lvl 40 in a small town

My village has a stop and a gym and I'm a lvl 37.5. Before raids the next highest level in a 2-hour radius was 34 until raids came around. To be successful you can either put tons of money into the game or gas to drive to a larger town. I'd have to drive 40 minutes to a town with 10 stops, fill my bag, then use that for the week. I've really slowed down however since raids now because all my hard effort seems in vain as I can easily catch all the guys I walked so far for.

I hatched almost 1200 eggs and im level 35 (500k xp farmed atm and more than 200 evolutions stocked waiting for a double xp event).
My town are bigger than urs ~55k ppl but we only have two gyms and 5 pokéstops.

It really depends how fanatical you are. I Reached level 32 in the games first two months in my 10K town. Used to travel to a City nearly every day to do most grinding, would have been impossible to achieve that level if i'd only stayed in my town.

Can certainly be level 40 if you're prepared to travel lots to do your grinding.

There's a guy in my discord group (which covers a few neighboring small communities) with nearly 40 million xp. He lives in an incredibly small town (<5000) and works in a bigger town (~10000) with roughly 10 gyms currently (fewer before the rework). He has done nearly 90% of his playing in our small towns. He has also spent a ton of money on the game.

Otherwise, there is another recent level 40, a couple 39, and 6-10 level 37+. Most of these higher levels work in bigger cities and play quite a bit there.

I am level 35 and have played almost exclusively in my own town without spending any real money.