Introduction: since 2015, many municipalities have started to work out development strategies, although the current legislation is not biding the latter to be mandatory strategic planning documents at this level of governance. At the same time, regional authorities themselves often initiate processes of strategy development in municipalities, thus making actual the research into the regional authorities approach in this process. Aims: to identify regional approaches to working out socio-economic development strategies in municipalities. Methods: combination of sociological, comparative and documentary analysis methods. Results: three groups of criteria are proposed for inter-regional comparisons: the institutional, reflecting the degree of the municipal strategy meeting the presentday requirements; the organizational, determining the strategy structure and duration, as well as the specific guidelines; the content ones, reflecting the content and specific requirements to building individual blocks within the strategy. The comparative analysis has been carried out based on the guidelines produced in 11 regions of the Russian Federation, in which the regional authorities initiated development strategies at the municipal level. Using the survey results for Sverdlovsk region local governments representatives and additional in-depth interviews on the regional government guidelines for strategy development, the main arguments for and against the existing methods of regional authorities participation in municipal strategic planning have been identified. Conclusion: the study confirmed the hypothesis outlining a variety of regional approaches to municipal strategies development, namely: those covering the entire cycle of strategic planning; focused only on the strategy; not providing for independent strategies but regulating the participation of municipalities in a regional strategy development. A differentiated approach is recommended to be used when extending strategies to the municipal level.