Brewster County, Texas

• 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 $22,264 (28.4%) under the Texas median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Talent advantage: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment exceeds the national average by 9.8 pts, supports knowledge-economy and tech attraction.

• Largest private-sector industry: Accommodation and Food Services employs 954 workers (33.7% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $34,566. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,339 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $611M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $105,960 while Retail Trade averages $32,924, a 3.2x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Accommodation concentrates at 10.57x 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 63.6% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: visitor economy. 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 4.0x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• Elevated vacancy: 16.3% of housing units are vacant, above the Texas rate of 9.4%, and down from 26.1% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 54.1% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 24.2%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 10.6% of the vacant stock, or 1.7% of all housing units against the 16.3% headline vacancy rate. Absorbable supply for an incoming employer is thin, 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 $46,034 can pay without cost burden (~$1,151/mo), and 34.7% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 60.1% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Brewster County awards 565 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Brewster County shows strong potential for accommodation attraction, with a 10.57x concentration and 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. Visitor economy accounts for 63.6% of it, with accommodation the largest single sub-sector at 32.4%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.