Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America

The Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America provides statistics by broad categories of socioeconomic factors:

  • People: Demographic data from the American Community Survey (ACS), including age, race and ethnicity, migration and immigration, education, household size, and family composition.
  • Jobs: Economic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources, including information on employment trends, unemployment, and industrial composition of employment from the ACS.
  • County classifications: Categorical variables including the rural-urban continuum codes, economic dependence codes, persistent poverty, persistent child poverty, population loss, onshore oil/natural gas counties, and other ERS county typology codes.
  • Income: Data on median household income, per capita income, and poverty (including child poverty).
  • Veterans: Data on veterans, including service period, education, unemployment, income, and other demographic characteristics.

What can users do with the atlas?

  • View county-level maps for socioeconomic indicators.
  • View the entire country or zoom into specific regions, States, or county areas.
  • For any county, view a pop-up window showing data for the indicators in the broad category for that county, with the option to download the selection.
  • Print a version of the map or save the image in a graphics-file format that may be added to a document or presentation.
  • Download a spreadsheet or CSV files containing all the data items for all U.S. counties.

Data as of June 8, 2021. The atlas has been updated to include annual unemployment/employment data for 2020; earlier estimates were revised. Maps using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) were updated to 2015-19 (5-year average county-level data). Poverty and income maps that used the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) were revised to use the 2015-19 ACS.