Bend MSA Adds Two Counties
March 11, 2025The Bend Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) is now three counties: Crook County, Deschutes County, and Jefferson County. Previously the Bend-Redmond MSA included only one county: Deschutes County. Also, the old name for the MSA was “Bend-Redmond, OR MSA”. The title was shortened based on the federal Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) naming rules related to the latest population and commuting patterns data for the cities.
This change in what counties are included in the Bend MSA will result in changes to Bend MSA’s labor market information. For example, the Current Employment Statistics (CES) numbers, starting with the publication of the January 2025 data, will include the total of all jobs in the three counties combined, whereas previously the CES data for Bend-Redmond MSA included only the employment for Deschutes County.
The reason for the change is that periodically, the federal government’s Office of OMB reviews all metropolitan areas throughout the country and possibly changes the geographic definition of each area. This time around, the OMB added two counties to Bend MSA. None of Oregon’s other MSAs received a change in which counties were assigned to that particular MSA.
Here is OMB’s succinct definition:
Metropolitan Statistical Areas have at least one urban area of 50,000 or more population, plus adjacent territory that has a high degree of social and economic integration with the core as measured by commuting ties.
More specifically, on July 21, 2023, the OMB announced an update to statistical area delineations based on the application of the new standards to data from the 2020 Census. A copy of this announcement is available through the OMB website at OMB Bulletin 23-01.
This new definition for Bend MSA impacts CES data and it also impacts all other labor market information data published on the Oregon website, QualityInfo.org, and on the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics website BLS.gov
The Bend MSA’s CES data will include the same published industries as before. The top-line number, “total nonfarm payroll employment” will be approximately 112,000 jobs. This will be comprised of about 7,500 jobs for Crook County, 6,700 jobs for Jefferson County, and 98,000 jobs for Deschutes County. Therefore, Deschutes County will account for about 87% of total nonfarm payroll employment in the Bend MSA. Crook County will account for about 7%, and Jefferson County will make up 6% of the total.
Our website, QualityInfo.org, will still publish CES data for each of the three separate counties as well as the Bend MSA as a whole. Look for those numbers by selecting a particular county in the geographic dropdown list.
The CES data for the new three-county Bend MSA will be revised back to the beginning of the timeseries on QualityInfo.org, which is back to the year 2001.
For more details or questions please contact the author of this publication, the regional economist, or the workforce analyst who covers Bend MSA. You can find their contact information here: https://qualityinfo.org/web/guest/east-cascades