Eagle County, Colorado

• Income premium: Households earn well above the national median, supporting strong retail and housing markets.
• Cost of living erodes income: Local prices run 3.1% above the national average, so the nominal median of $104,096 is worth $100,966 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Talent advantage: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment exceeds the national average by 15.2 pts, supports knowledge-economy and tech attraction.

• Largest private-sector industry: Accommodation and Food Services employs 7,650 workers (25.7% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $46,703. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 3,666 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $6.9B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services averages $105,830 while Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation averages $45,529, a 2.3x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Amusement, Gambling, and Recreation Industries concentrates at 6.76x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 9 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 62.2% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: visitor economy. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.

• Stretched market: Home value to income ratio of 8.1x is well above the ~4.1x national average; attainable workforce housing may be a recruitment friction.
• Elevated vacancy: 35% of housing units are vacant, above the Colorado rate of 8.3%, and down from 44% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 80.6% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 13.2% of the vacant stock, or 4.6% of all housing units against the 35% 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.
• Rent affordability gap: None of the 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $62,080 can pay without cost burden (~$1,552/mo), and 59.9% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 29.2% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Healthy participation: 73.5% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Eagle County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Eagle County shows strong potential for amusement, gambling, and recreation industries attraction, with a 6.76x concentration and 3,005 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally.

Most of the employment across the concentrated sub-sectors traces back to a single source of demand. Visitor economy accounts for 62.2% of it, with food services and drinking places the largest single sub-sector at 28.9%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.