Phelps County, Nebraska

• 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 5.8 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest sector: Wholesale Trade employs 973 workers (31.8% of the top displayed sectors), at an average wage of $78,044.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $1.0B (2024) with per-capita income of $71,624.
• Wage stratification: Wholesale Trade averages $78,044 while Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation averages $10,797, a 7.2x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Animal Production and Aquaculture concentrates at 28.61x 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, 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 2.8x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• Broadly affordable rents: All 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom tiers sit below the 30%-of-median-income affordability threshold (~$1,723/mo), a clear cost-of-living advantage for workforce attraction.

• Succession risk is real: 25.1% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Strong participation: 95.0% labor force participation among working-age residents indicates an engaged, available workforce.
• Short commutes: 14.7-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 12,952 annual credentials.

Phelps County shows strong potential for animal production and aquaculture attraction, with a 28.61x concentration and 238 jobs in this sub-sector, it ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 25.1% of the working-age population within 10 years of retirement age.

The interconnected base across animal production and aquaculture, merchant wholesalers, durable goods, and support activities for agriculture and forestry creates supply-chain attraction leverage rather than single-employer risk, a structural advantage for industrial recruitment.

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