Job Growth Focused on Largest Cities

National employment has been on the rise since 2010, but most U.S. counties still have fewer jobs today than they did when the Great Recession started in 2008.  Half of all metropolitan counties (580 out of 1,165) had fewer jobs in 2015 than they did in 2008. And a stunning 67 percent of nonmetropolitan counties (1,326 out of 1,969) had fewer jobs last year than they did before the recession. All the job growth has been in metropolitan America. But a closer look at Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that all the gains occurred in large metropolitan areas – ones that have at least 250,000 residents. And most of the growth occurred in metro areas with 1 million or more residents. These largest metro areas had 5.6 percent more jobs in 2015 than they did just before the recession. At the other end of the county-size spectrum, the result is flipped. In nonmetropolitan counties where fewer than 20,000 residents lived in a city, there were about 5 percent fewer jobs last year than before the recession.