Montana Isn't One of the Top 3 Most Rural States

I just learned what it means to be "rural" in the United States and what I learned broke my brain. Montana isn't as rural as we might all assume it is.

What Does it Mean to Be Rural?

It's complicated.

According to the World Population Review, and they admit this can be debatable, it has to do with how the Census Bureau determines how many people have to live in the same area for it to be considered "urban." Rural then is a matter of how few people live in an area together. Not how few people an area has. This becomes important later.

So How 'Rural' Is Montana?

When you look at Montana's numbers in this study on rural populations, Montana is not the most rural state, or even in the top 3.

Montana is the 5th most rural state.
Montana had 46.6% rural population for 2020
Montana is 2nd for rural land area

Surprisingly, these are the top 4:

#4 Mississippi
#3 West Virginia
#2 Maine
#1 Vermont

But, if you look at just rural land area, Montana is tied for #2.

#1 Alaska
#2 Montana
#2 Wyoming
#3 North Dakota
#3 North Dakota

WHY: Here's my educated guess based on this data why Montana isn't considered more rural even though we have the second most rural land area in the country: a place can't be rural (according to this definition) if no one lives there.

That's the beautiful reality in Montana: we have so much open space that there are plenty of places where nobody lives. But because when a place is considered rural, it's considered a place where people live but not enough people to make it urban, that's how you get Vermont as the 'most rural' state in the country according to Stacker via World Population Review.