Kalamazoo County, Michigan

• 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 $343 (0.5%) under the Michigan median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 5.2% below the national average, so the nominal median of $72,532 is worth $76,511 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at metro level, not county level.
• Talent advantage: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment exceeds the national average by 5.6 pts, supports knowledge-economy and tech attraction.
• Young population: Median age of 35 is materially below the U.S. norm, a workforce pipeline asset.

• Largest private-sector industry: Health Care and Social Assistance employs 21,318 workers (22.2% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $71,024. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 13,027 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $20.7B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $102,934 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $24,376, a 4.2x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Miscellaneous Manufacturing concentrates at 10.29x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 10 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 92.1% 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: 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 3.3x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• Affordable rent tiers: 2 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $42,263 can pay without cost burden (~$1,057/mo), and 49% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 65.7% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 20.7-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 5 institutions in Kalamazoo County award 6,656 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Kalamazoo County shows strong potential for miscellaneous manufacturing attraction, with a 10.29x concentration and 5,146 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. Goods manufacturing accounts for 92.1% of it, with miscellaneous manufacturing the largest single sub-sector at 28.3%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.