March 21, 2025
CDC Updates Urban-Rural Classification for Counties
Last week, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the new NCHS Urban-Rural Classification Scheme for Counties.
For this update, the NCHS used delineations of metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas from the Office of Management and Budget as well as estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau to classify counties and county equivalents into six categories – four metropolitan and two nonmetropolitan.
This scheme allows researchers, policy makers, and others to study the health of U.S. residents according to how urban or rural their county is.
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Click Here to Read More about how FORHP uses several federal data sources to define for rural for programs.