Forest and pasture/rangeland accounted for more than half of U.S. land use in new report

The United States has a total land area of 2.26 billion acres. In 2017, the latest year for which complete data are available, about 29 percent was grassland pasture and range, 28 percent was forest-use land, and 17 percent of the land area was cropland. Urban areas accounted for 3 percent of U.S. land, and a variety of special uses accounted for 14 percent. Special-use land, most of which is devoted to rural parks and wilderness areas, is largely concentrated in Alaska and other States in the western half of the United States, where there are larger amounts of public lands. Miscellaneous other uses made up the remaining 9 percent. The USDA, Economic Research Service (ERS) maintains an inventory of all major uses of public and private land in the 50 States, which it updates every five years using data from various sources. This chart was drawn from the ERS’s most recent report Major Uses of Land in the United States, 2017, released in September 2024.

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