Grant County's Economic Snapshot: Jobs, Industries & Trends — How to Read the Data
Here is a question worth sitting with: why do economic developers spend so much time talking about “indicators”? The answer is simpler than the jargon suggests. Good strategy requires shared facts. Data doesn’t replace local knowledge — the instincts of a longtime employer, the observations of a school counselor, the lived experience of a job-seeker navigating the county’s labor market. What data does is help a community agree on what’s changing, what’s holding firm, and where the highest-leverage opportunities actually are.
This post is a plain-language tour of the core numbers we track at the Grant County Economic Growth Council — what they mean, how to interpret them together, and why they matter for the decisions our community faces in the year ahead.
Why Local Strategy Starts With Indicators
An economic snapshot is not a report for its own sake. It’s a decision tool.
When we build a countywide strategy — whether the focus is workforce development, downtown revitalization, housing, or business attraction — we are constantly trying to answer a handful of essential questions:
Are we growing, holding steady, or losing population?
Is our labor market tight — meaning employers are competing for workers — or soft, meaning jobs are plentiful but unfilled for other reasons?
Are wages and household incomes rising fast enough to keep pace with the cost of living?
Are we developing the skills our employers need and our residents want?
Are we creating the conditions that persuade families to stay and businesses to invest?
Grant County has a meaningful advantage here: we have multiple reliable, locally focused sources for this data. The Community Foundation of Grant County’s Grant County Data Drive was built precisely to end the scavenger hunt for local indicators. It organizes information around four pillars — Economic Vitality, Talent Development, Quality of Place, and Quality of Life — and ties it directly to the questions practitioners and community members most need to answer: Where are we making progress? Where are we falling short? What story does the evidence actually tell?
At the state level, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation echoes the same conviction: access to real-time workforce intelligence and a robust talent pipeline is not a nice-to-have. It is central to how Indiana competes for investment, jobs, and people.
Five Metrics That Tell a Surprisingly Complete Story
No single number captures the full picture of a local economy. But five core indicators, read together, provide a dashboard that is both accessible and genuinely useful — a starting point, not a final answer.
| Metric | Latest Value | How to Read It | Why It Matters for Local Strategy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resident Population | 66,440 (2025, Lightcast) | Watch the direction over several years. Are we gaining residents, holding steady, or declining? The trend matters more than any single year’s count. | Population underpins labor supply, housing demand, school enrollment, and the market size available to local businesses. | |
| County Economic Output (GDP) | $3.22 billion (2024, BEA/FRED) | GDP estimates the total value of goods and services produced locally. Track the trend and its major components over time, not just the headline figure. | GDP is a proxy for the scale and productive capacity of our economy. It frames investment needs and helps identify sector strengths. | |
| Unemployment Rate | 3.0% (December 2025, BLS/FRED) | A low rate generally signals a tight hiring environment — employers compete for workers. Always compare to prior years and account for seasonal patterns. | Helps employers and partners gauge hiring difficulty; informs priorities such as training pipelines, childcare infrastructure, and workforce re-entry programs. | |
| Labor Force & Employment | 31,137 in labor force; 30,214 employed (December 2025, BLS/FRED) | The labor force counts everyone working or actively searching. Growth in labor force size is a positive sign for long-term staffing capacity. | Captures the “people available to work” picture. A growing, engaged labor force supports both current employers and future business recruitment. | |
| Educational Attainment | 20.3% bachelor’s degree or higher (2024, American Community Survey 5-year estimate) | This is a skills-distribution signal, not a judgment. Track the trend and match attainment levels against the sectors you are trying to grow. | Influences wage potential, business attraction and expansion decisions, and the feasibility of building higher-skill industry clusters locally. |
A note on timing: Some metrics update monthly (unemployment, labor force), while others update annually (population, income, GDP). That lag is intentional and normal. The goal is to combine longer-term “structural” metrics — those that reveal deep patterns — with faster-moving “signal” metrics that show where things are heading right now.
What These Numbers Are Telling Us Right Now
Start with the labor market — it shows pressure first.
