Isle of Wight County, Virginia

• Income premium: Households earn well above the national median, supporting strong retail and housing markets.
• Aging population: Median age of 44 is materially above the U.S. norm; succession planning and senior-services demand are real factors.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 1,730 workers (27% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $71,953. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,654 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $1.7B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Management of Companies and Enterprises averages $339,909 while Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation averages $15,509, a 21.9x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Crop Production concentrates at 3.93x the national norm, strong concentration that anchors the local economy and supports supply-chain attraction strategy.
• Cluster depth: 6 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 63.3% 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.

• In line with national: Home value to income ratio of 3.7x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• High home ownership: 80.1% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Rent affordability gap: None of the 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $51,587 can pay without cost burden (~$1,290/mo), and 38.8% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 22.9% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Succession risk is real: 27.4% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Healthy participation: 62.5% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Isle of Wight County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Isle of Wight County shows meaningful potential for crop production attraction, with a 3.93x concentration and 128 jobs in this sub-sector. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 27.4% of the working-age population within 10 years of retirement age.

Most of the employment across the concentrated sub-sectors traces back to a single source of demand. Resident household spending accounts for 63.3% of it, with food and beverage retailers the largest single sub-sector at 40.4%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.