The USDA, Economic Research Service’s (ERS) Commuting Zones (CZs) are geographic units of analysis intended to identify rural labor markets. County boundaries are not always adequate confines for a local economy and often reflect political boundaries rather than meaningful boundaries for economic activity. Other labor market delineations—such as the Office of Management and Budget’s Core Based Statistical Areas—identify urban labor markets while excluding a significant number of rural U.S. counties.
The 2020 Commuting Zones group the 3,222 counties and county-equivalents in the United States and Puerto Rico into 598 distinct labor markets. These CZs are based on commuting flows to and from small counties. They allow researchers to aggregate county-level data to examine the socioeconomic differences across rural labor markets. The 2020 Commuting Zones are depicted in the map below.
One important consideration for users of the Commuting Zones data product is that, while the Commuting Zones identify distinct labor markets, labor markets overlap in reality. To allow users to evaluate how well a Commuting Zone represents the labor market of its member counties, measures of worker “containment” are included in the 2020 Commuting Zones data product. See the Documentation page for more details.
The USDA, 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 for 2010 and 2020 were developed by researchers at The Pennsylvania State University and are available on the (Labor-sheds for Regional Analysis) website. The ERS 2020 Commuting Zones data product is based on the replicable statistical methodology developed by the researchers at Penn State, but adds an additional constraint that requires all commuting zones to be contiguous. Therefore, the ERS and Penn State versions of the 2020 Commuting Zones are not an exact match.