Note: Development of the 2020 Commuting Zones data product is underway, with an anticipated release in fall 2025. In the meantime, the Preliminary 2020 Commuting Zones are an initial update. Users should note that ongoing quality checks and refinements to the methodology mean that these delineations are expected to change with the release of the final version.
County boundaries are not always adequate confines for a local economy and often reflect political boundaries rather than meaningful boundaries for economic activity. Commuting Zones (CZs) are geographic units of analysis that are intended to more closely reflect the labor markets where people live and work.
Highlights
- The Preliminary 2020 Commuting Zones group all 3,222 counties and county equivalents in the United States and Puerto Rico into 592 labor markets, based on the commuting relationship between counties.
- CZs are designed to group small, rural counties with nearby larger counties to identify where residents of rural counties are likely to travel for work. This grouping allows rural researchers and analysts to examine the variation in socioeconomic conditions across labor markets.
- The Preliminary 2020 Commuting Zones are identified using only hierarchical cluster analysis, which results in some counties being included in Commuting Zones with which the counties have relatively weak commuting relationships. For example, Lincoln County, Montana is included in a Preliminary 2020 CZ with 3 county equivalents in Alaska.
- The Final 2020 Commuting Zones (to be released in late 2025) are intended to improve upon the Preliminary CZs by systematically identifying counties with weak relationships to the CZ to which the counties are assigned by the hierarchical cluster analysis. The independently replicable procedure will then determine whether there is an alternative CZ in which the county is a better fit.
The USDA, Economic Research Service (ERS) previously published three vintages of Commuting Zones based on journey-to-work data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Decennial Censuses. More recent commuting zone delineations in 2010 and 2020 were developed by researchers at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) and are available on their website (Labor-sheds for Regional Analysis). The ERS Preliminary 2020 Commuting Zones data product is based on the same replicable statistical methodology used by the researchers at Penn State, but are not an exact match for every single county due to a minor change made to the underlying data in the Penn State Commuting Zones and not in the ERS Preliminary 2020 Commuting Zones.