Rice 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 $10,350 (13.9%) 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 $63,925 is worth $70,949 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 9.8 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 422 workers (23.1% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $72,635. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,092 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $949M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Transportation and Warehousing averages $108,738 while Retail Trade averages $23,043, a 4.7x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Pipeline Transportation concentrates at 122.16x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 7 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 54.9% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: resource and agricultural commodities. 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: 77.4% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 15.3% of housing units are vacant, above the Kansas rate of 9.2%, and up from 14.7% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 58.7% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 18.4%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 21.8% of the vacant stock, or 3.3% of all housing units against the 15.3% 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: 3 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $45,083 can pay without cost burden (~$1,127/mo), and 20% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Succession risk is real: 22.7% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Healthy participation: 63.3% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 20.9-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Rice County awards 138 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Rice County shows strong potential for pipeline transportation attraction, with a 122.16x concentration and 141 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 22.7% of the working-age population within 10 years of retirement age.

Most of the employment across the concentrated sub-sectors traces back to a single source of demand. Resource and agricultural commodities accounts for 54.9% of it, with animal production and aquaculture the largest single sub-sector at 34.8%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.