The state of Maine came in at number five on SafeHome.org’s 2026 LGBTQ+ Safety and Equality Report. Other top scorers in New England were New Hampshire and Rhode Island taking eleventh and twelfth places respectively. Rounding out the region were Connecticut, Vermont and Massachusetts coming in at twentieth, twenty-second and twenty-third.
According to the report:
Maine’s story in 2025 was defined less by what laws it passed than by what laws were stopped. The Pine Tree State already had one of the nation’s strongest legal frameworks, scoring high across all pro-equality categories with a perfect zero in anti-equality laws, and lawmakers spent the year defending it. According to the ACLU and Translegislation.com, Mainers defeated a slate of anti-LGBTQ+ bills: a trans sports ban (LD 233), bathroom restrictions (LD 868 and LD 1704), a bill forcing schools to use birth-certificate names and pronouns (LD 1002), an attempt to strip gender identity from the Maine Human Rights Act entirely (LD 1432), and restrictions on gender-affirming care (LD 380).
Maine is one of only a handful of states in the country that scores zero across every anti-equality category: no religious refusal laws, no anti-youth laws, no restrictions on healthcare access. That clean record, combined with strong protections and a moderate hate crime profile, keeps it firmly in the top five.
Methodology
SafeHome.org’s 2026 LGBTQ+ State Safety Rankings are based on a composite score with two components: a law score and a hate crime score.
Unlike other LGBTQ+ state rankings, SafeHome.org’s safety score is built directly on the priorities of the people it measures: 1,004 LGBTQ+ Americans who told us which types of laws most affect their personal safety. We used those survey results to weight five categories of pro-equality legislation and six categories of anti-equality legislation, then applied those weights to each state’s actual laws as tracked by the Movement Advancement Project (MAP).
The hate crime score is based on FBI Uniform Crime Report data on anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in each state. We normalized the crime counts based on population density and weighted them by the percentage of law enforcement agencies in each state that report hate crime data to the FBI.
The final safety score for each state is a combination of the law score and the hate crime score, translated to a letter grade. Full methodology details are available at the end of this article.
Read the complete report here.