Silver Spring has retained its position as one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States.
The annual report released earlier this month from personal finance website WalletHub ranks Silver Spring fourth in terms of ethnic diversity, with Germantown taking the top spot, Gaithersburg ninth, and Rockville ninth.
While Silver Spring maintained its position from last year, Gaithersburg has ranked first for the past two years. Germantown was third in 2024 and ranked second in 2023.
WalletHub describes the U.S. as a melting pot of cultures, noting the ongoing increase in ethnic and racial diversification. The report suggests that if this trend continues, America will reach unprecedented levels of diversity by 2045 when, for the first time in history, no single ethnic group is projected to constitute the majority of the U.S. population.
Despite these demographic shifts, the landscape of ethnic diversity in the U.S. remains subject to potential changes, particularly as immigration reform debates continue. With discussions on racial and ethnic equality gaining prominence recently, WalletHub analyzed America’s cultural makeup.
WalletHub’s annual study compared over 500 of the largest U.S. cities across three key indicators of ethnic diversity, focusing on residents’ ethnicity and race, language use, and place of birth.
You might not expect a place named “Germantown” to be very diverse, but this Maryland city is actually the most ethnically diverse place to live in the U.S. The city is split close to equally among the major ethnic groups: around 24% of the population is white, 25% is Black, 24% is Hispanic and 22% is Asian.
When it comes to language, just slightly over 50% of the population speaks only English at home. Of the rest, 21% speak Spanish, 12% speak other Indo-European languages, and 13% speak Asian or Pacific Islander languages.
While Germantown is the most racially diverse city and has the fourth-most language diversity, it ranks 93rd when it comes to birthplace diversity. However, that’s still in the top 20% of the more than 500 cities in our study.
To identify the most ethnically diverse places in America, WalletHub analyzed 501 of the largest U.S. cities using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and focused on three main factors of Ethnoracial Diversity, Linguistic Diversity, and Birthplace Diversity. Each city’s performance in these metrics was rated on a 100-point scale, with a higher score indicating greater diversity.
The research calculated each city’s “Ethnic Diversity Score” by averaging its scores across all three metrics. This score was then used to rank the cities in terms of diversity. It’s important to note that the analysis only considered the population within the city proper, excluding surrounding metropolitan areas.
The cities were divided into categories based on population size:
- Large city: More than 300,000 people;
- Midsize city: 100,000 to 300,000 people; and
- Small city: Fewer than 100,000 people.
According to WalletHub, the study utilized the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index method, a well-recognized measure of market concentration that also serves as an effective tool for assessing diversity, and provided a comprehensive evaluation of diversity across the cities analyzed.
The Most & Least Ethnically Diverse Cities in the U.S. (2025) report is available online at wallethub.com.
Photo: © mehaniq41 – stock.adobe.com