San Francisco County, California

• Income premium: Households earn well above the national median, supporting strong retail and housing markets.
• Cost of living erodes income: Local prices run 15.6% above the national average, so the nominal median of $140,970 is worth $121,946 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at metro level, not county level.
• Talent advantage: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment exceeds the national average by 24.6 pts, supports knowledge-economy and tech attraction.

• Largest private-sector industry: Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services employs 128,489 workers (25.2% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $345,972. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 110,437 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $268.3B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $407,326 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $49,480, a 8.2x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Web Search Portals, Libraries, and Archives concentrates at 13.32x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 14 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 44.7% of the employment across them, the largest being business and professional services. Demand reaches this base from more than one market rather than from a single one.
• Attraction whitespace: 5 sub-sectors register LQ < 0.5 with at least 50 employed and clear the local siting screen on energy cost, freight access and land base, candidates for diversification or recruitment depending on labor-market fit.

• Stretched market: Home value to income ratio of 9.9x is well above the ~4.1x national average; attainable workforce housing may be a recruitment friction.
• Renter-majority market: 38.2% owner-occupied; flexible labor mobility but consider home-buying pipeline if attracting families.
• Elevated vacancy: 12.2% of housing units are vacant, above the California rate of 7.5%, and up from 8.9% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is units for rent at 32.1% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 16.9%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 35.2% of the vacant stock, or 4.3% of all housing units against the 12.2% 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 $112,757 can pay without cost burden (~$2,819/mo), and 37.8% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 69.6% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Talent pipeline: the 6 largest of 15 institutions in San Francisco County award 18,744 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

San Francisco County shows strong potential for web search portals, libraries, and archives attraction, with a 13.32x concentration and 10,345 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally.

The concentrated base spans web search portals, libraries, and archives, computing infrastructure providers and data processing, and internet publishing and broadcasting, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 44.7% of the employment across them, the largest being business and professional services. Supply-chain recruitment has more than one demand base to work from.