Rural America’s slow grind to replace the jobs it lost at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic took a turn for the worse at the end of 2023 after showing signs of improvement a month before, according to a Daily Yonder analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Total employment in rural (nonmetropolitan) counties in December 2023 was down 0.4% compared to December 2019, the last December before the economic shutdown in March 2020.
The graph above compares monthly total employment to the same month before the start of the pandemic. This method provides a way of measuring how well the job market has recovered since the pandemic while factoring out seasonal impacts on employment.
Metropolitan counties returned to pre-pandemic employment in January 2022 and remained in positive territory ever since. Rural counties, on the other hand, didn’t reach pre-pandemic employment levels until more than a year later, in March 2023. Since then, rural counties have been in positive territory only two other times, April and November 2023.
The latest monthly county-level numbers showed that rural America had 90,000 fewer jobs in December of 2023 than the same month in 2019. Metropolitan counties, meanwhile, saw a 1.5% increase in employment since December of 2019, which adds up to about 2.2 million jobs added to the urban economy. As a whole, the United States witnessed a 1.3% growth in employment.
In the graph at the top of the page, the massive dip in employment in March and April 2020 came from the pandemic-related economic shutdowns. The general trend over the last three and a half years has been toward gradual recovery, both for rural and urban areas.
Most Economic Industries Suffered to Recover Employment in Rural Places
Parts of rural America performed better than others, depending on regional variation and the dominant economic driver in each county.
In rural counties where government employers like federal agencies, prisons, or public schools were the primary economic force, employment grew by over 3,000 jobs, a 0.11% increase over December of 2019.
Rural counties where manufacturing was the dominant industry were down 1.36% from pre-pandemic employment.
Employment in farming-dependent counties dropped by 0.89%, or 11,400 jobs, while “nonspecialized” counties - places where no single industry dominates the local economy - were down about 31,600 jobs, or 0.44% of their pre-pandemic numbers.
Rural counties where mining and natural resource extraction drives the local economy showed the worst employment recovery compared to rural counties in other economic sectors. Between December of 2019 and December of 2023, rural mining communities lost 22,000 jobs, a 1.66% drop in employment.
In rural Lawrence County, Illinois, for example, employment dropped by nearly 900 jobs between December of 2019 and December of 2023. Because Lawrence County is relatively small (about 15,000 people), the change amounted to a whopping 16% decrease in employment since before the pandemic.
Employment in Delta County, Colorado, a rural mining town of 32,000 about 240 miles west of Denver, was down 1,300 jobs last December compared to pre-pandemic numbers. That’s almost a 10% drop.
The county economic types are based on categories created by the Economic Research Service (ERS), a branch of the USDA.
Towns Dependent on Tourism Gained Employment
In rural counties where the economy is built around natural amenities, tourism, and activities like hiking and skiing, recovery from pandemic employment loss tended to show greater promise.
Rural tourism counties witnessed a 1.27% increase in employment between December of 2019 and December of 2023. That’s equal to a loss of about 36,700 jobs. Although recreation-economy counties were harder hit during the early months of the pandemic when travel was curtailed, they have since recovered faster than rural America as a whole.
Westcliffe, Colorado, the county seat of Custer County, is a rural tourism town of 546 residents bordering the popular Sangre de Cristo mountain range about 75 miles south of Colorado Springs. Between December of 2019 and December of 2023, employment in Custer County, which has a population of about 5,300, grew by 21%, although the number of jobs increased by just 400.
In Navajo County, Arizona, a rural county of about 109,000 people, employment increased by 5% between December of 2019 and 2023. A popular tourist attraction in Navajo is Monument Valley Tribal Park, a 91,000 acre stretch of desert inside the Navajo Nation famous for its sandstone buttes. Data from 2017 showed that Monument Valley attracted over 250,000 visitors annually.
Notes
The Economic Research Service (ERS), part of the USDA devoted to analyzing economic trends, creates these economic types by assigning all U.S. counties into one of six mutually - exclusive categories that best describes the county’s economic dependence. A county can fall into one of the following categories - farming, government, recreation, mining, manufacturing, or “nonspecialized.”
We rely on the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines to categorize counties as either metropolitan or nonmetropolitan, using the nonmetropolitan category as a proxy for rural. We use the 2013 Metropolitan Statistical Area list, not the list released in 2023.
The analysis is based on monthly county-level job numbers from the BLS. The study compares monthly job figures to the same month in previous years, which factors out seasonal changes that can affect employment from one month to the next.
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