At 3.0 percent unemployment as of December 2025, Grant County’s labor market is operating near full employment. That is broadly good news — the vast majority of residents who want to work are working. The underlying counts confirm it: with 31,137 people in the labor force and 30,214 employed, the gap between those seeking work and those finding it is narrow.
For employers, however, a tight market is a double-edged reality. When nearly everyone who wants a job has one, filling open positions requires creativity — competitive wages, flexible schedules, clear advancement pathways, and attention to the barriers that keep willing workers on the sidelines. Recruitment alone is not a sufficient strategy.
Read education and earnings together.
Grant County’s median household income reached approximately $54,000 in 2023 (Lightcast), set against an educational attainment rate of approximately 20 percent with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Neither figure, on its own, tells us what to do. Together, they raise a question that economic developers in communities like ours confront regularly: how do we expand access to credentials and skills that translate into higher-wage work — without assuming a four-year degree is the only path worth building?
The answer, increasingly, is that it isn’t. Stackable credentials, apprenticeships, and employer-designed training programs are not consolation prizes. They are, in many cases, the most direct route from where our residents are today to the wages they deserve.
Add the industries lens.
Grant County’s $3.22 billion GDP is distributed unevenly across sectors. Private services-producing industries account for approximately $1.84 billion; private goods-producing industries (manufacturing, construction, agriculture) contribute roughly $956 million; and government and government enterprises add approximately $424 million.
That mix has strategic implications. Services-heavy economies — led by healthcare, education, and business services — require deep, continuously refreshed workforce pipelines. Goods-producing strength, meanwhile, depends on productivity investment, strong skilled-trades pathways, and resilient supply chains. Grant County has meaningful assets in both categories. The task is to be deliberate about which sectors we want to grow and what investments those growth paths require.
How to Read Trends Like a Strategist, Not a Headline
Numbers invite misreading. Here are three practical principles that experienced economic developers use to stay grounded.
Look at the line, not the dot.
A single month of data can swing because of seasonal patterns, a plant shutdown, a large employer’s announcement, or simply the noise built into survey-based measurements. County-level labor market figures in particular carry meaningful variance — another reason to focus on the trend over time rather than reacting to any single update. The story is in the line, not the dot.
Separate what is national from what is local.
One tool analysts use to make this distinction is shift-share analysis, which separates job change into three components: a national growth effect (what would have happened here if we simply tracked the national trend), an industry mix effect (how our particular sector composition performed), and a regional shift — a measure of our own local competitiveness. The technical details matter less than the underlying insight: some of what happens to Grant County’s economy happens to everyone. Some of it is driven entirely by the choices we make here.
Use faster signals to stay ahead of the curve.
Traditional indicators — annual income, GDP, census-based attainment data — are essential for understanding structural patterns, but they lag reality by months or years. Workforce strategists increasingly complement them with faster-moving signals: job postings by sector, skill-demand shifts, employer hiring intentions. Real-time job-posting data, for example, can reveal whether demand in healthcare, manufacturing, or technology is rising or falling in a region before annual surveys confirm it.
Grant County doesn’t need to chase every trend. We do need the ability to spot meaningful shifts early — especially when training programs and credential pathways take months or years to build and scale.
One Practical Implication for Strategy and Workforce
A tight labor market combined with a modest four-year attainment rate points toward a clear priority: Grant County’s workforce strategy should build “earn-and-learn” and short-to-medium credential pathways aligned to high-growth sectors, while actively removing the barriers that keep motivated workers out of the labor force altogether.
Nationally, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that roughly half of all U.S. job gains between 2023 and 2033 will be concentrated in healthcare and social assistance, and in professional, scientific, and technical services. Healthcare support is projected to be the fastest-growing occupational group and the largest source of new jobs. Computer and mathematical occupations rank among the fastest-growing as well.
What does that mean for Grant County, practically speaking?
Build the pathways, not just the pipeline. If we want to grow wages and expand opportunity for more residents, we need to connect people to in-demand work through stackable credentials, registered apprenticeships, and employer-designed training. Indiana’s state strategy directly supports this: the Indiana Economic Development Corporation highlights employer-tailored training programs and directs workers and job-seekers to tools including Indiana Career Connect, work-based learning resources through WorkOne East (Region 3, which serves Grant County), and the NextLevel Jobs employer training grant program.
