Thomas County, Kansas

• Income gap: Households earn meaningfully less than the national median, which directly affects retail demand, housing absorption, and tax base.
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 1.1 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.
• Young population: Median age of 35 is materially below the U.S. norm, a workforce pipeline asset.

• Largest sector: Retail Trade employs 641 workers (36.8% of the top displayed sectors), at an average wage of $31,426.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $905M (2024) with per-capita income of $63,921.
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $81,317 while Real Estate and Rental and Leasing averages $30,471, a 2.7x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Animal Production and Aquaculture concentrates at 34.92x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 7 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, suggesting an interconnected industrial base rather than reliance on a single employer or sector.
• Attraction whitespace: 6 sub-sectors register LQ < 0.5, candidates for diversification or recruitment depending on labor-market fit.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 2.4x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 75.2% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 12.2% vacancy rate; potential opportunity for redevelopment or repositioning.
• Broadly affordable rents: All 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom tiers sit below the 30%-of-median-income affordability threshold (~$1,783/mo), a clear cost-of-living advantage for workforce attraction.

• Strong participation: 98.7% labor force participation among working-age residents indicates an engaged, available workforce.
• Short commutes: 11.7-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 6 local institutions feed the workforce; the top three combined produce 17,685 annual credentials.

Thomas County shows strong potential for animal production and aquaculture attraction, with a 34.92x concentration and 247 jobs in this sub-sector, it ranks in the top decile nationally.

The interconnected base across animal production and aquaculture, pipeline transportation, and crop production creates supply-chain attraction leverage rather than single-employer risk, a structural advantage for industrial recruitment.

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