Terry 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 $34,376 (43.8%) under the Texas median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Elevated poverty: At 18.3%, the rate is in economically distressed territory and supports federal funding narratives (CDFI, NMTC, EDA).
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 25.9 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Retail Trade employs 401 workers (23% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $35,725. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 936 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $610M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction averages $129,178 while Retail Trade averages $35,725, a 3.6x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Crop Production concentrates at 25.59x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 11 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 31.4% of the employment across them, the largest being resource and agricultural commodities. Demand reaches this base from more than one market rather than from a single one.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 2.4x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• Elevated vacancy: 10.3% of housing units are vacant, above the Texas rate of 9.4%, and down from 16.4% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 81.8% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 7.8%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 10.4% of the vacant stock, or 1.1% of all housing units against the 10.3% 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: 2 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $34,030 can pay without cost burden (~$851/mo), and 41.3% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Low participation: 56.3% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 7.5% between 2019 and 2024, from 5,342 to 4,942.
• Short commutes: 21.8-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 Terry County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Terry County shows strong potential for crop production attraction, with a 25.59x concentration and 228 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally.

The concentrated base spans crop production, beverage and tobacco product manufacturing, and support activities for agriculture and forestry, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 31.4% of the employment across them, the largest being resource and agricultural commodities. Supply-chain recruitment has more than one demand base to work from.