Pratt 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 $8,253 (11.1%) 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 $66,022 is worth $73,276 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 9.9 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Retail Trade employs 696 workers (23.9% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $37,121. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,071 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $745M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $86,396 while Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation averages $20,402, a 4.2x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Support Activities for Mining concentrates at 30.17x 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, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 49.5% of the employment across them, the largest being resident household spending. Demand reaches this base from more than one market rather than from a single one.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 1.7x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 73.2% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 20.5% of housing units are vacant, above the Kansas rate of 9.2%, and up from 18.5% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 53.3% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 16.1%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 27.6% of the vacant stock, or 5.7% of all housing units against the 20.5% headline vacancy rate. That is the figure to plan an incoming employer's housing against, and the gap between the two is the redevelopment and conversion opportunity.
• Affordable rent tiers: 2 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $33,232 can pay without cost burden (~$831/mo), and 39.8% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Low participation: 59% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 8.5% between 2019 and 2024, from 4,740 to 4,338.
• Short commutes: 12.2-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Pratt County awards 297 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Pratt County shows strong potential for support activities for mining attraction, with a 30.17x concentration and 215 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally.

The concentrated base spans support activities for mining, crop production, and oil and gas extraction, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 49.5% of the employment across them, the largest being resident household spending. Supply-chain recruitment has more than one demand base to work from.