Cole County, Missouri

• 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 12.0% below the national average, so the nominal median of $74,876 is worth $85,086 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at metro level, not county level.

• Largest private-sector industry: Retail Trade employs 6,002 workers (20.2% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $35,108. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 20,829 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $7.4B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Wholesale Trade averages $88,121 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $22,364, a 3.9x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Printing and Related Support Activities concentrates at 4.43x the national norm, strong concentration that anchors the local economy and supports supply-chain attraction strategy.
• Cluster depth: 12 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 45.6% of the employment across them, the largest being resident household spending. Demand reaches this base from more than one market rather than from a single one.

• 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.
• Affordable rent tiers: 3 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $46,553 can pay without cost burden (~$1,164/mo), and 32.2% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 63.2% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 17.9-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 2 institutions in Cole County award 354 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Cole County shows meaningful potential for printing and related support activities attraction, with a 4.43x concentration and 398 jobs in this sub-sector.

The concentrated base spans printing and related support activities, sporting goods, hobby, musical instrument, book, and misc. retailers, and computing infrastructure providers and data processing, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 45.6% of the employment across them, the largest being resident household spending. Supply-chain recruitment has more than one demand base to work from.