Annual Figures Show Slight Rise in Rural Jobs, But Gap With Metro Widens

The most recent annual employment figures show that metropolitan America is adding jobs at a faster rate than rural America. Nonmetropolitan America still doesn't have as many jobs as it did before the recession, annual figures show.

New annual job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirm that the effects of the Great Recession went deeper and have lasted longer in rural America than they did in the rest of the nation.

The 2017 annual jobs report shows that rural counties (defined as nonmetropolitan) still haven’t gotten back to levels of employment they saw in 2008 at the beginning of the recession.

Rural counties had 750,000 fewer jobs in 2017 than they did in 2008. That’s a drop of 3.5% over the nine-year period.

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