Lafourche Parish, Louisiana

• Income gap: Households earn meaningfully less than the national median, which directly affects retail demand, housing absorption, and tax base.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 14.9% below the national average, so the nominal median of $63,135 is worth $74,189 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at metro level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 17%, 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 14.6 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Transportation and Warehousing employs 6,022 workers (22% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $110,398. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 5,291 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $6.3B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction averages $148,392 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $19,359, a 7.7x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Water Transportation concentrates at 119.77x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 11 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 29% of the employment across them, the largest being freight and distribution. Demand reaches this base from more than one market rather than from a single one.
• 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 3.1x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• High home ownership: 79.9% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Rent affordability gap: None of the 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $30,297 can pay without cost burden (~$757/mo), and 46.3% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 28.9% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Succession risk is real: 22.9% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Low participation: 56.8% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 5.4% between 2019 and 2024, from 46,208 to 43,715.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Lafourche Parish awards 1,435 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Lafourche Parish shows strong potential for water transportation attraction, with a 119.77x concentration and 1,836 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 22.9% of the working-age population within 10 years of retirement age.

The concentrated base spans water transportation, oil and gas extraction, and support activities for transportation, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 29% of the employment across them, the largest being freight and distribution. Supply-chain recruitment has more than one demand base to work from.