Beckham County, Oklahoma

• 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 $11,711 (18.0%) under the Oklahoma median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 12.2% below the national average, so the nominal median of $53,328 is worth $60,738 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 21.7%, 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 22.8 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction employs 2,306 workers (32.6% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $80,236. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,183 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $1.3B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction averages $80,236 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $17,357, a 4.6x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Oil and Gas Extraction concentrates at 172.78x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 11 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 50.5% 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 2.7x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• Elevated vacancy: 19.2% of housing units are vacant, above the Oklahoma rate of 12%, and down from 24.6% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 52.2% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 4.7%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 41.8% of the vacant stock, or 8% of all housing units against the 19.2% 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: 2 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $38,144 can pay without cost burden (~$954/mo), and 41.1% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Low participation: 49.9% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 1.9% between 2019 and 2024, from 9,036 to 8,863.
• Short commutes: 16.2-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 Beckham County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Beckham County shows strong potential for oil and gas extraction attraction, with a 172.78x concentration and 1,386 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 50.5% of it, with oil and gas extraction the largest single sub-sector at 30.3%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.