The current study examined how time pressure and community identity affected urban residents' in‐group emergency helping intention with a sample of 88 Chinese urban residents from a common community. Firstly, we instructed participants to fill out the Community Identity Scale. Following this, we set a hypothesized scenario, in which they met a fainted person in community when they left the community either in a hurry or not, to measure helping intention. It was found that time pressure had little impact on urban residents' in‐group helping intention, whereas community identity increased in‐group helping intention. Moreover, emotional identity but not functional identity positively predicted in‐group helping intention. These findings and their implications for community psychology were discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.