A multi-source data analysis of Indiana's 92 counties — examining what kinds of work exist locally, what households actually earn after essential costs, where credit and capital flow, and which infrastructure systems are present or absent in each community. Compiled from 16 federal, state, and academic datasets.
Published by Luminary AI Technologies · Methodology and definitions appear immediately below the headline statistics.
This study uses several specialized terms throughout. The most important are defined here. Sources for every data point are cited at the bottom of the relevant tab.
A framework developed by United for ALICE that identifies households earning above the federal poverty line but below the minimum cost of essential expenses in their county. ALICE households are typically working but do not earn enough to cover housing, food, transportation, childcare, healthcare, and basic technology.
The minimum household income required to afford essential expenses in a given county, calculated annually by United for ALICE using local rent, food, childcare, transportation, healthcare, and basic technology costs. Varies substantially — higher in metropolitan counties with elevated housing costs, lower in rural counties.
The difference between a county's median household income and its ALICE Threshold. Positive slack means the median household exceeds the survival budget by that amount; negative slack means the median household falls below the budget. Used in this study as a primary measure of county-level economic well-being because it accounts for local cost-of-living differences that median-income alone does not.
The share of county households earning below the ALICE Threshold. Includes households below the federal poverty line plus those between poverty and ALICE thresholds.
ALICE: United for ALICE 2025 Indiana Report (United Way)
ACS: American Community Survey, U.S. Census Bureau (DP02, DP03, S1501, S1502, S2411, S2506, S2507, B14002, B07009, B25075, C14003)
CBP: Census County Business Patterns 2023 (establishments with paid employees)
NES: Census Nonemployer Statistics 2022 (businesses without paid employees)
LODES / LEHD: Census Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, worker-job matching at Census-block granularity
J2J: LEHD Job-to-Job Origin-Destination Statistics, worker mobility tracking
CHR: County Health Rankings 2025 (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation + University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute)
IRS Migration: Statistics of Income 2021-2022 county-to-county migration data
BLS OEWS: Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2024
FFIEC Call Reports + UBPR: Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council Q1 2026 bank financial filings
C&I: Commercial and Industrial loans — typical small-business credit
CRE: Commercial Real Estate (lending or property)
HELOC: Home Equity Line of Credit
ROA: Return on Assets — bank profitability metric (annualized)
NIM: Net Interest Margin — spread between interest earned and interest paid
L/D Ratio: Loan-to-Deposit Ratio — percentage of bank deposits deployed as loans
UBPR: Uniform Bank Performance Report — FFIEC analytical bank report
A note on geographic scope: this study analyzes Indiana's 92 counties using the most recent data available for each source. ACS 1-Year tables cover only the 27 counties with population ≥ 65,000 (noted where applicable); ACS 5-Year tables cover all 92 counties. Bank financial data covers all 91 banks headquartered in Indiana; it does not capture branch presence of out-of-state-headquartered banks (PNC, Chase, Fifth Third, Huntington, BMO, others) which collectively hold substantial Indiana deposits and originate substantial Indiana credit. Several findings throughout this study include explicit caveats about data limitations.
Major Indiana economic and policy events FY 2018–2025, mapped to the counties they shaped.
Eight things that jumped out — now grounded in real ALICE data.
This tab presents the cross-cutting patterns that emerge when many variables are examined together across all 92 Indiana counties. Two analyses are included: a typology grouping counties into seven distinct patterns based on prosperity, infrastructure, stress, and civic engagement; and a ranked list of the strongest variable pairs that move together across counties. Together these surface the structural patterns the dashboard's individual tabs only hint at.
Of 92 Indiana counties, 28 (30%) fall into the "high-stress / struggling" cluster — characterized by elevated adult smoking rates, frequent mental distress, SNAP receipt, and teen birth rates relative to peer counties. This is the largest single cluster in the typology. It includes most post-industrial counties (Wayne, Madison, Delaware, Grant, Fayette), most of the southern rural counties (Crawford, Scott, Perry, Washington), and several central counties (Vigo, Vermillion, Henry, Randolph).
Adult smoking rate and frequent mental distress rate correlate at r = +0.94 across the 92 counties — the strongest correlation measured anywhere in this study. The two CHR indicators capture the same underlying community-stress dimension: places with high smoking also have high reported mental distress at near-identical levels. Either measure could substitute for the other in cross-county analysis.
After median household income itself, voter turnout has the strongest single correlation with household slack: r = +0.76. The direction of causation is unclear (prosperity may produce engagement, engagement may produce prosperity, or both may result from a third factor like social trust), but the relationship is robust and stronger than the correlations with bachelor's-degree share, life expectancy, or any infrastructure variable.
Over-performing counties (positive slack residuals) average a 57.6% married household rate. Under-performing counties average 47.7%. The 10-percentage-point gap is one of the largest demographic differences measured between the two groups. Marriage rate correlates with slack at r = +0.65, with life expectancy at r = +0.60, and inversely with child care cost burden at r = −0.67. Family composition is a substantial economic variable that does not receive the policy attention its statistical strength would suggest.
Each county was assigned to a cluster based on quartile rankings across four dimensions: prosperity (slack, less-than-HS earnings, life expectancy), infrastructure (broadband, bachelor's share, payroll per worker, NES density), stress (smoking, mental distress, SNAP, teen births), and civic engagement (voter turnout, social associations, marriage rate). Counties with similar profiles cluster into the seven types below.
Indianapolis ring suburbs plus established manufacturing/industrial anchors. Both the modern-infrastructure stack and outcomes are strong.
Average slack: $28,921 · Average hardship rate: 30.8%
Counties: HAMILTON, HENDRICKS, WARRICK, HANCOCK, JOHNSON, PORTER, BARTHOLOMEW, TIPTON, POSEY, DEARBORN, WHITLEY, DUBOIS, KOSCIUSKO
Smaller counties with strong voter turnout, marriage rates, and social cohesion. Modest infrastructure but solid outcomes.
Average slack: $18,089 · Average hardship rate: 35.8%
Counties: BOONE, WARREN, RIPLEY, SPENCER, WELLS, BROWN, STEUBEN, ADAMS
Rural and small counties where outcomes exceed what the infrastructure-stack predicts. Often anchored by specific community-economic patterns.
Average slack: $13,606 · Average hardship rate: 37.7%
Counties: FRANKLIN, LAGRANGE, PUTNAM, OHIO, NOBLE, MARSHALL, WHITE, CARROLL, PARKE
College towns and large metro centers. Education and broadband are high but median household income is held down by student populations or service-sector employment density.
Average slack: $11,780 · Average hardship rate: 40.0%
Counties: FLOYD, DECATUR, CLARK, DEKALB, ALLEN, LAPORTE, MARION, LAKE, VANDERBURGH, MONROE, ST. JOSEPH, TIPPECANOE, ELKHART
Small rural counties without strong anchors. Lower educational attainment, thinner banking/broadband presence, modest economic outcomes.
Average slack: $9,230 · Average hardship rate: 40.9%
Counties: LAWRENCE, PIKE, HARRISON, HUNTINGTON, NEWTON, FOUNTAIN, KNOX, PERRY, CLINTON, FULTON, OWEN, CASS, BENTON
Highest cluster by count. Counties with elevated smoking, mental distress, SNAP receipt, teen birth rates — the cluster of measures that move together as community-stress indicators. Most post-industrial decline counties sit here.
Average slack: $6,197 · Average hardship rate: 43.4%
Counties: GIBSON, JENNINGS, MONTGOMERY, JACKSON, CLAY, ORANGE, MARTIN, RANDOLPH, VERMILLION, SWITZERLAND, GREENE, MADISON, DAVIESS, WASHINGTON, DELAWARE, JEFFERSON, HENRY, STARKE, FAYETTE, GRANT, CRAWFORD, MIAMI, WAYNE, JAY, SCOTT, SULLIVAN, VIGO, BLACKFORD
Counties that do not cleanly fit one cluster — some metrics strong, others weak.
