Caddo Parish, Louisiana

• 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 $10,051 (16.5%) under the Louisiana median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 15.2% below the national average, so the nominal median of $50,705 is worth $59,794 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at metro level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 22.4%, 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 9.7 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Health Care and Social Assistance employs 24,350 workers (30.8% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $64,550. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 17,359 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $17.9B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Wholesale Trade averages $74,882 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $22,714, a 3.3x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Support Activities for Mining concentrates at 8.74x 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 72.6% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: health care economy. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.
• Attraction whitespace: 4 sub-sectors register LQ < 0.5 with at least 50 employed, candidates for diversification or recruitment depending on labor-market fit.

• In line with national: Home value to income ratio of 3.5x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• Elevated vacancy: 15% of housing units are vacant, above the Louisiana rate of 14.4%, and down from 15.3% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 60.8% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 8.1%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 28.6% of the vacant stock, or 4.3% of all housing units against the 15% 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.
• Rent affordability gap: None of the 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $31,161 can pay without cost burden (~$779/mo), and 48.3% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 28.2% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Low participation: 56.9% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 6.6% between 2019 and 2024, from 111,275 to 103,915.
• Short commutes: 20.4-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: the 6 largest of 11 institutions in Caddo Parish award 5,338 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Caddo Parish shows strong potential for support activities for mining attraction, with a 8.74x concentration and 1,644 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. Health care economy accounts for 72.6% of it, all of it in hospitals. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.