Rural counties receive more census-based funding, per person, than urban areas

News reports frequently cite the fact that the census is used in part to allocate billions of dollars worth of government grants and loans as proof of the importance of returning your census questionnaire, but exactly how important is that funding to rural America? Data from the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., non-profit non-partisan research group, shows "rural counties received more funding per capita than either urban or exurban counties," and "rural counties in the South received the highest per capita payments," William O'Hare reports for the Daily Yonder.

Nearly $450 billion in federal grants is allocated in part by census data, making the overall amount per person $1,469. Rural counties received $1,719 per person, urban counties received $1,414, and exurban counties received $1,108 per person, O'Hare reports. "In the most urban counties, federal funds averaged $1,357 per person," he writes. "In the most rural counties [places that aren’t adjacent to any urban area and are without a town of more than 2,500 people], the payments averaged $2,407 per person." The Yonder chart below shows per capita funding in every rural county. Those in green received more than the national average, while those in red received below the national average.

The variance between rural and urban areas can be partially attributed to the importance of child poverty rates on funding formulas, O'Hare writes. The child poverty rate in the most urban counties is 16 percent; in the most rural, it's 27 percent. But per-capita funding for rural counties varies widely among regions. Southern rural counties received $1,938 per person while Midwestern rural counties received $1,449 per person, O'Hare reports. (Read more)