Benson County, North Dakota

• 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 $12,624 (16.5%) under the North Dakota median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 11.0% below the national average, so the nominal median of $64,033 is worth $71,947 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 25.6%, 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 13.8 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.
• Young population: Median age of 33 is materially below the U.S. norm, a workforce pipeline asset.

• Largest private-sector industry: Wholesale Trade employs 116 workers (35.7% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $85,100. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,476 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $366M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services averages $93,729 while Retail Trade averages $19,845, a 4.7x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Crop Production concentrates at 22.14x 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 50% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: resource and agricultural commodities. 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 1.4x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 73.1% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 20.1% of housing units are vacant, above the North Dakota rate of 12.3%, and down from 26.5% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 33.3% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 7.8% of the vacant stock, or 1.6% of all housing units against the 20.1% 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 $28,646 can pay without cost burden (~$716/mo), and 24% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 11% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Succession risk is real: 22.7% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Low participation: 53% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 17% between 2019 and 2024, from 2,593 to 2,153.
• Short commutes: 16.1-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Benson County awards 43 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Benson County shows strong potential for crop production attraction, with a 22.14x concentration and 45 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 22.7% 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. Resource and agricultural commodities accounts for 50% of it, all of it in crop production. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.