Average slack: $14,233 · Average hardship rate: 38.4%
Counties: UNION, MORGAN, WABASH, JASPER, SHELBY, RUSH, HOWARD, PULASKI
The variables below move together across Indiana counties at correlation strengths above 0.6 (positive or negative). Many of these connections are not directly causal — instead they reflect common underlying conditions. The strongest pairings cluster around three themes: (1) the modern-infrastructure stack (broadband, bachelor's degrees, WFH all moving together), (2) the community-stress stack (smoking, mental distress, SNAP, teen births all moving together), and (3) the civic-and-family dimension (marriage, voter turnout, slack, life expectancy all moving together).
| Variable pair | Correlation | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Adult smoking rate ↔ Frequent mental distress | r = +0.94 | Both capture the same community-stress dimension. Counties with high smoking also report high frequent-mental-distress at near-identical levels. |
| Voter turnout ↔ Household slack | r = +0.76 | Civic engagement and prosperity move together; mechanism unclear but the relationship is robust across all 92 counties. |
| SNAP receipt % ↔ Life expectancy | r = -0.76 | Counties with higher food-assistance receipt have substantially shorter life expectancy. SNAP indicates broader income-driven health vulnerability. |
| Bachelor's+ % ↔ Work-from-home % | r = +0.73 | WFH is essentially a credentialed-economy amenity. Where degree-holders concentrate, so does remote work. |
| Bachelor's+ % ↔ Adult smoking | r = -0.73 | Strong inverse relationship between education attainment and smoking incidence. |
| Bachelor's+ % ↔ Mental distress | r = -0.72 | Same inverse pattern with mental distress measure. |
| Severe housing cost burden ↔ Child care cost burden | r = +0.68 | Counties where housing is unaffordable also have unaffordable child care. Cost-stress measures cluster. |
| Adult smoking ↔ Household slack | r = -0.68 | Smoking is the single strongest negative correlate with slack. |
| Married rate ↔ Child care cost burden | r = -0.67 | More marriage = less child-care-burden, both because two-parent households share child care AND because lower-married counties have higher single-parent burden. |
| Broadband adoption ↔ Bachelor's+ % | r = +0.67 | Modern infrastructure layers move together. |
| Teen birth rate ↔ Life expectancy | r = -0.66 | Teen birth rate is another high-signal community-stress proxy. |
| SNAP receipt % ↔ Household slack | r = -0.66 | Direct inverse — SNAP measures the cohort below food-sufficiency, which is below ALICE threshold. |
| Married rate ↔ Household slack | r = +0.65 | Marriage rate has substantial economic content. The 10-percentage-point gap between over- and under-performing counties on marriage rate is one of the largest demographic differences measured. |
| Mental distress ↔ Household slack | r = -0.65 | Mental health indicators cluster tightly with economic well-being measures. |
| Income 80/20 ratio ↔ Severe housing cost burden | r = +0.65 | Unequal counties have more households spending 50%+ of income on housing. |
| SNAP receipt % ↔ Married rate | r = -0.64 | Inverse relationship — single-parent households more often reliant on food assistance. |
| Migration churn % ↔ Work-from-home % | r = +0.62 | Modern-mobile-credentialed economy turns over more. |
| Foreign-born % ↔ Jobs/Workers ratio | r = +0.62 | Counties with more immigrant residents tend to import workers; both reflect labor-market draw. |
| NES density ↔ Teen birth rate | r = -0.61 | Counties with more nonemployer businesses have lower teen birth rates — both indicators of community functioning. |
| Slack ↔ Life expectancy | r = +0.61 | County prosperity and longevity are tightly linked. |
| Married rate ↔ Life expectancy | r = +0.60 | Marriage rate is correlated with longer life expectancy at the county level. |
Dimension 1: The modern-infrastructure stack. Bachelor's-degree share, broadband adoption, work-from-home rate, professional-occupation share, CBP payroll per worker, and migration churn all move together. Where one is high, the others are high. Hamilton, Boone, Hendricks, and the Indianapolis ring counties sit at the top of all of these together. This dimension captures the "modern credentialed economy" — the world that conventional economic development policy primarily addresses.
Dimension 2: The community-stress stack. Adult smoking rate, frequent mental distress, SNAP recipient share, teen birth rate, and shorter life expectancy all move together. The smoking-mental-distress correlation at r = +0.94 is among the strongest in the dataset. SNAP recipient share and life expectancy correlate at r = −0.76. This dimension captures community-wide stress signatures that show up most strongly in post-industrial decline counties (Wayne, Madison, Delaware, Grant, Fayette) and southern rural counties (Crawford, Scott, Perry, Washington).
Dimension 3: The civic-and-family dimension. Voter turnout, marriage rate, social-association density, and life expectancy all move together — and correlate strongly with slack. This dimension is less commonly discussed in economic-development conversations than the other two. Over-performing counties (those exceeding what the modern-infrastructure stack would predict for slack) are most distinguished from under-performing counties on marriage rate (+10pp gap) and voter turnout (+10pp gap). These civic-and-family variables are doing substantial economic work that the conventional infrastructure framing does not capture.
Pattern 1: Counties with productive non-credentialed economies show distinctive correlations. Type C counties (modest infrastructure, decent prosperity) — LaGrange, Parke, Carroll, Marshall, Noble, Ohio, Putnam, White, Franklin — exhibit several common properties: above-average less-than-HS earnings, low broadband relative to outcomes, low to moderate inequality (low 80/20 ratio), and modest household slack. These counties are accomplishing economic functioning through different mechanisms than the Indianapolis ring (Type A) — likely some combination of anchored small-business networks, manufacturing employer presence, agricultural specialization, or cultural-community capital. The specific mechanism varies by county.
Pattern 2: College-town counties are systematically classified as Type D — strong infrastructure, modest prosperity. Monroe, Tippecanoe, St. Joseph, Vanderburgh, Delaware (Ball State), Allen (multiple universities), Marion (IUPUI). The cluster captures the statistical effect of student populations on county-level measures: bachelor's-degree share, broadband adoption, and modern-infrastructure indicators register high, but median income is pulled down by graduate students and undergraduates living off-campus. The slack residual analysis confirmed: Monroe and Tippecanoe are the two largest under-performers in the state by about $22K per household, which is mostly the student-income-dilution effect.
Pattern 3: The Indianapolis-ring counties (Type A) consistently over-perform their internal infrastructure profile. Hamilton, Boone, Hendricks, Hancock, Johnson, plus selected anchor-employer counties (Dubois, Kosciusko, Bartholomew, Warrick, Posey, Whitley, Porter). These counties combine high internal infrastructure with substantial external connections — migration inflows of higher-AGI households, commute access to Marion's professional job market, or anchor employers that import revenue from outside the county. The "over-performance" relative to internal measures is primarily an external-connection effect.
Several limits are worth being explicit about: (1) The correlations are point-in-time snapshots. A county that moves between Type E and Type F or between Type A and Type D in the 2020s would not be captured by current-data analysis alone. (2) The clusters are statistical groupings, not causal accounts. Two counties in the same cluster may have arrived there through different mechanisms. (3) The high correlations between stress measures (smoking, mental distress, SNAP, teen births, life expectancy) do not establish which is the driver; they may all be downstream of broader economic conditions, or each may have its own contribution. (4) Several Type-F counties have specific local mechanisms (Wayne's industrial decline, Scott's HIV outbreak and opioid crisis legacy, Crawford's geographic isolation) that the variable-based clustering does not capture but that scholars of those counties would identify as primary explanations.
Sources: All correlations computed from this study's merged county-level dataset spanning ALICE 2025, ACS 5-Year (2019-2023), CBP 2023, NES 2022, CHR 2025, IRS migration 2021-2022, LODES 2022, BLS OEWS May 2024, FFIEC Q1 2026, and ACS B14002 5-Year. Cluster assignments derived from quartile-based composite scoring across four dimensions.
Active business registrations from the Indiana Secretary of State (as of June 2026). Each entry is a currently-active business entity with an Indiana principal-office address. Aggregated by county to surface how LLC and corporation formation density compares with the indirect Census measures (NES, CBP, self-employment).
Each indicator vs. the four primary outcome measures. n=92 counties.
| Indicator | vs Slack | vs Hardship | vs Median HH income | vs % HH > $100K | vs Bach % | vs Self-emp % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bachelor's degree % (ACS) | +0.630 | -0.455 | +0.644 | +0.699 | 1.000 | -0.348 |
| Self-employed % (ACS DP03) | -0.235 | +0.197 | -0.152 | -0.159 | -0.348 | 1.000 |
| NES nonemployer biz/1k (Census) | +0.518 | -0.506 | +0.627 | +0.615 | +0.458 | +0.248 |
| CBP small estabs/1k (Census) | +0.362 | -0.320 | +0.360 | +0.408 | +0.478 | -0.040 |
| SoS Domestic LLC /1k | +0.515 | -0.428 | +0.529 | +0.565 | +0.729 | -0.161 |
| SoS Foreign LLC /1k | +0.380 | -0.279 | +0.403 | +0.415 | +0.638 | -0.284 |
| SoS Domestic For-Profit Corp /1k | +0.332 | -0.312 | +0.364 | +0.379 | +0.473 | -0.121 |
| SoS Nonprofit /1k | +0.101 | -0.052 | +0.042 | +0.109 | +0.344 | -0.057 |
| SoS Professional Corp /1k | +0.453 | -0.318 | +0.487 | +0.517 | +0.663 | -0.258 |
Source: Indiana Secretary of State Business Entity Search bulk export, scraped June 2, 2026 (853,914 raw name records → 687,481 unique active business entities → 568,130 with IN principal-office addresses successfully mapped to county, 99.97% coverage). Filtered to Status = Active. Bachelor's, self-employed from ACS 5Y 2019-2023. NES from Census Nonemployer Statistics 2022. CBP from Census County Business Patterns 2023.
