Pickaway County, Ohio

• 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 4.5% below the national average, so the nominal median of $74,040 is worth $77,529 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 14.0 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 2,252 workers (23.7% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $76,676. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 3,594 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $2.6B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Manufacturing averages $76,676 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $21,448, a 3.6x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Warehousing and Storage concentrates at 7.42x 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 50.2% 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.

• In line with national: Home value to income ratio of 3.5x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• High home ownership: 74% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Rent affordability gap: None of the 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $43,169 can pay without cost burden (~$1,079/mo), and 38% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 19.8% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Low participation: 58.6% labor force participation against a labor force that grew 10.4% between 2019 and 2024, so workforce development programs may unlock additional supply.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Pickaway County awards 447 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Pickaway County shows strong potential for warehousing and storage attraction, with a 7.42x concentration and 1,325 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 50.2% of it, with warehousing and storage the largest single sub-sector at 38%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.