Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
After writing recently about how population growth in rural America is uneven, I got an invitation from Eastern Standard, a weekly public affairs radio program out of WEKU, to talk specifically about population change in Appalachian Kentucky.
The region tells a different story than the national narrative. While about half of rural counties are gaining residents, contributing to an overall boom in the rural American population, eastern Kentucky continues to lose people. In the state’s rural, mining-dependent counties, the population fell by about 2,300 residents last year alone.
But eastern Kentucky isn’t a definitive outlier. Only about half of rural counties grew last year. And by comparison, just a quarter of metropolitan counties lost population in 2025. Looking at rural America as an aggregate doesn’t tell the whole story, so let’s zoom in to some of those communities that are losing residents.
In this edition of the Rural Index, I’ll be analyzing population figures over a five-year span: 2020 to 2025. Looking over a longer window of time helps weed out some of the statistical noise that might create annual anomalies at the county level.
Between 2020 and 2025, 998 of the country’s 1,976 rural counties saw population decline, culminating in a total loss of nearly 460,000 residents in those communities. In most places, a combination of natural decrease, which happens when deaths outnumber births, and outmigration contributed to population loss, but about 64% of declining rural counties had natural decrease as the primary driver.
When I mapped where people were leaving versus where populations are aging and shrinking, two distinct geographies emerged.
Counties in pink illustrate where outmigration is driving the majority of the population decline. In rural Alaska, for example, nearly 10,000 residents were lost from outmigration alone. Other hotspots of outmigration included West Texas, Eastern Montana, North and South Dakota, and Southeastern Kansas.
In Lassen County, California, a rural community in the northern part of the state that borders Nevada, 4,600 residents were lost due to outmigration.
In places like Northern New Mexico and Central Appalachia (eastern Kentucky, West Virginia), natural decrease contributed the most to population decline. In these regions, the issue is less about people leaving and more about aging populations and fewer births.
But not all population loss looks the same. Some counties losing population are actually seeing more births than deaths, but they are still shrinking because people are moving away. North Slope Borough, Alaska, had natural increase over the past half decade, but overall population is in decline because of outmigration.
