Dakota County, Nebraska

• 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 $6,146 (8.0%) under the Nebraska median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 13.5% below the national average, so the nominal median of $70,329 is worth $81,305 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at metro level, not county level.
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 21.1 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.
• Young population: Median age of 32 is materially below the U.S. norm, a workforce pipeline asset.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 5,593 workers (46.4% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $64,401. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,179 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $2.4B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $86,163 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $21,789, a 4.0x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Truck Transportation concentrates at 13.59x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 4 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 79.9% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: freight and distribution. 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.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 2.6x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• Affordable rent tiers: 3 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $50,769 can pay without cost burden (~$1,269/mo), and 41.9% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 71.5% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 13.9-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Dakota County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Dakota County shows strong potential for truck transportation attraction, with a 13.59x concentration and 1,942 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. Freight and distribution accounts for 79.9% of it, all of it in truck transportation. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.