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Land‐use change significantly contributes to biodiversity loss, invasive species spread, changes in biogeochemical cycles, and the loss of ecosystem services. Planning for a sustainable future requires a thorough understanding of expected land use at the fine spatial scales relevant for modeling many ecological processes and at dimensions appropriate for regional or national‐level policy making. Our goal was to construct and parameterize an econometric model of land‐use change to project future land use to the year 2051 at a fine spatial scale across the conterminous United States under several alternative land‐use policy scenarios. We parameterized the econometric model of land‐use change with the National Resource Inventory (NRI) 1992 and 1997 land‐use data for 844 000 sample points. Land‐use transitions were estimated for five land‐use classes (cropland, pasture, range, forest, and urban). We …