Johnson 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 $18,843 (24.6%) under the Nebraska median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 9.9% below the national average, so the nominal median of $57,632 is worth $63,964 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 18.0 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Retail Trade employs 167 workers (43.3% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $29,733. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 769 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $253M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Transportation and Warehousing averages $76,136 while Retail Trade averages $29,733, a 2.6x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Gasoline Stations and Fuel Dealers concentrates at 12.71x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 3 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 78.7% 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.

• 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.
• Elevated vacancy: 18.6% of housing units are vacant, above the Nebraska rate of 7.6%, and up from 16.8% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 37.4% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 2.9% of the vacant stock, or 0.5% of all housing units against the 18.6% headline vacancy rate. Absorbable supply for an incoming employer is thin, and the gap between the two is the redevelopment and conversion opportunity.
• Affordable rent tiers: 2 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $38,750 can pay without cost burden (~$969/mo), and 33.2% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Low participation: 49.1% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 1.4% between 2019 and 2024, from 2,169 to 2,139.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Johnson County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Johnson County shows strong potential for gasoline stations and fuel dealers attraction, with a 12.71x concentration and 70 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 78.7% of it, with gasoline stations and fuel dealers the largest single sub-sector at 49.6%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.