•We apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to develop an alternative version of the European Commission’s Cultural and Creative Cities Index.•We provide an index score that reflects expert opinion, cities’ diverse socio-economic backgrounds, and observed relative strengths.•The application of Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) weights implies that, on average, cities improve their performance by approximately 16 percentage points.•We also identify peer cities and target values for performance improvement within a cluster of cities sharing similar demographic and socio-economic features.•We practically illustrate how Bilbao, Krakόw and Umeå can draw policy insights from their benchmarks, showing how DEA can work as a powerful tool for peer learning. Culture is an integral part of a city's quality of life, a driver of urban change, and a genuine economic sector. To support benchmarking of urban culture and facilitate peer learning amongst policymakers, the European Commission has recently created the ‘Cultural and Creative Cities Index’. While this index builds on a standardised method to aggregate 29 indicators for the 155 selected cities, it is explicitly acknowledged that a ‘gold standard’ for a ‘Cultural and Creative City’ does not exist. Instead, different approaches should be allowed for in capturing cities’ cultural and creative vitality. This is the point of departure for this paper, which employs a Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) modelling approach to allow cities to combine such respect for performance diversity with peer learning and benchmarking. Expert-based weights are used to provide expert-consistent bounds for the shares of key dimensions in a city's final BoD index value. We identify three city clusters, amongst which there are large performance differences. Accordingly, we focus on the within-group identification of peer cities and target values, which we illustrate in more detail for Bilbao, Krakόw and Umeå, towards the formulation of fit-for-purpose policy measures that can support culture-led development.