Boone County, Indiana

• Income premium: Households earn well above the national median, supporting strong retail and housing markets.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 4.3% below the national average, so the nominal median of $111,250 is worth $116,249 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 16.0 pts, supports knowledge-economy and tech attraction.

• Largest private-sector industry: Transportation and Warehousing employs 14,462 workers (39.6% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $53,359. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 4,217 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $6.4B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Construction averages $77,940 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $24,060, a 3.2x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Warehousing and Storage concentrates at 21.30x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 8 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 89.7% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: freight and distribution. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.
• Attraction whitespace: 4 sub-sectors register LQ < 0.5 with at least 50 employed, candidates for diversification or recruitment depending on labor-market fit.

• In line with national: Home value to income ratio of 3.4x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• High home ownership: 78.8% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Affordable rent tiers: 3 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $59,906 can pay without cost burden (~$1,498/mo), and 37.6% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 69.5% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Boone County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Boone County shows strong potential for warehousing and storage attraction, with a 21.30x concentration and 12,530 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. Freight and distribution accounts for 89.7% of it, with warehousing and storage the largest single sub-sector at 72.5%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.