Emery County, Utah

• 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 $20,875 (21.9%) under the Utah median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 17.4 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Construction employs 540 workers (26.6% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $60,466. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 784 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $1.5B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction averages $79,750 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $23,155, a 3.4x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Gasoline Stations and Fuel Dealers concentrates at 10.91x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 6 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 58.3% 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.
• Attraction whitespace: 3 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 2.9x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 80.1% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 16.2% of housing units are vacant, above the Utah rate of 8.1%, and down from 20.3% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 48% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 4% of the vacant stock, or 0.7% of all housing units against the 16.2% 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: 1 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $31,205 can pay without cost burden (~$780/mo), and 34.2% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Low participation: 58.8% labor force participation against a labor force that grew 6.9% between 2019 and 2024, so workforce development programs may unlock additional supply.
• Short commutes: 20.7-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 Emery County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Emery County shows strong potential for gasoline stations and fuel dealers attraction, with a 10.91x concentration and 249 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 58.3% of it, with gasoline stations and fuel dealers the largest single sub-sector at 31.4%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.