"I want to move to a small town" can mean very different places. One person pictures a county seat a couple of hours from the nearest city, with one stoplight and Friday night football. Another pictures a new subdivision a short drive past the last suburb, with a big yard and an easy run back to the office.
Both are good choices. They're just different lives, with different costs and trade-offs. The official definitions help you read the data you'll find online, and a few honest questions will help you decide which kind of place you're really after.
Urban and rural: the Census Bureau's line
The U.S. Census Bureau draws "urban areas" around densely settled places. Under its rules for the 2020 Census, an area counts as urban if it has at least 2,000 housing units or at least 5,000 people. Rural is everything that isn't urban (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 criteria).
By that rule, a compact town just over the line counts as urban, even if everyone who lives there would call it a small town.
In the 2020 Census, 80.0% of Americans lived in urban areas and 20.0% lived in rural areas (U.S. Census Bureau, released December 2022).
Metro and micro: the county-level view
The federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sorts whole counties into metropolitan and micropolitan areas, and the Census Bureau publishes them:
- A metropolitan area has at least one urban area of 50,000 or more people.
- A micropolitan area has at least one urban area of at least 10,000 but under 50,000 people.
Each one starts with one or more central counties. Another county joins if at least 25% of its workers commute to the central counties, or if at least 25% of its jobs are held by people who live in them (OMB standards, 2021). As of July 2023, there were 387 metro areas and 538 micro areas in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023).
Anything outside a metro area, micro areas included, is called nonmetro in federal data such as the Bureau of Economic Analysis price figures behind our income tool.
Two things about metro areas surprise people:
- Because they're built from whole counties, a metro area can take in farms and small towns a long way from downtown.
- OMB itself says its metro and micro areas are not an urban-rural classification. Metro counties can include rural land and people, and counties outside them can include urban areas (OMB, 2021).
Where suburbs and exurbs fit
Neither the Census Bureau's urban areas nor OMB's metro areas include a category called "suburb" or "exurb." Those are everyday words, and people use them loosely.
When most people say suburb, they mean the built-up neighborhoods and towns right around a city. An exurb is the next ring out: towns and new subdivisions past the suburbs, where many people still drive into the metro for work. Because of the commuting rule above, an exurb can sit inside an official metro area even when it looks like countryside.
A handy way to see where a county falls is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (2023). Every county gets a code from 1 to 9:
- 1 to 3: metro counties, sorted by the size of the metro area.
- 4 to 9: nonmetro counties, sorted by the size of their towns and whether they're adjacent to a metro area.
A nonmetro county counts as adjacent if it borders a metro area and at least 2% of its workers commute to the metro's central counties (USDA Economic Research Service, 2023).
The county Frank Rolfe moved to in 2005, Ste. Genevieve County in Missouri, is a code 8: nonmetro, with an urban population under 5,000, adjacent to a metro area (USDA, 2023). In plain words, a real small town within reach of a city.
Frank Rolfe on exurbs and super-commuters
Frank Rolfe has written that the exurbs really took off around 2008. In his telling, the Great Recession pushed families farther from city job centers to find housing they could afford, it worked, and word spread among their friends and co-workers.
Then came what he calls the "super-commuter," which he describes as the exurban buyer on steroids. Frank's typical super-commuter drives more than an hour to work, in exchange for even cheaper housing and more distance from crime and big-city problems. He says the trend picked up steam in 2020, when millions of employees were allowed to work remotely.
His bottom line: people are figuring out that a little extra time in the car can buy a much better quality of life.
For a sense of scale, the average American worker's trip to work takes about 26 minutes (U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2020 to 2024). A drive of an hour or more is a real commitment, so be honest with yourself about how many days a week you'd make it.
So which do you actually want?
Set the labels aside and answer these questions.
How many days a week do you need to be in the city? If it's every day, a suburb or a close-in exurb keeps the drive livable. The book's rule of thumb is that in most cities you can get past the sprawl about 30 miles from downtown, close enough to keep your job. A town that close may still be inside the official metro area, and that's fine.
One or two days a week? You're in super-commuter territory. A long drive is far easier to live with when it isn't daily.
Rarely or never? If you work from home or you're retired, you can choose a true small town, metro or not.
Do you want a town or a subdivision? The small-town life the book describes, where everyone is invited to everything and every kid makes the team, comes from a real town with its own school, churches, main street and events. The book is blunt about the "gated community" kind of town: it can feel sterile, with only one type of resident.
What do you need close by? A hospital, your doctors, an airport, a big grocery store, the grandkids. Measure each one in drive time, not miles. As the book puts it, 30 miles at 75 miles per hour is a very different trip than 30 miles at 30 miles per hour.
Will you miss big-city things? If pro sports and live theater matter to you, the book suggests looking at towns within 60 miles or so of a city. If you won't miss them, the book's experience is that the farther out you go, the lower the density and the home prices.
There's no wrong answer here. The real mistake is buying a suburb when you wanted a small town, or a remote small town when you really needed the city twice a week.
Our town type quiz can help you sort out which kind of small town fits your family, and our guide to choosing a town goes further.
Frank and Dave's free book describes the six kinds of small towns they've seen, from tourist towns to boom towns, with the pros and cons of each. Download it here.