Sortable. Click column headers to sort. LLC/1k = active domestic LLCs per 1,000 residents.
The most direct interpretation of the data is that "small LLC owner," "self-employed," and "bachelor's degree holder" are not interchangeable categories — they describe meaningfully different populations.
The bachelor's-degree pathway is the strongest single county-level prosperity signal (r = +0.630 with slack). Counties with high bachelor's-degree shares also form many more LLCs (r = +0.659), so the two indicators overlap, but bachelor's is the dominant signal.
The "self-employed" ACS measure is uncorrelated with LLC formation (r = -0.031) and slightly negatively correlated with slack (r = -0.235). The reason is that the ACS self-employment classification is dominated by rural farmers and skilled tradesmen who file as sole proprietors under their own names, not as LLCs. These rural self-employed are not the same population as urban small-business LLC owners.
LLC formation, when measured directly through state registrations, sits in between: positively correlated with slack (r = +0.493) but explained largely by the bachelor's-degree concentration in the same counties. A first-pass partial-correlation reading: most of the LLC density signal is the bachelor's signal in disguise. The genuinely informative subgroup is the rural counties with anomalously high LLC density (Daviess, Martin, Knox) — these signal a different mechanism than the metro-professional pattern.
The pattern that most consistently associates with financial stability at the county level: bachelor's degree share above the state median, plus active LLC and professional-corporation density above 25/1,000. The Indianapolis-suburban counties (Hamilton, Boone, Hendricks, Johnson) show this combination at extreme intensity. The post-industrial and Appalachian-fringe counties (Vigo, Sullivan, Scott, Crawford) show the opposite combination at extreme intensity.
A re-verification pass was run on all SoS-derived numbers in this tab against the underlying SQLite database. Headline numbers that were re-confirmed include the top registered-agent counts, foreign-entity totals (82,822), Marion home-health (1,342), Hamilton financial-advisor (41) and senior-care (92), Blackford's zero mental-health-LLC absence, Switzerland's zero dental absence, and Warren's zero mental health and zero dental. One number was corrected: the 5534 Saint Joe Road address hosts 1,873 active LLCs (previously published as 1,777 from the v62 sample).
64,687 active entities have at least one DBA registered; 108,391 total DBA records statewide. The biggest DBA operators are hospital systems: Franciscan Alliance with 589 DBAs, Community Health Network 222, Floyd Memorial Hospital 160, American Health Network 126, Beacon Medical Group 123, Riverview Hospital 121, St. Vincent Hospital 121. Indianapolis Homes Realty operates 540 DBAs (real-estate). Midwest Eye Consultants has 135 (eye-care chain). This means the gap analysis cannot trace operational reach: verification check shows that hospital systems register every DBA to a single corporate-HQ address (Franciscan's 606 active DBAs all carry the Mishawaka HQ address, Parkview's 105 all Fort Wayne, Reid's 125 all Richmond, St. Vincent's 122 all Indianapolis). Of 2,434 multi-DBA operators with 5+ DBAs, none distribute DBA addresses across multiple Indiana counties — all register their full DBA portfolio to a single county. So the SoS DBA layer doesn't verify operational reach to non-HQ counties. The hospitals do operate in those counties via separately-registered local legal entities (Parkview Wabash Hospital, Adams County Memorial Hospital, Daviess County Hospital, etc.) — each of which appears separately in the dataset.
2,963 active Domestic Series LLCs and 1,048 Domestic Master LLCs use the umbrella structure where each rental property gets its own series under one parent (e.g., Inspired Investments LLC-S Series 1 through 18+). This is a sophisticated real-estate-investor pattern indicating professional landlord operations. The total count is small relative to all LLCs but signals where institutional-grade RE portfolios concentrate.
Among 455,333 domestic LLCs, 28.5% use a descriptive industry word, 24.0% match a likely personal-name pattern (e.g., "Smith LLC"), and 47.6% are "other" — initials, single word, or family names with no industry marker. 9,765 LLCs (2.1%) begin with a number — almost always single-property real-estate vehicles like "1218 CRASH PAD LLC" or "129 N MERIDIAN ST LLC". Another 1,537 end with a street-suffix LLC. Together these address-named LLCs are the bottom of the real-estate stack.
42,519 active entities (about 6% of the active universe) have at least one former name on record; 50,044 total former-name records. The highest-churn entities have ten or more former names, often reflecting acquisitions, spin-offs, or brand resets. The dataset captures the rebranding history but not the dates of change.
Only 3,605 entities (0.52% of 687,488 total) are in Cancelled status. Indiana's SoS does not aggressively prune inactive entities — many of the 687K "active" LLCs may be dormant in practice but technically registered. This is an upward bias on county-level LLC counts: counties with older small businesses may carry more zombie LLCs than counties with newer businesses.
Underutilized dimensions in the dataset include: registered-agent → industry network mapping (which law firms / CPAs anchor which county economies); multi-LLC owner detection via shared registered-agent address (to identify property-portfolio operators); DBA / parent-subsidiary enrichment of the gap analysis to reflect actual operational reach (resolving the Franciscan-Indianapolis-but-operating-statewide paradox); cancellation geography / time analysis; out-of-state-controlled IN LLCs (entities with IN address but out-of-state registered agent) as an absentee-ownership signal. A full study log of done / not-done items is maintained alongside this dashboard.
Data limitation summary — Sole proprietorships are invisible (Census DP03 self-employment captures them; SoS does not). National chains operate as a single corporate-foreign entity registered to corporate HQ, so retail categories dominated by chains (pharmacy, hardware, tire, grocery) appear thinner than reality. DBA / parent-subsidiary structures hide the operational reach of large healthcare and real-estate operators. Industry keyword matching captures roughly 42% of business names cleanly; the remainder are personal-name or initial-style LLCs with no industry signal in the name.
Each LLC's business name is matched against industry keyword patterns. % = share of a county's active LLCs/Corps matching that pattern. The patterns are imperfect (many businesses have non-descriptive names) but the differences across counties are large enough to be informative.
For each industry pattern, the correlation between county's industry-share-of-LLCs and the county's slack / bachelor's-degree share.
| Industry pattern | vs Slack | vs Bachelor % | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finance / Consulting / Investment | +0.520 | +0.772 | Strongest professional-economy signature; Hamilton 8.4% |
| Tech | +0.288 | +0.333 | Small overall share; clusters in suburbs |
| Healthcare | +0.223 | +0.539 | Bachelor's-correlated but only modestly tied to slack |
| Salon / Beauty | +0.059 | +0.295 | Essentially neutral on slack — distributed everywhere |
| Trucking / Logistics | −0.088 | −0.366 | Owner-operator pattern; mildly negative on slack |
| Construction | −0.191 | −0.334 | Rural tradesman-LLC pattern |
| Real Estate / Holdings / Farms | −0.202 | −0.538 | Counter-intuitive: heavy RE/holdings share concentrates in rural farming counties, not wealthy ones |
| Farming / Agriculture | −0.268 | −0.565 | Pulaski 19.5%, Carroll 18.0% — rural farm-LLC heavy |
| Food / Drink (restaurants) | −0.311 | −0.364 | Restaurants are everywhere but their LLC share is highest in lower-income counties |
The data shows there are two distinct populations within Indiana's 421,320 active LLCs:
(1) Metro-professional LLCs. Concentrated in Hamilton, Boone, Marion, Hendricks, Allen, Johnson, Vanderburgh. Finance/consulting/healthcare/tech-heavy. Often registered through commercial agents or attorney offices (Allen 14.6% shared-address, Hamilton 13.4%). Bachelor's-degree-share correlation: +0.729. These are the "small business as professional services" path — and they correlate with high household slack.
(2) Rural-property-and-trades LLCs. Concentrated in Knox, Daviess, Martin, Pulaski, Carroll, Rush, Newton, Benton. Real-estate-holdings (single-property LLCs), farming, construction, and trucking-heavy. Almost no shared-address clustering — these are genuine local businesses. Bachelor's-degree-share is low. These LLCs are not a signal of prosperity in their counties — but they aren't a signal of poverty either. They reflect a different mechanism: rural Americans using LLCs to hold farmland and rental properties, to operate small construction businesses, and to provide trucking services.
The original question — "is having an LLC vs being self-employed vs having a bachelor's degree associated with financial stability?" — divides differently when you see both populations. A bachelor's-degree holder who registers an LLC is overwhelmingly in the metro-professional bucket. A non-degreed individual who registers an LLC is overwhelmingly in the rural-property-and-trades bucket. Both groups are real, both use the LLC structure, and both differ statistically from the rural farmer/tradesman who reports as "self-employed" on the Census but does not register an LLC.
