Noxubee County, Mississippi

• 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 $22,614 (40.1%) under the Mississippi median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 13.0% below the national average, so the nominal median of $33,833 is worth $38,889 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 26.3%, 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 25.1 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 548 workers (38.8% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $53,746. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 641 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $346M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services averages $68,448 while Health Care and Social Assistance averages $25,951, a 2.6x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Forestry and Logging concentrates at 89.79x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 5 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 52.5% 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.

• 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.
• High home ownership: 73% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 16.5% of housing units are vacant, above the Mississippi rate of 14.6%, and down from 24.5% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 37% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 3.1% of the vacant stock, or 0.5% of all housing units against the 16.5% headline vacancy rate. Absorbable supply for an incoming employer is thin, 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 $19,418 can pay without cost burden (~$485/mo), and 31.8% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 23.9% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Succession risk is real: 23.1% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Low participation: 48.1% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 16.2% between 2019 and 2024, from 4,472 to 3,749.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Noxubee County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Noxubee County shows strong potential for forestry and logging attraction, with a 89.79x concentration and 48 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 23.1% of the working-age population within 10 years of retirement age.

Most of the employment across the concentrated sub-sectors traces back to a single source of demand. Goods manufacturing accounts for 52.5% of it, all of it in wood product manufacturing. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.