The article is devoted to the issues of rural settlements sustainable development. It is shown that the key task of ensuring the sustainable development of such settlements is creation of effective monitoring systems. A review of existing studies on sustainable development of territories is given. It is shown that, despite the variety of scientific works devoted to various methods of assessing the region's economic condition, the problem of sustainable development assessment of rural settlements remained outside these studies.The authors proposed a new indicators system for the sustainable development of rural settlements, which was tested on the example of the Diveevo district, located in the southern part of the Nizhny Novgorod region. The analysis of the socio-economic status of six rural settlements in the area showed a generally negative dynamics of their sustainable development. A similar dynamics, apparently, is observed in a number of other rural areas of the country. One of the possible mechanisms for increasing the level of socio-economic development of rural settlements is the widespread introduction of digital economy. An example of successful digitalization experience of the Michurinsk rural settlement of Khabarovsk Territory is given.