Stevens County, Minnesota

• Income near the national median: Median household income tracks the national median, indicating a broad-based consumer market.
• Below the state median: Median household income runs $13,329 (15.0%) under the Minnesota median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Young population: Median age of 34 is materially below the U.S. norm, a workforce pipeline asset.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 927 workers (36.5% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $82,848. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,146 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $816M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $115,897 while Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation averages $14,245, a 8.1x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Animal Production and Aquaculture concentrates at 119.98x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 6 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 64.5% 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.
• 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 $36,571 can pay without cost burden (~$914/mo), and 41.4% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 65.5% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 14.3-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Stevens County awards 349 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Stevens County shows strong potential for animal production and aquaculture attraction, with a 119.98x concentration and 1,128 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. Resource and agricultural commodities accounts for 64.5% of it, all of it in animal production and aquaculture. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.