Few studies empirically estimate the effects of metropolitan growth on non-metropolitan communities at a national scale. This paper estimates the growth effects of 276 MSAs on population in 1,988 non-metropolitan communities in the United States from 2000-2007. We estimate the distance for growth spillovers from MSAs to non-metropolitan communities and test the assumption that a single MSA influences growth. We compare three methods of weighting cities’ influence: nearest city only, inverse-distance and relative commuting flow to multiple cities. We find the inverse-distance approach provides slightly more reliable and theoretically supportable results than the traditional nearest city approach.