Rural America gets its jobs back, but urban areas gain more

Employment gain or loss, April 2019 to April 2022, by counties' rural-urban status
(Map by The Daily Yonder using Datawrapper; for a larger version, click on it.)

"Rural and urban America have more jobs today than in April 2019," but "job growth in the last year has been much faster in urban counties," reports Bill Bishop of The Daily Yonder.

"More than two years after a rampaging pandemic created widespread unemployment, the number of jobs in the country is essentially back to pre-Covid-19 levels," Bishop writes after analyzing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He used April 2019 to avoid the pandemic downturn.

Since 2020, "Major metro areas have had the strongest job growth," Bishop reports. "Rural America has lagged. In the last year, jobs in rural America grew by just 0.2%. In the major metros, jobs grew by 1.8%."

Bishop cautions against painting with a broad brush: "Job growth and decline are largely local or regional issues. Some places have boomed since 2019, despite the pandemic. Other places are lagging. . . . The rural Mountain West has seen a jobs boom while the oil and gas counties of Texas and North Dakota still have not caught up with 2019 levels."