Garfield 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 $33,291 (35.0%) 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 7.4 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Accommodation and Food Services employs 1,086 workers (68.4% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $32,677. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 570 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $417M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Utilities averages $83,612 while Retail Trade averages $24,579, a 3.4x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Accommodation concentrates at 30.08x 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: visitor economy. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.

• Stretched market: Home value to income ratio of 5.1x is well above the ~4.1x national average; attainable workforce housing may be a recruitment friction.
• High home ownership: 70.3% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 43.6% of housing units are vacant, above the Utah rate of 8.1%, and down from 55% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 87.1% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 4.5% of the vacant stock, or 2% of all housing units against the 43.6% 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: 4 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $57,711 can pay without cost burden (~$1,443/mo), and 24.4% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 60.1% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 13.5-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 Garfield County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Garfield County shows strong potential for accommodation attraction, with a 30.08x concentration and 845 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. Visitor economy accounts for 84.9% of it, all of it in accommodation. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.