Brown County, Wisconsin

• Income near the national median: Median household income tracks the national median, indicating a broad-based consumer market.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 6.9% below the national average, so the nominal median of $79,649 is worth $85,552 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at metro level, not county level.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 29,386 workers (23.6% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $70,722. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 16,956 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $25.7B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $95,454 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $22,671, a 4.2x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Paper Manufacturing concentrates at 14.18x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 14 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 50.6% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: goods manufacturing. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.
• Attraction whitespace: 8 sub-sectors register LQ < 0.5 with at least 50 employed, candidates for diversification or recruitment depending on labor-market fit.

• In line with national: Home value to income ratio of 3.3x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• Affordable rent tiers: 3 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $49,490 can pay without cost burden (~$1,237/mo), and 39.3% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 67.9% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Short commutes: 19.6-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: the 6 largest of 7 institutions in Brown County award 6,042 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Brown County shows strong potential for paper manufacturing attraction, with a 14.18x concentration and 5,370 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. Goods manufacturing accounts for 50.6% of it, with hospitals the largest single sub-sector at 18.4%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.