Hockley 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 $15,336 (19.5%) under the Texas median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 8.7% below the national average, so the nominal median of $63,140 is worth $69,157 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 16.8 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction employs 2,166 workers (36.7% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $123,184. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,902 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $1.9B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction averages $123,184 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $18,690, a 6.6x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Pipeline Transportation concentrates at 13.14x 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 51.7% 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 2.0x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 72.2% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 14.3% of housing units are vacant, above the Texas rate of 9.4%, and down from 14.8% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 70.5% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 3.9%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 22.3% of the vacant stock, or 3.2% of all housing units against the 14.3% 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: 3 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $40,915 can pay without cost burden (~$1,023/mo), and 33.8% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 62.1% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Hockley County awards 1,732 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Hockley County shows strong potential for pipeline transportation attraction, with a 13.14x concentration and 39 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 51.7% of it, with truck transportation the largest single sub-sector at 24.3%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.