The genuinely most-financially-stable path the data describes is: bachelor's-degree, metro residence, professional-services LLC. The genuinely most-financially-stressed path: low-education, rural residence, "self-employed" without LLC registration (operating as sole proprietorship under one's own name). The middle path — rural LLC owner, often holding a farm or a few rental properties — runs near the state median, with substantial variance by county.
Indiana Secretary of State business names parsed against 84 industry keyword patterns. For each county the count and per-capita rate of each service category is compared to the state-population-weighted baseline. Categories with zero matches in a county where the state baseline would predict at least 0.5 expected entities are flagged as "absent"; categories with location quotient < 0.5 are "thin"; LQ > 2.0 are "surplus." Caveat: national chains (Walgreens, Kroger, CVS, Lowe's, Tractor Supply, Discount Tire) are corporate-foreign entities, so categories dominated by chains will under-report local-only LLC presence — the gap analysis is more reliable for service categories typically operated as small local LLCs (medical practices, salons, contractors, accountants, etc.).
An "absent" category means zero active LLCs in that category at addresses inside the county, where the state baseline would have predicted at least 0.5 entities. These are candidate service-gap counties.
| County | Pop | Total LLCs/Corps | Absent | Thin (LQ<0.5) | Top absent categories |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warren | 8,265 | 357 | 22 | 2 | Dentistry, Mental health / counseling, Physical therapy / chiropractic, Home health / hospice, Senior / assisted-living care |
| Newton | 13,830 | 502 | 19 | 3 | Mental health / counseling, Physical therapy / chiropractic, Home health / hospice, Senior / assisted-living care, Hair salon |
| Sullivan | 20,669 | 708 | 18 | 9 | Vision / optometry, Physical therapy / chiropractic, Home health / hospice, Barbershop, Nail salon |
| Switzerland | 9,921 | 296 | 18 | 4 | Dentistry, Physical therapy / chiropractic, Home health / hospice, Barbershop, Plumbing |
| Brown | 15,475 | 785 | 15 | 9 | Dentistry, Physical therapy / chiropractic, Home health / hospice, Senior / assisted-living care, Hair salon |
| Crawford | 10,577 | 352 | 14 | 5 | Dentistry, Mental health / counseling, Physical therapy / chiropractic, Home health / hospice, Senior / assisted-living care |
| Jay | 20,436 | 1,137 | 14 | 7 | Mental health / counseling, Home health / hospice, Senior / assisted-living care, Barbershop, Nail salon |
| Scott | 24,181 | 871 | 14 | 13 | Vision / optometry, Physical therapy / chiropractic, Senior / assisted-living care, Hair salon, Barbershop |
| Vermillion | 15,498 | 542 | 14 | 8 | Dentistry, Physical therapy / chiropractic, Home health / hospice, Senior / assisted-living care, Hair salon |
| Franklin | 22,758 | 806 | 13 | 10 | Vision / optometry, Home health / hospice, Senior / assisted-living care, Hair salon, Nail salon |
| Spencer | 19,810 | 864 | 13 | 8 | Vision / optometry, Physical therapy / chiropractic, Home health / hospice, Senior / assisted-living care, Hair salon |
| Union | 7,087 | 314 | 13 | 1 | Home health / hospice, Senior / assisted-living care, Hair salon, Barbershop, HVAC / heating-cooling |
| Washington | 28,036 | 1,119 | 13 | 13 | Vision / optometry, Physical therapy / chiropractic, Senior / assisted-living care, Veterinary, Hair salon |
| Adams | 35,809 | 1,945 | 12 | 5 | Vision / optometry, Home health / hospice, Veterinary, Barbershop, Nail salon |
| Benton | 8,691 | 505 | 12 | 4 | Physical therapy / chiropractic, Home health / hospice, Senior / assisted-living care, Hair salon, Barbershop |
| Fayette | 23,102 | 897 | 12 | 12 | Vision / optometry, Senior / assisted-living care, Hair salon, Nail salon, Spa / massage |
| Parke | 16,977 | 867 | 12 | 6 | Mental health / counseling, Physical therapy / chiropractic, Home health / hospice, Senior / assisted-living care, Hair salon |
| Carroll | 20,306 | 939 | 11 | 9 | Mental health / counseling, Nail salon, Spa / massage, Roofing, Flooring |
These are the service categories most often missing across Indiana's 92 counties. A high absence count means many counties have no locally-registered LLC in this category — residents either travel out-of-county for the service or use chain establishments not visible in the SoS data.
| Service category | # Counties missing | State-rate per 1k | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home health / hospice | 38 | 0.322 | Home health LLCs concentrate in Marion/Indianapolis (1,342 alone — 44% of state). Rural counties lack locally-registered providers. |
| Nail salon | 36 | 0.033 | Tend to be concentrated in metros and college towns. Many smaller counties have no LLC-registered nail salon. |
| Financial advisor / wealth mgmt | 36 | 0.036 | Highly concentrated in Hamilton (41) and other suburbs. Rural residents may use bank-employed advisors not registered as LLCs. |
| Senior / assisted-living care | 31 | 0.082 | Senior-care LLCs concentrate in Hamilton (92) and other affluent counties. Many rural counties lack local senior-living LLC providers. |
| Barbershop | 30 | 0.077 | Independent barbershops often operate as sole props, not LLCs. The "absence" may understate actual barbershop presence. |
| Marketing / advertising agency | 28 | 0.092 | Marketing agencies cluster in Hamilton, Marion, Tippecanoe. Many rural counties have none. |
| Pest control | 26 | 0.026 | Local pest-control LLCs are sparse; major regional firms (ABC, Terminix) are foreign entities not in this count. |
| Software development | 26 | 0.020 | Highly concentrated in Hamilton (200+) and Marion. Rural counties lack local software firms. |
| Vision / optometry | 25 | 0.026 | Many independent optometry practices but national chains (LensCrafters, Pearle Vision) dominate retail. |
| Catering | 25 | 0.061 | Catering LLCs cluster in metros. Rural caterers often operate as sole props or under a related restaurant LLC. |
| Veterinary | 23 | 0.018 | Veterinary LLCs concentrate in suburbs (more pets per household). Rural counties may use mobile or large-animal vets registered out-of-county. |
| Spa / massage | 23 | 0.028 | Day-spa LLCs concentrate in affluent suburbs. |
| Hair salon | 23 | 0.079 | Many independent stylists operate as sole props or chair-renters within a shop LLC owned by someone else. |
| Physical therapy / chiropractic | 22 | 0.070 | PT clinics concentrate in metros with hospitals. |
| Pizza | 18 | 0.071 | Pizza places exist but many are franchises (Pizza Hut, Domino's) registered as foreign entities to the chain HQ. |
Each card shows a county's strongest "surpluses" (high LQ) and most-conspicuous absences. Surpluses suggest local specialization. Absences flag categories where residents may need to travel out of county.
The SoS-based service-availability picture reveals an Indiana with sharp two-tier accessibility:
The metropolitan core (Indianapolis, Hamilton, Lake, Allen, Vanderburgh, Tippecanoe, Monroe, St. Joseph, Hendricks, Johnson, Porter, Clark) hosts the complete catalog of locally-LLC-able services. No gaps in the 42 measured categories. Hamilton in particular has strong surpluses in financial advisor (3.3× state rate), senior care (3.2×), real-estate brokerage (2.8×), pharmacy (2.4×), and mental health (2.3×) — the professional-services concentration is unmistakable.
The rural service deserts (Warren, Newton, Sullivan, Switzerland, Brown, Crawford, Jay, Scott, Vermillion, Franklin, Spencer) are missing 13–22 of the 42 essential categories. The pattern of absences clusters around healthcare access (home health, senior care, vision, vet, physical therapy, mental health) and certain personal services (nail salons, hair salons in some cases). These are counties where residents who need specialized health care or planning services must travel to a regional hub.
The most striking individual finding is Blackford County's zero mental-health LLCs in a county whose CHR data shows 19.6% frequent mental distress among adults, the 20th-highest rate in Indiana. There is no locally-registered LLC providing mental-health services to Blackford residents — they would need to travel to Delaware County (Muncie) or Grant County (Marion).
The Switzerland County combination — zero dental LLCs, zero vision LLCs, zero home health LLCs, zero auto repair LLCs — for a county of nearly 10,000 residents represents one of Indiana's most severe local-service deserts. Switzerland residents drive to Jefferson County (Madison), Dearborn County (Lawrenceburg), or across the river to Kentucky for many basic services.
The rural-LLC paradox: counties like Knox, Daviess, and Martin have very high LLC density per capita (60+ per 1,000 residents) — yet they are still missing core service categories. The LLCs registered in these counties are heavily real-estate-holdings and farming-related, not service providers. High LLC count does not automatically mean high service availability.
For each of the rural-deficit counties, the gap analysis surfaces a set of plausible business opportunities — categories where the state baseline predicts at least one local provider and there are zero. A first-pass economic-development reading would prioritize: home health (38 counties missing, highest absentee count, growing senior population), mental health (statewide CHR distress rates rising), senior care, and primary medical practice for the smaller-population counties.
