Goliad 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 $19,117 (24.4%) under the Texas median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 10.2% below the national average, so the nominal median of $59,359 is worth $66,101 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 14.3 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: Construction employs 219 workers (43.2% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $68,770. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 446 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $355M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction averages $124,534 while Real Estate and Rental and Leasing averages $21,327, a 5.8x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Support Activities for Mining concentrates at 8.29x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 6 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 50.9% 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 3.2x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• High home ownership: 86.8% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 20.7% of housing units are vacant, above the Texas rate of 9.4%, and down from 27.7% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 31.8% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 7.7% of the vacant stock, or 1.6% of all housing units against the 20.7% 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 $27,000 can pay without cost burden (~$675/mo), and 29.7% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 13% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Succession risk is real: 26.7% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Low participation: 50.7% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 10% between 2019 and 2024, from 3,281 to 2,953.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Goliad County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Goliad County shows strong potential for support activities for mining attraction, with a 8.29x concentration and 16 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 26.7% of the working-age population within 10 years of retirement age.

Most of the employment across the concentrated sub-sectors traces back to a single source of demand. Visitor economy accounts for 50.9% of it, all of it in food services and drinking places. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.