Saline 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 $8,853 (11.9%) 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 $65,422 is worth $72,610 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 6.6 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Health Care and Social Assistance employs 5,622 workers (23.9% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $61,103. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 4,166 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $3.9B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $77,208 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $20,627, a 3.7x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Machinery Manufacturing concentrates at 5.84x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 5 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 73.8% 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: 3 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 2.7x 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 $39,643 can pay without cost burden (~$991/mo), and 35.9% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Succession risk is real: 23.9% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Healthy participation: 67% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 15.8-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 3 institutions in Saline County award 685 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Saline County shows strong potential for machinery manufacturing attraction, with a 5.84x concentration and 1,249 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 23.9% 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. Goods manufacturing accounts for 73.8% of it, with machinery manufacturing the largest single sub-sector at 40.5%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.