Woods 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 $11,764 (18.1%) 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 $53,275 is worth $60,678 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 19.9%, the rate is in economically distressed territory and supports federal funding narratives (CDFI, NMTC, EDA).
• Young population: Median age of 34 is materially below the U.S. norm, a workforce pipeline asset.

• Largest private-sector industry: Retail Trade employs 422 workers (28.2% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $31,675. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,175 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $731M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction averages $98,822 while Retail Trade averages $31,675, a 3.1x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Support Activities for Mining concentrates at 25.87x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 7 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 56.6% 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 2.6x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• Elevated vacancy: 19.4% of housing units are vacant, above the Oklahoma rate of 12%, and down from 25.8% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 54.2% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 16.1%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 22.8% of the vacant stock, or 4.4% of all housing units against the 19.4% 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.
• Rent affordability gap: None of the 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $28,582 can pay without cost burden (~$715/mo), and 43.9% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 23.6% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Healthy participation: 61.3% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 14.7-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 2 institutions in Woods County award 491 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Woods County shows strong potential for support activities for mining attraction, with a 25.87x concentration and 115 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 56.6% of it, with general merchandise retailers the largest single sub-sector at 27.9%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.