Parmer 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 $8,741 (11.1%) under the Texas median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 18.8 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Transportation and Warehousing employs 242 workers (28.1% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $54,594. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 839 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $1.4B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $82,854 while Retail Trade averages $28,008, a 3.0x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Animal Production and Aquaculture concentrates at 114.75x 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 84.9% 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.
• Attraction whitespace: 4 sub-sectors register LQ < 0.5 with at least 50 employed, candidates for diversification or recruitment depending on labor-market fit.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 2.1x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 72.1% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 13.7% of housing units are vacant, above the Texas rate of 9.4%, and down from 15.8% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 37.5% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 16.7%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 35% of the vacant stock, or 4.8% of all housing units against the 13.7% 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: 4 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $63,929 can pay without cost burden (~$1,598/mo), and 18.5% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 63% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 16.8-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Parmer County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Parmer County shows strong potential for animal production and aquaculture attraction, with a 114.75x concentration and 1,307 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 84.9% of it, with animal production and aquaculture the largest single sub-sector at 74.6%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.