Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Skip to content

Rural-Urban Continuum Codes

Metadata Updated: January 3, 2024

The 2013 Rural-Urban Continuum Codes form a classification scheme that distinguishes metropolitan counties by the population size of their metro area, and nonmetropolitan counties by degree of urbanization and adjacency to a metro area.

The official Office of Management and Budget (OMB) metro and nonmetro categories have been subdivided into three metro and six nonmetro categories. Each county in the U.S. is assigned one of the 9 codes. This scheme allows researchers to break county data into finer residential groups, beyond metro and nonmetro, particularly for the analysis of trends in nonmetro areas that are related to population density and metro influence. The Rural-Urban Continuum Codes were originally developed in 1974. They have been updated each decennial since (1983, 1993, 2003, 2013), and slightly revised in 1988. Note that the 2013 Rural-Urban Continuum Codes are not directly comparable with the codes prior to 2000 because of the new methodology used in developing the 2000 metropolitan areas. See the Documentation for details and a map of the codes.

An update of the Rural-Urban Continuum Codes is planned for mid-2023.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: Creative Commons CCZero

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date November 10, 2020
Metadata Updated Date January 3, 2024

Metadata Source

Harvested from USDA JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date November 10, 2020
Metadata Updated Date January 3, 2024
Publisher Economic Research Service, Department of Agriculture
Maintainer
Identifier USDA-ERS-00087
Data First Published 2019-10-25
Data Last Modified 2019-10-25
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 005:13
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Data Dictionary http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/rural-urban-continuum-codes/documentation.aspx
Harvest Object Id c1261da6-6009-41d7-bc00-bd22f69c5ac1
Harvest Source Id d3fafa34-0cb9-48f1-ab1d-5b5fdc783806
Harvest Source Title USDA JSON
License https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Old Spatial United States
Program Code 005:041
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash bc247a4274429a248fb76686a6a82806238b1278c3a17343778e5999eb4b69fe
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type":"Polygon","coordinates":-124.733253,24.544245,-124.733253,49.388611,-66.954811,49.388611,-66.954811,24.544245,-124.733253,24.544245}

Didn't find what you're looking for? Suggest a dataset here.