Wilcox 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 $23,215 (30.0%) 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 $54,138 is worth $56,218 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 21.9%, 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 20.3 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.
• Aging population: Median age of 42 is materially above the U.S. norm; succession planning and senior-services demand are real factors.

• Largest private-sector industry: Health Care and Social Assistance employs 138 workers (41.9% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $38,164. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 526 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $219M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting averages $40,149 while Manufacturing averages $17,058, a 2.4x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Forestry and Logging concentrates at 34.74x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 6 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 54.5% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: resident household spending. 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 1.6x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 74.7% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 24.5% of housing units are vacant, above the Georgia rate of 10.3%, and down from 26.9% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 80.8% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 13.7%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 0.7% of the vacant stock, or 0.2% of all housing units against the 24.5% 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 $26,786 can pay without cost burden (~$670/mo), and 32% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 9.4% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Low participation: 38.5% labor force participation against a labor force that grew 0.4% between 2019 and 2024, so workforce development programs may unlock additional supply.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Wilcox County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Wilcox County shows strong potential for forestry and logging attraction, with a 34.74x concentration and 8 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. Resident household spending accounts for 54.5% of it, with credit intermediation and related activities the largest single sub-sector at 26.4%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.