Finney County, Kansas

• 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 $1,266 (1.7%) under the Kansas median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 9.9% below the national average, so the nominal median of $73,009 is worth $81,031 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 16.7 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.
• Young population: Median age of 32 is materially below the U.S. norm, a workforce pipeline asset.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 4,681 workers (33.9% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $59,402. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 3,150 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $3.1B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Wholesale Trade averages $73,335 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $20,561, a 3.6x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Animal Production and Aquaculture concentrates at 12.73x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 9 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 50.3% 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.
• Attraction whitespace: 5 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: 4 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $60,774 can pay without cost burden (~$1,519/mo), and 30.9% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 69.2% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 14.7-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Finney County awards 656 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Finney County shows strong potential for animal production and aquaculture attraction, with a 12.73x concentration and 445 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 50.3% of it, with general merchandise retailers the largest single sub-sector at 25.3%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.