Winkler County, Texas

• Income premium: Households earn well above the national median, supporting strong retail and housing markets.
• Elevated poverty: At 16.2%, 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 25.1 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.
• Young population: Median age of 35 is materially below the U.S. norm, a workforce pipeline asset.

• Largest private-sector industry: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction employs 1,524 workers (55.1% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $127,076. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 651 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $2.3B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Transportation and Warehousing averages $128,239 while Retail Trade averages $30,476, a 4.2x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Mining (except Oil and Gas) concentrates at 150.48x 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 67.5% 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 1.7x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 86% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 14.4% of housing units are vacant, above the Texas rate of 9.4%, and up from 14% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 75.9% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 3%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 8.6% of the vacant stock, or 1.2% of all housing units against the 14.4% 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 $43,609 can pay without cost burden (~$1,090/mo), and 29.7% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 65.4% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Winkler County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Winkler County shows strong potential for mining (except oil and gas) attraction, with a 150.48x concentration and 758 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 67.5% of it, with mining (except oil and gas) the largest single sub-sector at 33.1%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.