How OEWS defines metro and nonmetro areas

Every area row on a state page and every metro page carries a name such as “Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX” or “Southwest Alabama nonmetropolitan area.” Those names are not chosen by BLS alone. The metropolitan ones come from a federal standard administered by the Office of Management and Budget; the nonmetropolitan ones are built by the OEWS program itself.

Metropolitan statistical areas

OMB delineates metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas by applying published standards to Census Bureau data. The concept is a core with a substantial population plus the surrounding communities that are economically and socially tied to it, measured chiefly by commuting. Under the 2020 standards, a metropolitan statistical area must contain at least one urban area of 50,000 or more people; a micropolitan area has an urban core of at least 10,000 but under 50,000. A county is a “central county” if at least half its population lives in urban areas of 10,000 or more, or it holds at least 5,000 people in a single such urban area; “outlying counties” join the area when enough of their workers commute to or from the central counties. The building block is the county, which is why area boundaries follow county lines even where a city’s footprint does not.

Areas are named for up to three principal cities and every state they extend into, which is how multi-state names such as “Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV” arise. Metropolitan areas with a single core of 2.5 million or more may be split into metropolitan divisions. The Census Bureau’s page counts 387 metropolitan and 538 micropolitan statistical areas as of July 2023.

Which delineation OEWS uses

The May 2025 OEWS technical notes state that the estimates use the metropolitan area definitions in OMB Bulletin 23-01. BLS adopts OMB’s periodic revisions, and when it does, the counties inside an area can change even if the area’s name does not, so BLS warns that an area’s figures before and after a revision are not strictly comparable. The FAQ records the larger shifts: new definitions in May 2005 after the 2000 census and in May 2015 after the 2010 census, and, from May 2018, the end of separate estimates for metropolitan divisions, after which the eleven large areas that contain divisions are published only at the whole-MSA level.

OEWS does not publish micropolitan areas as such. Counties outside any metropolitan statistical area fall into the nonmetropolitan areas described next.

Nonmetropolitan areas

The nonmetropolitan areas are specific to OEWS. BLS draws them in consultation with the state workforce agencies, grouping each state’s non-metropolitan counties into one or more regions with names like “North Arkansas” or “Alaska nonmetropolitan area.” Their number has changed: the FAQ notes that some smaller ones were combined in May 2018, taking the count from 167 to 134. Together with the metropolitan areas, BLS publishes about 530 areas in all. The spreadsheet of area definitions on the BLS site lists every county in every area for a given May.

On this site nonmetropolitan areas appear as rows in state and occupation-by-state tables and never get a page of their own, because they are statistical constructs rather than places a reader would search for.

Why the state total is not the sum of its areas

A small number of establishments report the state they are in but not the specific area. BLS uses them in the statewide estimate and in no area estimate, so adding a state’s metropolitan and nonmetropolitan employment can fall short of the state figure. Suppression works in the same direction: a cell withheld in one area still counts in the state total.

Multi-state areas

A metropolitan area that crosses a state line is one area in OEWS, with one set of estimates covering all its counties. This site gives such an area one page, under its primary state, and lists it on every state page it touches. The state-level tables, by contrast, stop at the border. A worker in the Kansas City area appears in the Kansas City, MO-KS figures once, but in the Missouri or Kansas state figures depending on the establishment’s address.

Reading area names on this site

The name printed is BLS’s name for that May’s estimates, and the occupation tables use the same names in their highest-paying and largest-employing lists. Where a name changed between releases, as when OMB adds a principal city, the older release’s pages keep the older name; nothing is renamed retroactively. Why metro wages differ takes up what the figures inside these boundaries do and do not show.