Lamar County, Mississippi

• 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 12.4% below the national average, so the nominal median of $70,909 is worth $80,946 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at metro level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 14.7%, the rate is in economically distressed territory and supports federal funding narratives (CDFI, NMTC, EDA).

• Largest private-sector industry: Retail Trade employs 5,150 workers (30.6% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $34,006. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 2,342 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $2.8B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $76,162 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $21,454, a 3.6x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Forestry and Logging concentrates at 9.21x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 13 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 52.3% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: resident household spending. 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 3.2x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• Affordable rent tiers: 3 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $50,239 can pay without cost burden (~$1,256/mo), and 39.1% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 64.2% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Lamar County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Lamar County shows strong potential for forestry and logging attraction, with a 9.21x concentration and 59 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. Resident household spending accounts for 52.3% of it, with food services and drinking places the largest single sub-sector at 33%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.