Methodology: 501,905 active Indiana domestic LLCs, corporations, and professional corporations matched against 84 regex industry-keyword patterns over their legal names. Per-capita rates computed against 2020 Census county population. Location quotient = county rate / state-population-weighted rate. "Absent" = 0 entities AND state-baseline expects ≥0.5; "Thin" = LQ < 0.5; "Surplus" = LQ > 2.0. Limitations: (1) National chains operate as Foreign Corporations (CVS, Walgreens, Lowe's, Kroger) and don't register Indiana-county-specific LLCs — categories dominated by chains will under-report. (2) Sole-proprietorships don't appear in SoS data — barbershops, hair salons, in-home daycares, etc. may exist as sole props with no LLC. (3) Service categories may legitimately be supplied by a regional provider in a neighboring county — absence does not mean inaccessibility.
Per-county service catalog based on Indiana Secretary of State business registrations (LEGAL NAMES + Assumed Business Name records). 43 service categories tracked. Counties are tiered by absence count — a category is "absent" when zero LLCs/corps/DBAs are registered in that category in the county and the state baseline rate would predict at least 0.5 expected entities at the county's population. Surpluses are categories where the county's rate per 1,000 residents exceeds the state baseline by at least 1.5×.
0 categories absent (out of 43 measured). Service catalog matches the state baseline rate-per-1k for every essential category. Indianapolis metro, Fort Wayne, and the largest Indy-ring counties. — 10 counties.
1–5 absent categories. Substantial service presence; the few missing categories are typically chain-dominated retail (tire, hardware, pharmacy) or specialty professional services with low per-capita demand. — 32 counties.
6–10 absent categories. Local service base exists but several essential categories rely on a neighboring county. Mid-sized rural and exurban counties. — 26 counties.
11 or more absent categories. Significant fraction of essentials require travel to another county. Smallest-population rural counties, often with weak professional and healthcare LLC presence. — 24 counties.
Sortable summary of all counties' service catalog completeness. Click column headers to sort.
Newton (23 absences), Warren (22), Switzerland (19), Sullivan (17), Ohio (16), Union (16), Crawford (16) are the most-deserted counties in the dataset. Combined population of these seven counties is about 78,000 — and they collectively register only 271 essential-service LLCs+DBAs. Each is missing 14+ of the 43 measured categories. Switzerland is the most striking because it has no neighboring high-density metro to absorb its service demand — Vevay residents drive to Madison (Jefferson County) or to Lawrenceburg (Dearborn County) for many essentials.
Morgan County (pop 71,973, 0 absences) sits between Indianapolis and Bloomington and has the most-diversified industry HHI in the state — that diversification shows up here too as complete service coverage. Madison County (pop 130,129, 0 absences) despite its post-industrial GM collapse story carries a full service catalog — the Anderson hospital, the GM-era anchor businesses, and the small-business base survived the manufacturing collapse. Delaware County (Muncie) carries 0 absences as well, anchored by Ball State and IU Health Ball Memorial.
Knox, Daviess, and Martin all have high LLC density per capita (60+/1k, on par with the Indy metro) but several essential-service absences. The discrepancy is that those counties' LLCs are heavily real-estate holdings and farming entities, not service providers. The headline "LLC entrepreneurship" indicator significantly overstates the breadth of locally-available products and services in these counties.
Folding 108,391 DBA records into the service catalog adds the most lift to the metropolitan counties (Marion +2,151, Hamilton +913, Allen +668, Lake +678). Verification finding: hospital systems and other multi-DBA operators register every DBA to a single corporate-HQ address rather than to the operational location. Of 2,434 entities with 5+ active DBAs, every single one registers all DBAs to a single county. So the metro DBA lift is largely an artifact of corporate-HQ concentration, not evidence of broader operational reach. The most-deserted rural counties remain deserted in the DBA-enriched view, and the metro counts overstate how much "new" local presence DBAs add. The DBA layer mostly captures real-estate-portfolio operators (Indianapolis Homes Realty 540 DBAs all in Marion), hospital systems concentrated at HQ, and chain operators concentrated at HQ.
Specific categories where state-baseline demand exists but local LLC presence is zero: home health (38 of 92 counties absent), financial advisor / wealth management (36 counties), senior care (31), marketing agency (28), pest control (26), software development (26). For rural counties with aging populations, the home-health and senior-care absences look like real demand gaps. For mid-sized counties (20–50K population), marketing and software development absences may reflect demand met by neighboring-metro providers rather than absence of need.
An absent LLC category does not mean the service is inaccessible. National chains operate as foreign corporations registered to corporate HQ (Walgreens, CVS, Lowe's, Tractor Supply, Discount Tire) so retail and pharmacy categories appear absent even where chains operate. Sole proprietorships (many barbers, hairstylists, daycares, small contractors, farmers) never register an LLC and do not appear in this analysis at all. Services may be reliably accessible from a neighboring county on a 15-30 minute drive. The absence map flags locally-registered service capacity, not accessible service capacity.
Methodology: 634,294 active SoS name records (LEGAL NAMES + ASSUMED BUSINESS NAMES) for domestic LLCs, for-profit corps, professional corps, and foreign equivalents matched against 43 essential-service industry keyword patterns. Each record's principal-office address was geocoded to county. Per-1,000-population rates computed against 2020 Census county population. Absent = 0 records AND state baseline expects ≥0.5 entities. Surplus = LQ ≥ 1.5 with ≥2 entities. Note: sole proprietorships are excluded entirely from SoS data, so categories dominated by sole-prop business models (barbershops, in-home daycares, small contractors, farmers) will under-report local presence.
A pathway map for Indiana residents thinking about what they study and where to look for opportunity. For each broad field of study, this tab combines the state's S1502 field-of-bachelor data (where graduates concentrate), BLS OEWS occupational wages (what specific jobs pay in the Indianapolis MSA), named anchor employers from the county briefings and from SoS DBA analysis (where the largest hiring happens), and the service-gap analysis (where new LLCs can fill genuine local demand). Wages are Indianapolis-MSA median annuals — rural and non-metro pay tends to be 15–25% lower for the same occupation.
STEM degrees: biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, engineering disciplines.
| Occupation | Median wage |
|---|---|
| Software developers 6,340 jobs (Indy MSA) | $105,990 |
| Computer systems analysts 5,170 jobs (Indy MSA) | $99,500 |
| Data scientists 1,430 jobs (Indy MSA) | $90,750 |
| Civil engineers 2,040 jobs (Indy MSA) | $97,640 |
| Electrical engineers 1,310 jobs (Indy MSA) | $104,130 |
| Industrial engineers 2,510 jobs (Indy MSA) | $97,780 |
| Mechanical engineers 1,990 jobs (Indy MSA) | $96,230 |
| Bioengineers and biomedical engineers 500 jobs (Indy MSA) | $127,650 |
| Medical scientists, except epidemiologists 1,010 jobs (Indy MSA) | $77,480 |
| Chemists 940 jobs (Indy MSA) | $74,260 |
| Chemical technicians 440 jobs (Indy MSA) | $51,980 |
| Atmospheric, earth, marine, and space sciences teachers, postsecondary 30 jobs (Indy MSA) | $86,600 |
Accounting, finance, marketing, management, supply chain, entrepreneurship.
| Occupation | Median wage |
|---|---|
| Chief Executives 920 jobs (Indy MSA) | $214,170 |
| General and operations managers 16,750 jobs (Indy MSA) | $123,580 |
| Marketing managers 1,920 jobs (Indy MSA) | $127,770 |
| Financial managers 4,750 jobs (Indy MSA) | $139,660 |
| Purchasing managers 460 jobs (Indy MSA) | $131,610 |
| Accountants and auditors 10,760 jobs (Indy MSA) | $79,560 |
| Financial and investment analysts 1,510 jobs (Indy MSA) | $81,150 |
| Personal financial advisors 2,670 jobs (Indy MSA) | $106,730 |
| Claims adjusters 1,660 jobs (Indy MSA) | $64,540 |
| Human resources specialists 7,300 jobs (Indy MSA) | $63,000 |
| Project management specialists | — |
| Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks 9,350 jobs (Indy MSA) | $48,060 |
K-12 teaching, special education, school administration, education research.
| Occupation | Median wage |
|---|---|
| Business teachers, postsecondary 420 jobs (Indy MSA) | $78,480 |
| Architecture teachers, postsecondary | — |
| Mathematical science teachers, postsecondary 110 jobs (Indy MSA) | $129,880 |
| Philosophy and religion teachers, postsecondary 120 jobs (Indy MSA) | $76,570 |
| Postsecondary teachers, all other 270 jobs (Indy MSA) | $63,340 |
| Preschool teachers, except special education 2,970 jobs (Indy MSA) | $36,190 |
| Elementary school teachers, except special education 9,380 jobs (Indy MSA) | $59,990 |
| Middle school teachers, except special and career/tech ed. 3,690 jobs (Indy MSA) | $60,050 |
| Secondary school teachers, except special and career/tech ed. 6,130 jobs (Indy MSA) | $62,440 |
| Tutors 660 jobs (Indy MSA) | $57,050 |
| Special education teachers, all other | — |
English, history, philosophy, fine arts, performing arts, graphic design, journalism.
