 bars across 176 cities. This report reads that record as a single dataset and reports what it actually contains in June 2026. No estimates, no rounding up. The counts below are the counts.
The headline is concentration. One category, cocktail bars, accounts for 30.4% of every bar we track. The next four categories together explain just over half the rest. The long tail, from sports bars down to wine bars, is thin.
Price tier is the second story in the data. We grade each bar from $ to $$$$. Four out of five bars land in the two middle tiers.
The $ tier is almost empty. Only 25 bars in the entire index read as genuinely cheap. That is 0.7%. The premium $$$ tier, by contrast, is the most common single grade. The cheap end of the market is the rarest thing we track, a point we examine in detail in our companion study on whether the dive bar is dying.
Every bar in the index carries a rating. The mean is 4.59 and the median is 4.6, on a five point scale. The spread is narrow. Nearly nine in ten bars fall between 4.5 and 4.7.
Only 138 bars, 3.8% of the index, clear a 4.8. That number is a useful filter. When a single city claims a dozen near-perfect bars, the rating data lets us check the claim against a global baseline rather than local hype.
Our index measures composition, not headcount over time. For the trend we read the trade data. In the United States the bars and nightclubs sector runs to roughly 70,000 establishments and about 39 billion dollars in revenue, with output edging down in both 2025 and 2026, according to IBISWorld and Statista.
The United Kingdom shows the pattern in sharper relief. Late night venues there contracted 26.4% between March 2020 and mid 2025, close to 800 closures, per the Night Time Industries Association data reported by the NTIA and the Morning Advertiser. Net closures ran at about three a week through the spring of 2025.
So the global picture is two trends at once. The mature Western markets are losing venues, while travel demand pushes the other way. Night time economies grew an estimated 4.9% year on year on the back of late season travel, per Travel And Tour World. The bars that survive are the ones with a clear reason to exist.
"One category explains nearly a third of every bar worth tracking. The cocktail bar is no longer a niche. It is the default."
Read together, the three distributions describe a market that has moved upmarket and narrowed its quality band. The median bar is a mid to premium cocktail or after work room that scores 4.6. The budget dive and the five star showpiece are both rare.
For a traveler that is good news and bad news. Good, because a near random pick from a major city is unlikely to be poor. Bad, because finding something genuinely cheap, or genuinely exceptional, takes work the average score will not do for you. That gap is the reason we run city guides such as London cocktail bars and Bangkok rooftop bars rather than a single global list.
For the category breakdown by region, see our ranked guides to the 25 best cocktail bars in Europe and the 25 best craft beer bars in Europe.
Dataset. barsforkings.com master index, bars-master-72-cities.csv. Sample size 3,631 bars across 176 cities and 41 countries. Fields used: category, price_tier, rating. Pulled June 2026.
Method. Category share, price tier distribution and rating bands were computed directly from the dataset. Percentages are shares of the 3,631 row total and may not sum to 100 because of rounding.
External sources. Market size and closure trends from IBISWorld, Statista, the Night Time Industries Association, the Morning Advertiser and Travel And Tour World, each linked inline. We did not estimate any figure that we could not trace to the dataset or a cited source.
Marcus Webb runs the barsforKings data desk. He built and maintains the 72-city index and writes the publication's annual nightlife reports.
Cocktail bars are the most common type in our 72-city index, at 1,104 bars or 30.4% of the 3,631 we track. After work bars are second at 16.0% and rooftop bars third at 13.5%.
The mean rating across all 3,631 bars is 4.59 on a five-point scale, and the median is 4.6. About 87.5% of bars score between 4.5 and 4.7, so ratings cluster tightly.
Only 25 bars in the index, 0.7% of the total, carry the budget $ price tier. Most bars sit in the $$ and $$$ tiers, which together hold 81.5% of all listings.
Mature Western markets are contracting. United States output fell in 2025 and 2026 per IBISWorld, and United Kingdom late-night venues dropped 26.4% from 2020 to 2025 per the NTIA. Travel-driven nightlife demand grew about 4.9% year on year.
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