Virginia Beach is the 4th most caring city in the country in 2021, according to personal finance website Wallethub.

Each year their researchers release a list of America’s towns ranked by how well residents take care of each other, and this year they put The Beach behind only Madison, Wisconsin; Boston, Massachusetts; and New York City.

To create the list they compared the 100 largest US cities using 39 metrics separated into three categories: Caring for the community, Caring for the Vulnerable, and Caring in the Workplace. Some of the heaviest-weighted metrics used were violent crime rate, property crime rate, favors for neighbors, disability-friendliness, volunteering hours per capita, vaccination rates, poverty rates, and residents working in community & social services per capita.

Virginia Beach did particularly well in the Caring for the Community category, with the second-highest score. This category’s heaviest-weighted metrics measured favors for neighbors, volunteering, crime rates, and vaccination rates.

We were 4th overall in volunteer hours per capita, and tied with our neighbors Norfolk and Chesapeake in that regard. The community spirit shared by the cities helped all three to appear in the top 50, with Chesapeake at position 16, and Norfolk at position 42. Chesapeake received its highest rating in the category of Caring for the Community, while Norfolk’s highest rated category was Caring in the Workforce. The Hampton Roads towns were the only Virginia cities on the list.

This isn’t the first time that Virginia Beach has appeared on Wallethub’s most caring list. In 2019 Virginia Beach was at the very top of the list as the most caring big city in the country, when its residents were tied for first place in the metric volunteer hours per capita.