Wisconsin is more rural than most people realize. According to a 2024 analysis by the Rural Policy Institute, roughly 41% of Wisconsin’s population lives in communities classified as rural or rural-adjacent — a share that reflects the state’s deep agricultural heritage and the hundreds of small cities, towns, and townships that give Wisconsin its geographic and cultural character. These communities are not afterthoughts. They are the backbone of the state’s farming economy, manufacturing base, and natural resource industries. And they are facing a convergence of serious, compounding challenges — population loss, broadband gaps, healthcare shortages, workforce deficits, and housing constraints — that state policy has not yet fully confronted with the seriousness they deserve.
📋 What Wisconsin Families Need to Know
- Two-thirds of rural Wisconsin counties lost population between 2010 and 2018, according to Forward Analytics research — and researchers warned at the time that the trend was likely to continue or worsen.
- As of 2024, Wisconsin had an estimated 180,109 locations without basic broadband service and an additional 195,224 locations that were underserved, according to the 2024 Governor’s Task Force on Broadband Access.
- Rural Wisconsin faces acute shortages across the healthcare workforce — from primary care physicians and nurses to behavioral health providers and dentists — with many counties designated as federal Health Professional Shortage Areas.
- Workforce shortages are particularly sharp in rural areas, where the combination of an aging population, youth out-migration, and limited housing supply creates a cycle that is difficult to reverse without deliberate state investment.
- Wisconsin’s rural communities are not monolithic — some are growing through tourism and remote-work migration, while others are in sustained decline. State policy needs to account for that variation, not apply a single one-size-fits-all response.
Challenges Facing Rural Wisconsin: Population Decline and the Demographic Squeeze
The most fundamental challenge facing rural Wisconsin communities is demographic: people are leaving, and not enough are arriving or being born to replace them. A Wisconsin Public Radio report on Forward Analytics research found that two-thirds of rural Wisconsin counties lost population between 2010 and 2018 — a dramatic deterioration from the 1990s, when rural Wisconsin counties were actually growing faster than urban ones. The counties that lost the most ground lost an average of 2.2% of their residents over that eight-year window, with places like Price County and Iron County recording losses of 5.4% and 4.1% respectively.
Wisconsin has fared somewhat better than many Midwest rural peers — the state’s diversified rural economy, which blends agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism, has provided cushion that single-industry rural economies lack. The Wisconsin Policy Forum has documented that rural Wisconsin is outpacing rural peers in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and other Midwest states on population retention. But relative advantage isn’t the same as stability, and the trajectory is not encouraging. Slowing population growth has given way to outright decline in much of the state, and the demographic forces driving that shift — declining birth rates, an aging population, and the persistent gravitational pull of metropolitan job markets for young adults — are not reversing on their own.
The consequences of population decline compound quickly. Forward Analytics director Dale Knapp has noted that declining populations trigger declining numbers of jobs and businesses — a feedback loop that makes it harder for communities to retain the remaining residents and harder still to attract new ones. Schools lose enrollment and face consolidation pressures. Local tax bases shrink. Essential services become harder to sustain. The communities most affected are often those already furthest from economic centers, with the fewest alternative assets to draw on.
The Broadband Gap: Rural Wisconsin’s Digital Infrastructure Crisis
In the modern economy, broadband internet is infrastructure in the same fundamental sense as roads and electricity. It determines whether a rural business can reach customers outside its zip code, whether a student can complete coursework online, whether a patient can access a telehealth appointment, and whether a remote worker can choose to live in a small Wisconsin town rather than relocating to a city. The gap in broadband access between rural and urban Wisconsin is not a minor inconvenience — it is a structural disadvantage that affects nearly every dimension of rural economic and community life.
The scale of the problem is quantified in the 2024 Governor’s Task Force on Broadband Access report, which drew on federal mapping data to estimate that Wisconsin has approximately 180,109 locations without any qualifying broadband service — defined as a minimum of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload — and a further 195,224 locations that are underserved relative to the 100/20 Mbps standard the Task Force identified as the appropriate target for adequate service. These are not scattered individual households. They represent entire stretches of rural Wisconsin where residents and businesses are functionally cut off from the digital economy.
Research from the UW–Madison Division of Extension underscores how dramatically broadband access diverges between Wisconsin’s urban and rural areas: while more than 95% of urban Wisconsin households have broadband access, in the state’s most rural counties just 63% of households are connected. And the economic consequences are measurable. A 2024 study cited by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, drawing on Center on Rural Innovation research, found that rural counties with low broadband adoption lose on average three or more businesses each year, while counties with high broadband adoption saw an 18% growth in per capita income between 2020 and 2022.
