COVID-19 created unique challenges and opportunities for America’s micropolitan areas—towns with 10,000 to 50,000 residents and the outlying areas with close
economic ties to those communities. In some ways, these challenges and opportunities rewrote the guide to micropolitan economic success, while in other ways
they simply reordered the bullet points on that guide. “Most Dynamic Micropolitans: 2022” tells the story of trends that were subverted during the pandemic and
those that remained.
We ranked the economic dynamism of 536 micropolitan areas across the United States by studying changes in key economic conditions from 2015 through 2020. We also examined one indicator—the change in employment from September 2020 through September 2021—that reflects communities’ ability to rebound from the early months of the pandemic. (Appendix 1 provides details on the methodology.)