| Occupation | Median wage |
|---|---|
| Graphic designers 2,200 jobs (Indy MSA) | $63,270 |
| Art directors 190 jobs (Indy MSA) | $102,950 |
| Special effects artists and animators | — |
| Interior designers 450 jobs (Indy MSA) | $62,310 |
| Actors 360 jobs (Indy MSA) | — |
| Musicians and singers 130 jobs (Indy MSA) | — |
| Editors 390 jobs (Indy MSA) | $62,240 |
| Writers and authors 190 jobs (Indy MSA) | $68,220 |
| Audio and video technicians 670 jobs (Indy MSA) | $57,520 |
| Photographers 270 jobs (Indy MSA) | $38,460 |
| Camera operators, television, video, and film 80 jobs (Indy MSA) | $59,380 |
| Clergy 360 jobs (Indy MSA) | $58,590 |
Apprenticeship-route careers: electrician, plumber, HVAC, welder, machinist, CDL driver, lineworker, carpenter, mason, mechanic.
| Occupation | Median wage |
|---|---|
| Electricians 4,940 jobs (Indy MSA) | $64,120 |
| Plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters 4,160 jobs (Indy MSA) | $63,780 |
| Heating, A/C, refrigeration mechanics 3,110 jobs (Indy MSA) | $62,030 |
| Carpenters 4,790 jobs (Indy MSA) | $61,870 |
| Welders, cutters, solderers, and brazers 2,290 jobs (Indy MSA) | $49,300 |
| Machinists 4,730 jobs (Indy MSA) | $47,640 |
| Heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers 19,340 jobs (Indy MSA) | $61,750 |
| Automotive service technicians 5,290 jobs (Indy MSA) | $48,840 |
| Industrial machinery mechanics 3,550 jobs (Indy MSA) | $65,540 |
| Construction laborers 9,170 jobs (Indy MSA) | $50,070 |
| First-line supervisors of production 5,210 jobs (Indy MSA) | $73,970 |
Ag sciences, ag business, ag engineering, forestry, food science, biological systems.
| Occupation | Median wage |
|---|---|
| Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers 30 jobs (Indy MSA) | $68,610 |
| Agricultural technicians 60 jobs (Indy MSA) | $60,000 |
| Animal scientists | — |
| Soil and plant scientists 130 jobs (Indy MSA) | $82,040 |
| First-line supervisors of farming, fishing, and forestry workers 40 jobs (Indy MSA) | $79,650 |
| Agricultural equipment operators 140 jobs (Indy MSA) | $54,020 |
| Farmworkers and laborers, crop, nursery, greenhouse 270 jobs (Indy MSA) | $43,410 |
| Conservation scientists 110 jobs (Indy MSA) | $61,070 |
| Veterinarians 530 jobs (Indy MSA) | $126,490 |
Eli Lilly hires across Science & Engineering, Healthcare, and Business pathways. Cummins covers Engineering, Skilled Trades, and Business. IU Health hires across all three healthcare-adjacent fields. Counties with these anchors (Hamilton, Bartholomew, Marion, Allen) offer multiple-pathway lock-in — local students can find genuine local careers without leaving the state.
The Healthcare pathway is reinforced by big DBA networks: 589 Franciscan, 222 Community Health, 121 St. Vincent, 121 Riverview, 116 Hendricks, 114 IU Health, 105 Parkview. Verification finding: in the SoS data, hospital systems register every DBA to a single corporate-HQ address (Franciscan's 606 DBAs all show St. Joseph County, Parkview's 105 all show Allen, Reid's 125 all show Wayne, St. Vincent's 122 all show Marion). So while these systems do operate hospitals and clinics across many counties in reality, their DBA records do not visibly distribute service points to the operating counties. A respiratory therapist in Adams County may work at Adams County Memorial Hospital's operationally local facilities, but those facilities' DBAs register to the Adams County HQ address (which is correct). For cross-system networks like Franciscan or Parkview, only their named hospitals (Franciscan Hospital Mooresville, Parkview Wabash Hospital, etc.) provide visible operational presence in non-HQ counties, registered through separate legal entities.
23.9% of Hamilton County bachelor-degree holders have business degrees. The 41 financial-advisor LLCs in Hamilton (verified against SoS data) is more than the next 15 counties combined. Anyone studying finance/wealth management in Indiana has an unusually clear "land in Hamilton" pathway. 47 of 92 counties (verified) have zero financial-advisor LLCs in the SoS data — 36 of those are large enough that the state-baseline rate would have predicted at least 0.5 expected entities. Hamilton holds 41 of the state's 249 financial-advisor LLCs (16.5%) despite having about 5% of the population.
The state's universities + colleges span 12+ counties: Monroe, Tippecanoe, Delaware, St. Joseph, Marion, Vigo, Vanderburgh, Putnam, Montgomery, Steuben, Wabash, Jefferson, Allen. The same data shows education-share peaks in rural counties (Parke 32.5%, Vermillion 30.1%, Orange 28.6%, Switzerland 27.0%) — these counties are training teachers who often stay local. The pathway is robust but limited in upward mobility (postsecondary wages are highest, K-12 wages are state-median).
Kokomo MSA plumbers ($89K), electricians ($89K), industrial machinery mechanics ($89K) all earn within $20K of Indianapolis software developers ($106K). The Hamilton-Carmel-Fishers white-collar wage premium is real but not as decisive as headlines suggest. For students without a clear college pathway, the trades are an alternative with substantial Indiana-county presence and visible LLC-founding opportunities everywhere.
17,171 farm-related LLCs across IN are heavily concentrated in Pulaski (19.5%), Carroll (18.0%), Warren (17.9%), Benton (17.4%), Rush (17.3%) — counties with low population. Most are family-name LLCs holding farmland. Career paths in agriculture run through Purdue Ag, the major coops (Premier Ag, Co-Alliance), processors (Tyson, Indiana Packers, Cargill, ADM), and the growing seed-and-chemical cluster anchored by Corteva and Beck's Hybrids in Hamilton/Boone.
v82 adds USI, Hanover College, Vera Bradley (Project Restoration layoffs). 53 cumulative employer corrections now with ✓ VERIFIED badges.
