Williams County, North Dakota

• Income near the national median: Median household income tracks the national median, indicating a broad-based consumer market.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 11.0% below the national average, so the nominal median of $85,595 is worth $96,174 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 11.3 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: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction employs 7,451 workers (34.6% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $139,820. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 2,848 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $7.5B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction averages $139,820 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $28,888, a 4.8x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Support Activities for Mining concentrates at 136.50x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 10 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 56.3% 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.
• Attraction whitespace: 5 sub-sectors register LQ < 0.5 with at least 50 employed, candidates for diversification or recruitment depending on labor-market fit.

• In line with national: Home value to income ratio of 3.3x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• Elevated vacancy: 25.6% of housing units are vacant, above the North Dakota rate of 12.3%, and down from 25.9% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is units for rent at 51.2% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 17.8%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 55.6% of the vacant stock, or 14.2% of all housing units against the 25.6% headline vacancy rate. That is the figure to plan an incoming employer's housing against, and the gap between the two is the redevelopment and conversion opportunity.
• Affordable rent tiers: 3 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $58,914 can pay without cost burden (~$1,473/mo), and 27.5% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 73.4% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 18.7-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Williams County awards 355 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Williams County shows strong potential for support activities for mining attraction, with a 136.50x concentration and 6,486 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. Resource and agricultural commodities accounts for 56.3% of it, all of it in support activities for mining. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.