The aim of this article is to identify the characteristics of social assistance care beneficiaries living in peri-metropolitan and peripheral rural areas of the Mazowieckie Voivodeship. Above all, it is an attempt to create a demographic and social profile of people in need of and benefiting from institutional support, living in suburban villages. The results of surveys conducted among beneficiaries of social assistance centres and among employees of social assistance organisational units from counties included in the Warsaw Capital Region and in the Masovian Regional Region were used. Suburban areas are characterised in the literature as those characterised by a high level of socio-economic development, while the characteristics of social asstistance beneficiaries in the WCR area - only in this small research sample - indicate that they are people with long-term problems of poverty, unemployment, low income and low quality of life. The picture of social assistance beneficiaries operating in the ring of rural areas around Warsaw formulated here is a picture of people remaining in a particularly difficult social and professional situation. It is a picture of people who rely on external support in their daily lives for a long time.