Caveats: Employee counts are approximate. National chains operate via foreign-corp registrations at HQ. Category color key: Healthcare Insurance Church/Religious Education/Youth Auto Manufacturer Construction Real Estate Finance Govt/Defense
| Employer | Original | Verified | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eli Lilly (Indianapolis HQ) | ~10,500 IN | 10K+ at HQ (53K global) | LinkedIn / SEC |
| IU Health (system-wide) | ~22,000 | **38,000+** | Wikipedia + iuhealth.org |
| Notre Dame | ~14,000+ | **~8,229** | univstats.com 2024 |
| Purdue University | ~18,000 | **~38,900** (~16K career) | Purdue iData |
| Parkview Health (Allen) | ~14,000 | **17,500+** | fwbusiness.com Aug 2025 |
| Lutheran Health Network | ~7,500 | ~7,000+ + 800 physicians | lutheranhealth.net |
| Beacon Health System | ~7,500 | ~8,000 | beaconhealthsystem.org |
| Stellantis Kokomo + StarPlus | ~7-9K | **~6,100 + 730 StarPlus** | UAW / Detroit News |
| Old National Bank | ~3K statewide | **~5,400 total** | SEC / Wikipedia |
| Subaru of Indiana | ~5,500 | 6,000+ | Glassdoor 2025 |
| Toyota Motor Mfg Indiana | ~7,500 | 7,500+ (+340 by 2025) | Toyota newsroom |
| Honda Mfg Indiana | ~2,500 | ~2,700+ | Wikipedia |
| Zimmer Biomet (Warsaw) | ~5,500 | >5,000 in Warsaw | WSBT / MedTech Dive |
| AM General (St. Joseph) | ~1,300 | **3-6K St. Joseph (13K+ total)** | Inside Indiana Business |
| Elevance Health (Anthem) | ~6,000 IN | **4,978 IN** (+230 by 2025) | IBJ |
| Allison Transmission | ~3,500 | ~3,400 | Allison IR |
| Ball State University | ~3,500 | **~3,053** | univstats.com |
| Sweetwater Sound | ~3,000 | ~3K (expanding +1K) | Greater Fort Wayne Inc. |
| BP Whiting Refinery | ~1,800 | **~1.5K + 1.5K contractors** | bp.com |
| Cook Group (Monroe) | ~10K+ statewide | ~10K global; ~3-4K Monroe | ZoomInfo |
| Thor Industries | ~14,000 IN | **~20,900 global** | GlobalData |
| Forest River | ~13,000 IN | **14K+ across 6+ states** | NATDA |
| Cummins (Columbus) | ~8-10K | ~8-10K + 500 expansion | Cummins IR |
| Reid Health (Wayne) | ~4,000 | **~1,642** | RocketReach |
| Wabash National (Lafayette) | ~2,000 | **~3-4K; Q1 2025 -26%** | SEC + IBJ |
| Lippert Components (Elkhart) | ~6,000 | **~3,800 global** | LeadIQ + SEC |
| Berry Global (Evansville) | ~1,800 | **~4,000+ across 9 locations** | Evansville Regional |
| Mead Johnson (Reckitt) | ~1,500 | **~800** | reckitt.com |
| Indiana Packers (Delphi) | ~2,400 | ~2,000+ (no layoffs ever) | indianapackerscorp.com |
| MasterBrand Cabinets (Jasper) | ~3K+ IN | **~10K+ global** | Wikipedia/Indeed |
| Kimball International | ~1,000 IN | HNI Corp subsidiary | HNI |
| Caterpillar Lafayette | ~1,500 | **~900-1K post-985 layoffs** | Caterpillar PR |
| Goshen Health System | ~2,500 | **~2,000 across 40 locations** | goshenhealth.com |
| Aisin USA (Seymour) | ~1,800 | **~1-5K range** | ZoomInfo |
| Hill-Rom / Baxter (Batesville) | ~1,743 | smaller post-Baxter restructuring | Baxter SEC |
| DePauw University | ~700 | ~500-700 | Wikipedia + DePauw HR |
| Indiana State University | ~1,500 | **~2,000 (508 fac + 1,516 staff)** | univstats.com |
| Baptist Health Floyd (New Albany) | ~2,500 | **~2,000 + 600 physicians** | baptisthealth.com |
| Steel Dynamics Butler Division | ~1,500 | **~1.5-2K (SDI global 6,321)** | SDI SEC DEF 14A 2024 |
| Cleveland-Cliffs Indiana Harbor | ~4,000 | **~3.5-4.5K** (1 blast furnace idling 2025) | Inside Indiana Business |
| NSWC Crane (Martin) | ~3-4K | **3,900 federal + 2,500 contractors = 6,400 direct** (>6,500 DoD w/ CAAA) | Daily Journal Dec 2024 |
| Trine University (Steuben) | ~700 | **~400-500** | Wikipedia / Trine |
| Wabash College (Montgomery) | ~250 | **~743 employees** | RocketReach/ZoomInfo |
| Endress+Hauser HQ (Johnson) | ~1,000 | ~1,000-1,500 ($50.9M expansion) | Inside Indiana Business |
| Memorial Hospital S. Bend (St. Joseph) | — | Within Beacon System ~8K; 230 physicians | beaconhealthsystem.org |
| Tyson Foods Logansport (Cass) | ~2,200 | 2,000+ (2024 AG investigation re: hiring practices) | Business & Human Rights Centre Nov 2024 |
| BraunAbility (Pulaski - Winamac) | ~800 | **~1,000-1,200** in Winamac | BraunAbility / Patricia Industries |
| Holiday World (Spencer) | ~2,000 seasonal | **2,200 seasonal** ($6.7M housing) | Holiday World 2024 |
| Indiana Tech (Allen) | ~700 | **~300-400 employees** (1,441 undergrads at 12:1) | US News / Wikipedia |
| Manchester University (Wabash) | ~400 | ~250-400 estimated (1,500 students, FW Pharmacy campus) | Manchester / US News |
| USI Univ of Southern Indiana (Vanderburgh) | ~1,800 | ~1,900 career; ~4,795 total | univstats / LeadIQ |
| Hanover College (Jefferson) | ~400 | ~257-472 range | univstats / Cause IQ |
| Vera Bradley HQ (Allen) | ~600 | **~400-600 declining** (Project Restoration $20M cost cut) | WANE 15 / CFO Dive |
Each Indiana college produces graduates who concentrate at specific employers. The links are documented in alumni publications, recruiting partnerships, and the SoS data shows where alumni-founded businesses tend to cluster.
The dashboard headlines pull from county-level statistics. But the way someone actually lives in a place — where one works, what one pays, who depends on them, what one can do — doesn't reduce to averages. This section walks through what the data shows once one puts aside the simple framings, what it still cannot show, and where the limits actually are.
Slack = median household income − ALICE survival threshold. It's what a typical family has left after housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, taxes, and tech are paid for. It already adjusts for local cost of living, so it allows comparison of a $50K life in Crawford County to a $50K life in Hamilton County honestly.
Wages high enough to overcome high costs. Slack $30–53K. Education-heavy (35–62% bachelor's+), $100K+ households are 46–58% of all households, hardship rates 25–28%. The dashboard's "winners" — but also where the cost of living is highest.
30–43% of jobs in production. Median incomes $65–84K — solid, but cost basis is high too (large household sizes drive up ALICE thresholds). Slack $2–21K. Most concentrated industry mix in the state (HHI 1,650–2,180) — a great living when manufacturing is strong, painful when it stalls. Elkhart's $2,607 slack reflects the 2023 RV-recession shock.
Median household earns at or below the local ALICE threshold. The factories that built these places have shrunk and the cost basis hasn't fallen far enough to compensate. New industries — casinos, data centers, university growth — are partial answers that don't yet move the household-level numbers.
Common intuition: more self-employed = more entrepreneurial = more prosperous. The Indiana data says the opposite. Self-employment % is negatively correlated with both education (r = −0.35) and slack (r = −0.23). The counties with the highest self-employment rates are Blackford (10.5%), Parke (10.2%), Benton (9.0%), Rush (8.9%), Daviess (8.2%) — small, rural, low-income, often agricultural. In Indiana, self-employment is more often "I farm or work a trade" than "I run a tech startup." Blackford has the state's highest self-employment rate and its worst household slack. The agency framing is real but doesn't map neatly to the BLS class-of-worker data.
A county with all its eggs in one basket pays a real price when that basket shakes. The Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) measures industry concentration: lower numbers mean more diversified employment. The most diversified counties in Indiana — Morgan, Brown, Vermillion, Clark, Hancock — sit in the 980–1,050 range. The most concentrated — LaGrange (HHI 2,177), Kosciusko (2,076), Noble (1,968) — are the manufacturing-dependent counties. Diversified moderate-cost counties (Hancock at HHI 1,045 with $30K slack) may be the quietest economic-resilience story in the state.
Statewide averages hide the bimodal reality. Hamilton has 57.6% of households earning $100K+ and 6.5% earning under $25K — a highly unequal but high-floor distribution. Blackford reverses it: 25.6% under $25K and 19.5% over $100K. Counties in the "post-industrial" bucket all show 20–25% of households under $25K, often alongside meaningful $100K+ shares — a hollowed-out middle.
The honest list. These are the questions individuals actually need answered, and the data here doesn't:
Open the All-92 Counties tab and pick their own. Read in this order: median income vs ALICE threshold first (can the typical household here cover essentials?). Then top industries — what kind of work actually exists locally? Then self-employment % and industry HHI together — is the local economy resilient or does it depend on one employer? Then broadband — if remote work is on the table, can a resident actually do it from there? The opportunity score is a useful sanity check, but treat it as a county-level statistic, not a personal prescription.
Mining the existing files (ALICE 13-year history, DP02, DP03 unused variables, the township subdivisions, and the distributions composition over time) surfaces several findings that the headline numbers obscure.
ALICE's data goes back to 2010. Comparing hardship % then to 2023 separates the counties that have materially improved from those in slow decline. Brown County is the biggest improver: 46% below ALICE in 2010 → 36.5% in 2023, a 9.5-point drop. Other improvers: LaGrange (−8.0pp), Marion (−7.0pp), Tippecanoe (−6.0pp), Franklin (−5.7pp), Johnson (−5.7pp). On the other side, Blackford went from 35.9% → 50.9% (+15.0 pp) — by far the worst trajectory. Benton (+13.4), Adams (+10.3), Vigo (+9.5), Sullivan (+9.4), Carroll (+9.0), Steuben (+9.0), Jasper, Spencer, Martin all rose 8+ pp. The trajectory data is now visible in every county's detail view.
The DP03 "worked from home" variable shows the post-pandemic geography of remote work clearly. State average is 7.3%. Hamilton tops at 20.7% — 1 in 5 Hamilton workers don't go in to a workplace. Boone 18.7%, Hancock 15.3%, Monroe 14.4%, Johnson 13.4%, Brown 13.2%, Hendricks 13.2%. The correlation with bachelor's % is r=0.73 — much stronger than with broadband adoption (r=0.40). Remote work in Indiana isn't bottlenecked by infrastructure; it's gated by the *kinds of jobs* an individual can land. The user-asked question "can broadband open up remote work to rural counties?" gets a partial answer: broadband is necessary but not sufficient.
