Black Hawk County, Iowa

• 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 $8,642 (11.5%) under the Iowa median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 12.9% below the national average, so the nominal median of $66,417 is worth $76,254 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at metro level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 14.9%, 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 5.4 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 13,166 workers (23.9% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $80,235. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 9,221 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $10B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $90,371 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $20,715, a 4.4x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Machinery Manufacturing concentrates at 10.98x 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 59% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: goods manufacturing. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.
• Attraction whitespace: 7 sub-sectors register LQ < 0.5 with at least 50 employed, candidates for diversification or recruitment depending on labor-market fit.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 2.8x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• Affordable rent tiers: 2 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $40,390 can pay without cost burden (~$1,010/mo), and 46.5% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 66.7% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 15.9-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 5 institutions in Black Hawk County award 3,980 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Black Hawk County shows strong potential for machinery manufacturing attraction, with a 10.98x concentration and 5,513 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. Goods manufacturing accounts for 59% of it, with machinery manufacturing the largest single sub-sector at 30.1%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.