The Most Red-Flagged Cities in America: A Tea App Data Study

We run the largest independent Tea app checker, maintaining an archive of posts from the Tea app — the women-only platform where women review the men they have dated. We took 555,736 posts, kept the 405,387 that are red flags, and mapped every one to the city it was posted in. The result is the first city-by-city ranking of where American men are getting flagged the most.

Los Angeles leads, but Houston is the real story

Los Angeles tops the list with 7,103 red-flag posts — no surprise for the country’s second-largest metro. The surprise is Houston at No. 2 with 6,853, edging out both Chicago and New York despite being a smaller city. Something about Houston’s dating pool is generating warnings at a rate its population alone does not explain.

The Top 15 cities

Rank	City	Red-flag posts
1	Los Angeles, CA	7,103
2	Houston, TX	6,853
3	Chicago, IL	5,505
4	New York, NY	4,990
5	Atlanta, GA	4,197
6	Dallas, TX	3,959
7	Las Vegas, NV	3,704
8	San Antonio, TX	3,359
9	Austin, TX	3,230
10	San Diego, CA	3,046
11	Phoenix, AZ	3,018
12	Boston, MA	2,959
13	Washington, DC	2,678
14	Detroit, MI	2,509

Texas owns the map

The single loudest signal in the data is Texas. The state holds four of the top ten cities — Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin — more than any other state. On the statewide ranking, Texas comes second only to California:

Rank	State	Red-flag posts
1	California	52,143
2	Texas	38,487
3	Florida	23,331
4	New York	18,400
5	Illinois	15,554
6	Ohio	15,471
7	North Carolina	14,289
8	Georgia	14,149
9	Pennsylvania	14,066
10	Michigan	12,658

What it means if you live in one of these cities

These are raw counts, so bigger metros naturally post more — but the ranking still tells a man something useful: in the cities at the top of this list, the odds that he is already being discussed on the Tea app are meaningfully higher. Because the app is women-only, he cannot look for himself. Our free Tea app checker lets him search his own name, city, and photo to see whether he appears — and respond or request a removal if a claim is false.

Methodology: we analyzed 555,736 Tea app posts spanning May 2023 through August 2026, classifying a post as a red flag when its red-flag reactions outnumbered its green-flag reactions, then aggregated the 405,387 red-flag posts by the city and state attached to each. Counts are raw post totals and correlate with population and app adoption.