Bacon County, Georgia

• 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 $32,659 (42.2%) under the Georgia median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 3.7% below the national average, so the nominal median of $44,694 is worth $46,411 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 24.5%, the rate is in economically distressed territory and supports federal funding narratives (CDFI, NMTC, EDA).
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 25.3 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 606 workers (30.4% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $50,285. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 695 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $508M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $72,419 while Real Estate and Rental and Leasing averages $25,218, a 2.9x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Support Activities for Agriculture and Forestry concentrates at 13.35x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 7 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 38.6% of the employment across them, the largest being goods manufacturing. Demand reaches this base from more than one market rather than from a single one.

• 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.
• Elevated vacancy: 13% of housing units are vacant, above the Georgia rate of 10.3%, and down from 19.2% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 67.9% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 4.3%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 11.5% of the vacant stock, or 1.5% of all housing units against the 13% headline vacancy rate. Absorbable supply for an incoming employer is thin, 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 $25,208 can pay without cost burden (~$630/mo), and 28.7% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 13.3% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Low participation: 50.8% labor force participation against a labor force that grew 2.6% between 2019 and 2024, so workforce development programs may unlock additional supply.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Bacon County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Bacon County shows strong potential for support activities for agriculture and forestry attraction, with a 13.35x concentration and 116 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally.

The concentrated base spans support activities for agriculture and forestry, crop production, and food manufacturing, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 38.6% of the employment across them, the largest being goods manufacturing. Supply-chain recruitment has more than one demand base to work from.