It's never a bad time to visit some of the nation's best beach towns, even with the start of winter on Dec. 21, 2024, just a handful of days away. Certain surfside destinations stay warm all year round, affording beachgoers a chance to visit without the summer crowds.
Though AirBnb's 2024 winter travel trends report shows interest in tropical destinations, like Mexico's Heroica Veracruz and the Brazilian coastal city of Fortaleza, vacationers hankering for a beach day have plenty of choices here in the U.S. The West Coast has many Pacific Ocean possibilities, the Midwest has its great lakeside locales, New England has its bays and oceanfront areas too, and the Gulf Coast has some of the greatest beach towns in the country, based on our findings here at Stacker.
So what makes a good beach town? Access to a beach, of course, but also plenty of indoor and outdoor activities to keep kids entertained, warm weather, and a long beach season—the average number of days beaches are open for swimming.
To be considered a beach town for this analysis, each city needed at least one beach on the Environmental Protection Agency's National List of Beaches. The EPA list includes beaches that are only used recreationally and open to the public for free or for a fee; it has more than 6,000 beaches on the United States' Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf coasts and on the Great Lakes identified by states and tribes in response to the Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health Act of 2000. The act requires states to report water quality monitoring to an EPA database.
Stacker determined rankings by a number of factors, with the most weight given to the number of beaches within a quarter mile of a city or town and the total shoreline of those beaches. Weather patterns and the duration of each beach's swim season affect town scores. The ranking also takes into account the prevalence of beach-related businesses, unemployment rates, and median home prices.
The data was analyzed before the devastating wildfires in Hawaii, so the ranking includes Lahaina, which was obliterated by the blaze. Hawaii's governor estimates it will take years to rebuild the historic site.
Read on to get some vacation planning inspiration.
Correction
A previous version of this article contained multiple errors in data analysis that skewed the overall ranking of beach towns, including incorrectly identifying the number of beaches in some towns and mischaracterizing some municipalities as beach towns. The article has been updated to correct the errors.
