Audubon County, Iowa

• 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 14.9 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.
• Aging population: Median age of 47 is materially above the U.S. norm; succession planning and senior-services demand are real factors.

• Largest sector: Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting employs 273 workers (25.3% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $51,356.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $473M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Utilities averages $129,433 while Retail Trade averages $30,311, a 4.3x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Animal Production and Aquaculture concentrates at 76.98x 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.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 2.1x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 76.2% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Broadly affordable rents: All 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom tiers sit below the 30%-of-median-income affordability threshold (~$1,456/mo), a clear cost-of-living advantage for workforce attraction.

• Succession risk is real: 29.5% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Short commutes: 19.0-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 6 regional institutions feed the workforce; the top three combined produce 21,768 annual credentials.

Audubon County shows strong potential for animal production and aquaculture attraction, with a 76.98x concentration and 241 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 29.5% of the working-age population within 10 years of retirement age.

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