Grand 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 $28,060 (29.5%) under the Utah median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.

• Largest private-sector industry: Accommodation and Food Services employs 2,301 workers (44.4% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $35,768. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,135 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $939M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services averages $68,461 while Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation averages $31,129, a 2.2x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Scenic and Sightseeing Transportation concentrates at 22.46x 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 86.3% 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 8.0x 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: 16% of housing units are vacant, above the Utah rate of 8.1%, and down from 23% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 45.3% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 33.3% of the vacant stock, or 5.3% of all housing units against the 16% headline vacancy rate. That is the figure to plan an incoming employer's housing against, 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 $52,697 can pay without cost burden (~$1,317/mo), and 38.4% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 67.7% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 14.7-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 Grand County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Grand County shows strong potential for scenic and sightseeing transportation attraction, with a 22.46x concentration and 30 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 86.3% of it, with food services and drinking places the largest single sub-sector at 40.5%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.