The article is devoted to the development of a methodology for assessing the development potential and promising functional roles of rural agglomerations of the Russian Federation. The article reveals the main elements of assessing the economic potential that ensures the effective development of rural areas, the development of which contributes to the successful implementation of rural agglomerations. The economic development and growth of economic indicators of rural agglomerations is possible only if the functional roles of the territories that make up the agglomeration are effectively fulfilled. In this regard, the article presents an analysis of the authors' approaches to assessing the potential of rural areas for economic development, provides a list of functional roles, and describes a method for ranking economic indicators. The methodology was tested using the example of municipalities of the Voronezh region that are part of a rural agglomeration. The purpose of this article is to develop a method for assessing the development potential of rural agglomerations and determining their promising functional roles. To achieve this goal, tasks such as analyzing the authors' approaches in the scientific community to the methodology for assessing the potential of rural development have been solved, based on the analysis, to form the main aspects of the methodology for assessing the potential of economic development of rural agglomerations by fulfilling their assigned functions, to propose a method to determine the potential of rural areas to assign them functional roles. To write the article, the methods of analyzing theoretical data and statistical information, the ranking method, the method of systematization and classification were used.