Scurry 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 $18,437 (23.5%) 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 22.7 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction employs 1,092 workers (25.2% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $109,570. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,579 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $2.2B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Administrative and Support and Waste Management averages $177,136 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $20,530, a 8.6x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Support Activities for Mining concentrates at 98.93x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 8 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 51.8% 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 1.9x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 76.8% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 14.6% of housing units are vacant, above the Texas rate of 9.4%, and down from 17.7% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 75.7% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 8.3%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 13.2% of the vacant stock, or 1.9% of all housing units against the 14.6% 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 $48,384 can pay without cost burden (~$1,210/mo), and 28% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Low participation: 53.5% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 3.8% between 2019 and 2024, from 7,169 to 6,894.
• Short commutes: 20.3-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.

Scurry County shows strong potential for support activities for mining attraction, with a 98.93x concentration and 997 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 51.8% of it, with support activities for mining the largest single sub-sector at 49.2%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.