Wisconsin does have a significant opportunity on this front. The federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, allocated more than $1 billion to Wisconsin specifically to extend broadband to unserved and underserved locations. The state’s BEAD subgranting process is underway, with an approved plan and a pipeline of applicants. Whether that federal investment is deployed effectively — reaching the communities most in need rather than those easiest to serve — depends directly on the quality of state agency oversight and executive leadership driving the process.
Broadband as a Prerequisite for Every Other Rural Solution
It is difficult to overstate how much broadband connectivity is a prerequisite for the solutions to other rural challenges. Telehealth — the most scalable tool for addressing rural healthcare provider shortages — doesn’t work without reliable internet. Remote work opportunities that might allow young workers to stay in rural Wisconsin rather than relocating to cities require connectivity. Distance learning and workforce training programs that could help rural residents access new careers depend on it. The broadband gap is not one challenge among many for rural Wisconsin — it is the foundational infrastructure challenge that either enables or forecloses progress on nearly every other front.
Rural Workforce Shortages: Not Enough Workers, Not Enough Housing
Wisconsin’s rural communities face a workforce challenge that is structural and self-reinforcing. The combination of an aging population — as the Baby Boom generation moves into retirement — and steady out-migration of younger workers to metropolitan areas has left many rural employers facing persistent labor shortages that can’t be resolved simply by raising wages. The workers aren’t there. And in many rural communities, even when employers want to recruit from outside, the absence of affordable housing makes it difficult for workers to move in.
The USDA Economic Research Service’s rural population data shows that nonmetro America is aging at a faster rate than metro areas — in 2023, 21% of the nonmetro population was over age 65, compared to 17% of the metro population. The working-age population in rural areas has been declining since 2010. That demographic math creates a shrinking labor supply precisely when the healthcare, social services, and caregiving demands of an aging rural population are growing — a direct and intensifying collision between workforce availability and community need.
Housing compounds the workforce problem in rural communities experiencing growth pressures. Tourism-driven counties in northern Wisconsin — areas like Bayfield County — have seen an influx of new residents and visitors, but as PBS Wisconsin has reported, the same communities struggling to attract workers are also struggling to supply the housing stock those workers would need. Seasonal and short-term rental demand pushes housing costs up and available inventory down in ways that make it harder for year-round working families to find and afford places to live. It is a version of the affordability crisis playing out in Madison and Milwaukee, adapted to a very different market context — but no less real for the workers and families experiencing it.
The Winners and Losers Dynamic in Rural Wisconsin
One of the most important and underappreciated dimensions of rural Wisconsin’s challenges is that the state’s rural communities are not all facing the same situation. The Wisconsin Policy Forum’s analysis describes a genuine “winners and losers” dynamic emerging among rural Wisconsin’s regions. Counties with natural amenities — lakes, forests, proximity to recreational opportunities — have benefited from pandemic-era migration and a growing tourism economy. They are growing, sometimes rapidly, and their challenges are ones of managed growth rather than managed decline.
The counties that are struggling are those without those geographic advantages: communities that are geographically isolated from metro areas, without strong tourism draws, and where the economic base has been eroding for decades as manufacturing has contracted, agricultural employment has consolidated, and the multiplier effects of a shrinking population have reduced the consumer demand that sustains local retail, services, and institutions. These communities don’t need the same policy response as a booming lakefront county — they need targeted, differentiated investment that addresses the specific structural conditions driving their decline.
State policy that treats rural Wisconsin as a monolith will miss this distinction and misallocate whatever resources it does deploy. Effective rural policy requires county-level understanding of the challenges and tailored approaches that reflect the difference between a community managing rapid growth and one managing gradual decline. The UW–Madison Division of Extension’s 2024 Wisconsin Rural Economic Summit brought together researchers and practitioners to examine exactly this variation — the kind of rigorous, place-specific analysis that should inform gubernatorial leadership on rural investment.
What State Government Owes Rural Wisconsin Communities
The challenges facing rural Wisconsin — population decline, broadband gaps, healthcare shortages, workforce deficits, and housing constraints — are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. No single intervention resolves them, and no governor can reverse demographic forces that have been building for decades. But that’s not the same as saying state government is powerless, or that the choices made in Madison don’t matter to the family farm in Vilas County or the small manufacturer in Clark County or the hospital in Rusk County that’s one provider departure away from losing a critical service line.
