Widening Divide: Rural Georgia’s population decline vs. Atlanta’s growth

A deepening demographic crisis now haunts rural Georgia and offers one of the starkest pictures of the widening divide between the greater Atlanta area and the rest of the state.  In less than 20 years, based on data maintained by the state’s Department of Public Health (DPH), the number of Georgia counties reporting more deaths than births exploded from less than 20 to nearly 100 of the state’s 159 counties.

This story first appeared in The Daily Yonder.

In fact, the number of counties reporting more deaths than births peaked at 124 in 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 spike, and the combined 130 counties outside the 29-county Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) posted nearly 10,000 more deaths than births during the three-year Covid period from 2020 through 2022.  

The Georgia situation is, of course, part of a larger national trend that started around 2010 and at least coincided with the Great Recession.  A February 2022 paper by Kenneth Johnson at the University of New Hampshire reported that, for the first time ever, rural America lost population between 2010 and 2020.  “The loss was minimal,” he wrote, “just 289,000 (-0.6 percent) out of 46 million, but it is the first decade-long rural population loss in history.”  

The Economic Research Service (ERS) at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) found the same pattern in a June 2025 paper by Justin B. Winikoff.  “Natural decrease is now widespread across nonmetro counties, with 1,492 nonmetro counties (76 percent) seeing a natural decrease between July 2023 and June 2024,” Winikoff wrote.  “Natural decrease should be expected to continue because of population aging.”

While the Georgia situation is part of a bigger picture, it almost certainly offers one of the starkest examples of the widening divide between urban and rural America.   The high-level numbers are jarring enough.  In 1994 – the earliest year for which the state’s public health agency has data – the difference in the number of births in the 29-county Atlanta MSA and the other 130 counties was relatively modest – just over 3,500.  

But that difference grew steadily through the 1990s and early 2000s, peaking at 22,169 in 2006.  In other words, the difference in the number of births between the Atlanta MSA and the rest of the state grew more than six-fold in just over a decade.

Deaths were also mounting, of course, in the Atlanta region thanks to sheer population growth and in the rest of the state (and rural areas in particular) because of aging populations.  Outside Atlanta, the number of births and deaths had been converging rapidly since the onset of the Great Recession, and the two lines crossed when Covid hit.  From 2020 through 2022, the 130 counties outside Atlanta reported nearly 10,000 more deaths than births.

Since then, non-Atlanta has gotten back into positive territory – but just barely.  And the overall picture is hardly encouraging.  In 2024, as this table shows, Georgia recorded just under 30,000 more births than deaths, but nearly all those excess births were in the Atlanta MSA.   

Tracking the data at a state level is startling enough, but mapping county-by-county behavior over time suggests nothing so much as the relentless spread of a terrifying socioeconomic cancer.  

In 1994, the earliest year for which DPH has data, only 12 Georgia counties recorded more deaths than births.  And, as this map shows, the only real regional patterns were in three “mountain counties” – Fannin, Towns, and Union – on the North Carolina line and two adjoining counties – Quitman and Clay – hard on the Alabama line in southwest Georgia.

The picture didn’t change much over the next 15 years.  As this chart shows, the number of Georgia counties reporting more deaths than births remained below 20 for this entire period.  At the onset of the Great Recession in 2007, the number of counties in this unhappy category was down to twelve; the previous year – 2006 – the number of counties reporting more deaths than births was eight, an all-time low for the period.

But by 2015, it had spiked to 60 counties (with two more that broke even, with the same number of births and deaths), and several clear regional patterns were taking shape.  

The group of mountain counties in northern Georgia’s border area had doubled, and this demographic malady was beginning to spread down Georgia’s eastern border with South Carolina and into east-central Georgia.  In deep southwest Georgia, the number of upside-down counties had quadrupled since 1994, and a long chain of counties where burials outnumbered new babies was taking shape across the belly of the state.  Many of these counties had been home to textile and manufacturing plants that were hammered by NAFTA starting in the 1990s.

Largely unaffected by this trend were the Metro Atlanta area – shown on the map above as the sprawling, wide-open expanse in the northern part of the state – and deep southeast Georgia.  

But southeast Georgia’s days were numbered.  Over the next few years, the number of counties reporting more deaths continued to rise and hit 78 in 2019, the last pre-Covid year.  

Two years later – the worst year of the Covid period – the number of counties with more burials than babies topped out at 124.  Of the 35 remaining counties still reporting net births, only 14 were outside the Atlanta MSA; combined, those non-Atlanta counties produced only 4,008 net births.  The 21 Atlanta MSA counties in this category produced 21,136 more births than deaths in 2021.

It’s worth noting that the damage was not confined to purely rural counties in 2021.  The important regional hub counties anchored by Macon, Albany, Brunswick, and Rome all fell into negative territory that year.

Post-Covid (or at least the worst of Covid so far), the number of counties in negative territory dropped back to 92 in 2023 and ticked up to 94 in ’24, but that should hardly be viewed as good news.  That drop merely puts this trend back on its pre-Covid trajectory, and it’s not at all clear that this trend will stall out anytime soon, let alone begin to reverse itself.

All data charts and maps were sourced from Georgia’s Department of Public Health (DPH).

Up next: A look at rural Georgia’s economic decline and how it presaged these population trends.

The post Widening Divide: Rural Georgia’s population decline vs. Atlanta’s growth appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.