Rural labor force is 2% under pre-pandemic levels, and is bouncing back more slowly than in metropolitan areas

May 2021 employment as a percentage of May 2019 employment; the greener the better
(Daily Yonder map; click the image to enlarge it or click here to view the original)

The nation is almost back to pre-pandemic employment levels, but rural areas are lagging in several ways, according to a Daily Yonder analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Essentially, metropolitan counties lost a greater share of the labor force in the early months of the pandemic than rural counties did, but metro counties gained back a greater share of jobs than rural counties did, Bill Bishop and Tim Marema report.

"In metropolitan counties, the size of the labor force bounced back from May 2020 to May 2021 and is now only 0.9% lower than it was in May 2019, before the pandemic," they report. "In rural counties, however, the size of the labor force took a similar nosedive in May 2020 but barely grew in the subsequent year. The May 2021 rural labor force was down 2.1% compared to the pre-pandemic level. That’s more than twice the rate of decline in the metropolitan labor force." The labor force includes people who have a job or are unemployed and job-seeking.

Click here for more charts, analysis, and an interactive county-level map from the Yonder.