USDA Rural Classifications and FIPS Codes

The USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) publishes several county-level classification schemes that are widely used in rural policy research, public health studies, and economic analysis. The most commonly used are the Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (Beale Codes), the Urban Influence Codes, and the Rural-Urban Commuting Area Codes (RUCA). All are published at the county level using 5-digit FIPS codes, making them easy to join with Census and BLS data.

The Rural-Urban Continuum Codes classify counties on a 1–9 scale: codes 1–3 represent metro counties (adjacent to central city, metro area of varying size), while codes 4–9 represent nonmetro counties ranging from urbanized adjacent to metro areas down to completely rural with few people. The USDA updates these after each decennial census, so the 2013 codes (based on the 2010 Census) are the most current as of this writing. A lookup on any county's FIPS code page lets you see its metro area membership, which informs rural/urban classification.

The ERS also publishes county-level data on farm income, food access (the Food Access Research Atlas, which identifies food deserts), natural amenity rankings, and poverty classifications. All of these datasets key on the standard 5-digit county FIPS code. The poverty classification (persistent poverty counties — those with 20%+ poverty rates in the 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 Censuses) is heavily used in federal grant programs to target funding.

For agricultural researchers, the Census of Agriculture (published every 5 years by USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service) also uses county FIPS codes. Combining USDA rural classifications with Census ACS socioeconomic data and BLS employment data using the county FIPS key is a standard approach for rural policy analysis. Browse county pages like King County (53033) to see how urban-rural classification and MSA membership interact. Our federal data overview covers USDA alongside other major agencies.