Remove participation barriers — they are workforce issues. Access to the labor force is not solely a matter of skills or willingness. Research specific to Indiana’s rural communities consistently identifies childcare availability, housing affordability, transportation infrastructure, and broadband access as central constraints on workforce participation. Greater Grant County’s Child Care Action Plan and its workforce development initiative — which brings educators, employers, and students together around work-based learning — reflect exactly the kind of systems-level thinking this moment requires.
Watch the triangle. For anyone looking for a single practical habit: track the relationship between labor force size, employment, and unemployment rate together, on a quarterly basis. When unemployment is low, the “win” is rarely just attracting new employers. It is making sure residents can access, train for, and stay in the jobs we already have.
Frequently Asked Questions
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The Community Foundation of Grant County’s Grant County Data Drive (givetogrant.org/data-drive) is the most comprehensive local resource — built to help residents, nonprofits, and practitioners identify priorities, evaluate progress, and make the case for investment. For national datasets at the county level, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s FRED database aggregates U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and Bureau of Labor Statistics data in a free, publicly accessible format.
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Different datasets measure different things — place of work versus place of residence, annual versus monthly, survey-based versus administrative records. They also update on different schedules. None of that makes one source wrong and another right; it means each source answers a slightly different question. When numbers diverge, the most useful response is to ask which definition best fits the decision at hand.
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Watch the triangle: labor force size, total employment, and unemployment rate — together, over time. As of December 2025, Grant County had 31,137 people in the labor force, 30,214 employed, and a 3.0 percent unemployment rate. That combination provides a useful baseline for tracking whether our workforce capacity is growing, tightening, or shifting in the months ahead.
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WorkOne East (Region 3) serves Grant County with job placement assistance, employer services, skills training, and connections to Indiana’s career and workforce programs. Residents can also access Indiana Career Connect for job postings and career planning tools, and NextLevel Jobs for employer-sponsored training grants. Greater Grant County’s workforce development team connects educators, employers, and students around work-based learning experiences including guest speaking, site visits, job shadowing, internships, and apprenticeships.
Click here to read more posts in the Growing Grant County series.
Sources & Data Notes
[1] Grant County Data Drive, Community Foundation of Grant County. givetogrant.org/data-drive
[2] Talent & Workforce, Indiana Economic Development Corporation. iedc.in.gov/talent-workforce
[3] Grant County Economic Overview, Greater Grant County. Lightcast Q2 2025 data set. gogreatergrant.org/workforce
[4] Resident Population, FRED / U.S. Census Bureau. fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INGRAN0POP
[5] Gross Domestic Product, Grant County, IN (GDPALL18053). Bureau of Economic Analysis / FRED.
[6] Unemployment Rate and Labor Force, Grant County (INGRAN0URN, INGRAN0LFN). BLS / FRED.
[7] Educational Attainment, ACS 5-Year Estimate. FRED series HC01ESTVC1718053.
[8] Median Household Income 2023, Lightcast Q2 2025. Cited via gogreatergrant.org/workforce.
[9] WorkOne East, Region 3. Indiana Department of Workforce Development. in.gov/dwd/workone/region-3
[10] Indiana Career Connect. indianacareerconnect.com | NextLevel Jobs. in.gov/dwd/nextleveljobs
[11] Industry and Occupational Employment Projections Overview and Highlights, 2023–33. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review, 2024. bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occupational-employment-projections-overview-and-highlights-2023-33.htm
[12] JobsPikr. “How Economic Signals Drive Scalable Workforce Strategies.” jobspikr.com/blog/economic-signals-for-workforce-strategies
[13] Advancing Prosperity: Policy Recommendations for Indiana’s Rural Communities. Indiana Capital Chronicle / Ball State University, 2022.
[14] Indiana Business Research Center, Indiana Business Review 2025 Outlook. ibrc.indiana.edu
The Grant County Economic Growth Council works with local partners to support business growth, community development, and strategic investment throughout Grant County. Learn more about current initiatives and opportunities by exploring our website.