Clallam County, Washington

• 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 $27,771 (28.3%) under the Washington median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Aging population: Median age of 52 is materially above the U.S. norm; succession planning and senior-services demand are real factors.

• Largest private-sector industry: Retail Trade employs 3,318 workers (23.2% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $41,823. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 8,398 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $3.8B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $90,264 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $29,066, a 3.1x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Forestry and Logging concentrates at 58.54x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 15 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 55.4% 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.

• Stretched market: Home value to income ratio of 6.0x is well above the ~4.1x national average; attainable workforce housing may be a recruitment friction.
• High home ownership: 73.7% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Affordable rent tiers: 2 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $44,789 can pay without cost burden (~$1,120/mo), and 48.2% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Succession risk is real: 28.8% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Low participation: 47.6% labor force participation against a labor force that grew 1.1% between 2019 and 2024, so workforce development programs may unlock additional supply.
• Short commutes: 19.3-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 1 institution in Clallam County awards 502 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Clallam County shows strong potential for forestry and logging attraction, with a 58.54x concentration and 323 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 28.8% 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 55.4% of it, with social assistance the largest single sub-sector at 19.4%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.