What state government owes rural Wisconsin is this: showing up with resources proportionate to need, policies tailored to the diversity of rural conditions, and the long-term commitment to invest in infrastructure — broadband, healthcare, housing, workforce pipelines — that the private market alone will not build in places where the return on investment doesn’t pencil out at short-term commercial rates. The Office of Rural Prosperity and Wisconsin Office of Rural Health both exist because the state has recognized, at least in principle, that rural communities require dedicated institutional support. The question is whether that recognition translates into adequate funding and genuine executive priority — or whether it remains a symbolic gesture while the structural challenges continue to compound.
Medicaid expansion — which Wisconsin has still not fully adopted — would extend healthcare coverage to rural residents who currently lack it and bolster the financial viability of the rural hospitals and clinics that serve them. Broadband investment, executed well, can unlock remote work opportunities and telehealth access. Workforce housing investment can give employers the ability to recruit and retain the workers rural communities need to function. Graduate medical education investment can build a pipeline of physicians who choose rural practice. These aren’t abstract policy ideas. They are the specific, documented tools that can move the needle on rural Wisconsin’s most pressing challenges — if state leadership chooses to use them.
David Crowley and the Commitment Rural Wisconsin Has Earned
Rural Wisconsin communities have too often heard from candidates who show up at county fairs, acknowledge the challenges, and return to the state capitol without translating that acknowledgment into durable policy investment. What rural Wisconsin needs from its next governor is not sympathy — it’s governance. It’s a budgetary commitment to rural broadband buildout, healthcare workforce development, and rural housing that matches the scale of the need. It’s a willingness to engage with the complexity of varied rural conditions rather than applying uniform solutions to communities with fundamentally different challenges. And it’s an understanding that the long-term economic health of Wisconsin — including its urban centers — depends on rural communities that can sustain themselves, attract workers, and remain viable.
David Crowley has spent his career governing for communities that have often been overlooked by state policy — communities where the gap between what government promises and what it delivers is visible in real and immediate ways. That governing orientation is precisely what rural Wisconsin needs from a governor: the discipline to follow through, the willingness to invest where the private market won’t, and the understanding that communities at the margins of the state’s political and economic attention are not a problem to be managed but a responsibility to be met. To learn more about David Crowley’s campaign for Wisconsin Governor, visit crowleyforwigov.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are rural Wisconsin communities losing population?
Rural population decline in Wisconsin is driven by several intersecting forces: declining birth rates, the out-migration of younger workers and families to metropolitan areas with more diverse job opportunities, and an aging population that produces more deaths than births in many counties. Forward Analytics research found that two-thirds of rural Wisconsin counties lost population between 2010 and 2018, and the Wisconsin Policy Forum has noted that while Wisconsin’s rural communities have held up better than many Midwest peers, the slowing of growth into outright decline in many areas reflects demographic pressures unlikely to reverse without deliberate policy intervention. Geographic isolation, limited broadband access, workforce housing shortages, and healthcare access gaps all make it harder to retain residents and attract new ones — reinforcing the underlying trend.
What is Wisconsin doing about rural broadband access?
Wisconsin is in the process of deploying over $1 billion in federal BEAD program funding to extend broadband to unserved and underserved locations across the state. The 2024 Governor’s Task Force on Broadband Access estimated approximately 180,000 unserved and 195,000 underserved broadband locations in Wisconsin as of 2024. The state’s BEAD subgranting process, managed by the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin, received 30 approved applicants as of early 2025. The state’s goal is to reach all homes and businesses with high-speed broadband service — at least 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload — by 2028 or 2029, according to the Task Force. Progress toward that goal depends on effective state oversight of the subgranting process and continued investment beyond BEAD funding where gaps remain.
What are the biggest economic challenges for rural Wisconsin?
The biggest economic challenges for rural Wisconsin communities include workforce shortages driven by population aging and youth out-migration, gaps in broadband access that limit business competitiveness and remote work options, housing supply deficits that make it difficult to recruit workers, and healthcare access barriers that affect quality of life and employer recruitment alike. According to Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation research, rural counties with low broadband adoption lose on average three or more businesses per year. The Wisconsin Policy Forum has also documented a widening “winners and losers” gap between rural communities with tourism and amenity advantages and those that are geographically isolated with eroding economic bases — a divergence that requires differentiated state policy responses rather than uniform approaches.
