Allendale County, South Carolina

• 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 $36,996 (53.4%) under the South Carolina median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 6.3% below the national average, so the nominal median of $32,328 is worth $34,502 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 28.2%, 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 21.4 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.
• Aging population: Median age of 45 is materially above the U.S. norm; succession planning and senior-services demand are real factors.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 767 workers (63.8% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $70,589. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,013 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $398M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Manufacturing averages $70,589 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $15,687, a 4.5x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Forestry and Logging concentrates at 117.86x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 4 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 60.1% 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 2.4x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• Elevated vacancy: 20% of housing units are vacant, above the South Carolina rate of 13.3%, and down from 25.4% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 34.2% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 10.6% of the vacant stock, or 2.1% of all housing units against the 20% 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 $23,598 can pay without cost burden (~$590/mo), and 33.3% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 13.1% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Low participation: 43.6% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 18.3% between 2019 and 2024, from 3,444 to 2,814.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Allendale County awards 110 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Allendale County shows strong potential for forestry and logging attraction, with a 117.86x concentration and 63 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 60.1% of it, with forestry and logging the largest single sub-sector at 39.9%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.