Dallas County, Arkansas

• Income gap: Households earn meaningfully less than the national median, which directly affects retail demand, housing absorption, and tax base.
• Below the state median: Median household income runs $18,273 (30.1%) under the Arkansas median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 13.1% below the national average, so the nominal median of $42,500 is worth $48,907 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 24.4 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.
• Aging population: Median age of 45 is materially above the U.S. norm; succession planning and senior-services demand are real factors.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 519 workers (41.6% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $56,157. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 321 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $340M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $72,133 while Retail Trade averages $29,965, a 2.4x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Forestry and Logging concentrates at 91.44x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 4 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 55.9% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: health care economy. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 2.3x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 72.6% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 26.3% of housing units are vacant, above the Arkansas rate of 13.5%, and down from 31.7% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 71.6% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 13.6% of the vacant stock, or 3.6% of all housing units against the 26.3% headline vacancy rate. That is the figure to plan an incoming employer's housing against, and the gap between the two is the redevelopment and conversion opportunity.
• Affordable rent tiers: 1 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $25,410 can pay without cost burden (~$635/mo), and 34.1% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Succession risk is real: 26.8% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Low participation: 52.5% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 11.2% between 2019 and 2024, from 3,086 to 2,740.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Dallas County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Dallas County shows strong potential for forestry and logging attraction, with a 91.44x concentration and 74 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 26.8% of the working-age population within 10 years of retirement age.

Most of the employment across the concentrated sub-sectors traces back to a single source of demand. Health care economy accounts for 55.9% of it, all of it in nursing and residential care facilities. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.