Ware 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 $29,905 (38.7%) 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 $47,448 is worth $49,271 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 21.5%, 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 21.3 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Retail Trade employs 2,120 workers (26.6% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $36,891. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 3,035 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $1.9B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $75,518 while Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation averages $18,000, a 4.2x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Wood Product Manufacturing concentrates at 18.93x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 12 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 37.7% of the employment across them, the largest being health care economy. 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: 18.7% of housing units are vacant, above the Georgia rate of 10.3%, and up from 17.3% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 82.6% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 0.6%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 14.2% of the vacant stock, or 2.7% of all housing units against the 18.7% 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 $29,298 can pay without cost burden (~$732/mo), and 45% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 20.2% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Low participation: 49.9% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 0.6% between 2019 and 2024, from 14,033 to 13,949.
• Short commutes: 20.6-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Ware County awards 1,478 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Ware County shows strong potential for wood product manufacturing attraction, with a 18.93x concentration and 642 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally.

The concentrated base spans wood product manufacturing, forestry and logging, and general merchandise retailers, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 37.7% of the employment across them, the largest being health care economy. Supply-chain recruitment has more than one demand base to work from.