rurality

Rurality classification and scoring for U.S. counties and ZIP codes.

Provides USDA Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (RUCC 2023), Rural-Urban Commuting Area codes (RUCA 2020), and a composite rurality score for all 3,235 U.S. counties. Built to make rurality data easy to use in research without manually downloading and merging USDA spreadsheets.

Web app: rurality.app

Install

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("cwimpy/rurality")

Usage

library(rurality)

# Look up a county by FIPS
get_rurality("05031")
#> Craighead County, AR — Score: 40 (Mixed), RUCC: 3

# Just the score
rurality_score("05031")
#> 40

# Just the RUCC code
get_rucc("05031")
#> 3

# RUCA code for a ZIP
get_ruca("72401")
#> Primary RUCA: 1 (Metropolitan core)

# Merge onto your own data
my_data <- data.frame(
  fips = c("05031", "06037", "48453"),
  outcome = c(0.7, 0.4, 0.6)
)
my_data |> add_rurality()

# Add all available variables
my_data |> add_rurality(vars = "all")

Data

The package ships two datasets:

county_rurality

All 3,235 U.S. counties with 24 variables including:

Variable Description
fips 5-digit county FIPS code
rurality_score Composite score (0-100)
rurality_classification Urban, Suburban, Mixed, Rural, Very Rural
rucc_2023 USDA Rural-Urban Continuum Code (1-9)
pop_density Population per square mile
dist_large_metro Distance to nearest large metro (miles)
median_income ACS 2022 median household income
median_age ACS 2022 median age 
# Browse the full dataset
county_rurality

# Filter to a state
county_rurality |> dplyr::filter(state_abbr == "AR")

# Distribution
table(county_rurality$rurality_classification)
#> Mixed    Rural Suburban    Urban Very Rural
#>   663      921      781       87        783

ruca_codes

USDA RUCA codes (2020) for 41,146 ZIP code tabulation areas.

ruca_codes |> dplyr::filter(state == "AR")

Methodology

The composite rurality score is a weighted average of three components:

Component Weight Source
RUCC score 55% USDA Economic Research Service, 2023
Population density 28% Census ACS 2022 5-year estimates
Distance to metro 17% Haversine distance to nearest metro area

Scores range from 0 (most urban) to 100 (most rural). See the full methodology for details.

Citation

If you use this package in published research, please cite:

Wimpy, Cameron (2026). rurality: Rurality Classification and Scoring
  for U.S. Counties and ZIP Codes. R package version 0.1.0.
  https://github.com/cwimpy/rurality

Data Sources

License

MIT