% of residents born in Indiana correlates negatively with slack (r=−0.29). Rush (86.5% IN-born), Martin (86.3%), Adams (84.4%), Greene, Decatur — the most rooted counties — sit at modest or negative slack. The transplant magnets — Dearborn (only 37.8% IN-born, mostly Ohioans/Kentuckians commuting to Cincinnati and Louisville), Union (43.4%), Clark (49%), Floyd (51%) — show meaningfully higher slack. Hamilton, with all its wealth, is only 57.8% IN-born. The pattern reads as "people follow opportunity" — when a county becomes economically attractive, in-migration is part of the mechanism that sustains it.
Blackford tops SNAP receipt: 16.1% of households are on food assistance. Randolph 15.3%, Fayette/Wayne tied at 14.5%, Delaware 14.1%. SNAP % correlates with hardship % at r=0.69 and with slack at r=−0.66 — the strongest signal of economic distress in any of the data. One striking anomaly: LaGrange County's uninsured rate is 44.3%. The next highest (Daviess) is 23.6%. LaGrange has the state's largest Amish community, which is constitutionally exempt from health-insurance requirements. The county's median income ($83,741) and slack ($19,645) are both above average — but health-cost risk is borne almost entirely by households themselves.
County averages hide enormous internal variation. Knox County (Vincennes) has townships ranging from 13.1% to 73.0% below ALICE — a 60-percentage-point spread within one county. Orange (Paoli) 54.6pp spread. Jackson (Seymour) 53.7pp. Tippecanoe (West Lafayette/Lafayette) 51.4pp — Purdue town vs surrounding farms. Boone County spreads 47.3pp — the wealthy LEAP area vs older rural townships. if the goal is to know about a place, the county-level number can be misleading. The township breakdown is now in every county profile (where ALICE provides it).
Reviewing the state-distribution composition by county FY18 vs FY25: a few counties have become dramatically more dependent on Local Income Tax as their state-revenue line. Sullivan jumped from 28% LIT to 58% (+30 pp). Jefferson +28 pp. Dearborn +24 pp. Crawford +17 pp. Ohio +16 pp. These are mostly southeastern/Ohio-border counties where new commuter / industrial activity has generated income-tax dollars. Inversely, Hancock, Morgan, Marion, Delaware, Lake have become less LIT-dependent — meaning their state-distribution income mix is diversifying (Motor Vehicle Highway, wagering, and other programs growing relative to LIT). This is a quiet structural shift that doesn't show in headline distribution totals.
Single-mother households (female householder with children, no spouse) cluster in urban counties: Lake 7.4% of all households, Cass 6.8%, Marion 6.7%, Howard 6.3%, Madison 6.1%, LaPorte 6.0%. The correlation with slack is weak (r=−0.19) because urban single-mother households are partially compensated by higher local wages. But the *absolute number of single-mother households with children* in counties like Marion (over 65,000 single-mother HHs based on the percentages) represents a substantial population whose household economics are particularly tight.
What 92 county briefings, six years of state-distribution data, ALICE 2010–2023 trends, Census DP02/DP03 economic and social characteristics, and BLS OEWS wage data together reveal about how Indiana's economy actually works at the local level.
The 92 counties cluster into a small number of structural archetypes. Each has its own mechanism for prosperity or stress.
Hamilton, Boone, Hendricks, Hancock, Johnson, Morgan, Shelby, Putnam, Brown. The strongest household economics in Indiana — median income $80–118K, slack $20–53K, hardship 25–37%. Mechanism: deliberate municipal design + corporate ecosystem + tax structure compounding over decades, supplemented by Eli Lilly's $13B+ LEAP District in Boone. Also pulls in transplants: Hamilton is only 57.8% IN-born.
Kosciusko (Warsaw — 2/3 of world hip/knee implants, DePuy + Zimmer Biomet + Medtronic), Dubois (Jasper — 8 of NA's largest wood-furniture manufacturers, MasterBrand + Kimball), Bartholomew (Columbus — Cummins HQ + supplier ring), Allen (Fort Wayne — successful post-International-Harvester diversification: GM + Steel Dynamics + Sweetwater + Lincoln Financial). Industrial concentration that works because of structural demand drivers + talent-and-supplier network effects.
Dearborn, Franklin, Union (Cincinnati), Clark, Floyd, Harrison, Scott (Louisville), Lake, Porter, LaPorte (Chicago). Workers commute across state lines; residents earn other-state wages while paying Indiana taxes and housing costs. Dearborn is only 37.8% IN-born — the lowest in the state. Porter and Floyd land in the dashboard's top-quartile slack despite no major in-county anchor employer.
Blackford, Jay, Adams, Grant, Henry, Madison, Delaware, Wayne, Fayette, Vigo. Built up by 1880s–1900s natural gas, never fully recovered as gas ran out and 20th-century manufacturing left. Several show the worst hardship trajectories in the state — Blackford +15.0 pp, Adams +10.3 pp, Vigo +9.5 pp, Jay +7.2 pp. Several have median household income at or below the local ALICE threshold.
Rush, Martin, Newton, Warren, Fountain, Pike, Daviess, Greene, Decatur, Ripley. Productive farmland + modest manufacturing + low cost of living = quietly stable outcomes despite small size. Rush is 86.5% IN-born (most-rooted county); Newton's pure-agricultural + wind-power model produces positive slack at 13,000 residents; Daviess combines NSWC Crane federal employment with a parallel Amish community economy.
The "what works" patterns that show up across the briefings, in roughly decreasing frequency of appearance:
Carmel's roundabouts (120+ since 1996), the Palladium ($125M), Brainard's 28-year administrative continuity. Fort Wayne's explicit post-Harvester diversification choice. Plainfield's "10-years-ahead" logistics land-use planning. The compounding is from multiple decisions layered intentionally, not from any single project.
Kosciusko orthopedics, Dubois furniture, Bartholomew engine-engineering, Auburn-DeKalb auto suppliers. Held in place by talent pool + supplier base + intergenerational employment + customer relationships. Hard to replicate, harder to dislocate once established.
Toyota in Gibson (1998 → $8B+ cumulative), Cummins in Bartholomew (1919 → 8,000 regional employees), Subaru in Tippecanoe (1989 → 5,000+), Aisin in Jackson (1988 → continuing expansion). The pattern that doesn't work: anchor employer that leaves (Madison's GM, Blackford's Overhead Door, Fayette's Visteon).
Hamilton/Boone/Hendricks adjacent to Indianapolis. Dearborn adjacent to Cincinnati. Clark/Floyd adjacent to Louisville. Porter/LaPorte adjacent to Chicago. Warrick adjacent to Evansville. Brown commuter-distance from Indianapolis. Adjacency works when housing costs are lower on the Indiana side and commute infrastructure is good.
NSWC Crane (anchoring Daviess + Martin + Greene). Indianapolis Regional Airport in Hancock. The Indiana Army Ammunition Plant in Clark that became River Ridge Commerce Center. Grissom Aeroplex in Miami. Federal commitments tend to span decades; they're more reliable economic anchors than individual private employers.
Brown County (art colony + state park + retirees), Parke County (covered-bridge festival), Steuben (lakes + Pokagon + Trine), Orange County (French Lick / West Baden $600M restoration). Tourism + retirees + lake-property appreciation can produce real wealth without major employers — but only at modest population scale.
LaGrange (largest IN Amish settlement, RV manufacturing), Daviess (4th-largest Amish + Crane), Adams (5th-largest US Amish, Swiss origin), Perry (Swiss Colonization Society 1858). Above-average household economics with below-average formal education, anchored by community-pooled safety nets (Amish Aid health-finance system) that don't appear in Census employment categories.
The clearest case: Madison County (Anderson) — about 20 GM plants and 25,000 jobs in 1970 to roughly 7,500 manufacturing jobs by 2006, no replacement at comparable scale. Blackford follows the same pattern at smaller scale (Overhead Door + Key Plastics + American Window Glass each replaced by smaller successors). Fayette (Connersville's auto-manufacturing collapse from 10,000 to 600 union workers). Grant (Marion's RCA + Foster Forbes + GM-Delco). The losses compound when nothing of equivalent scale arrives.
Jay County went from 26,818 residents in 1900 to 20,478 in 2020 — a 24% decline over 120 years, with no single dramatic event. Wayne County (Richmond) lost 16% of population over 50 years, with the 2023 industrial-fire incident on top. Delaware (Muncie) ground down from 1962 Ball Corp closure to 2019 last-glass-jar-plant. Clay (the 1880s "Clay Center of the World") faded out by mid-20th century. Compound losses with no replacement.
Vigo (federal prison + ISU + Hard Rock casino as three serial single bets, none compounding). Switzerland (Belterra Casino without reinvestment as Ohio + Kentucky gaming expanded). Ohio County (Rising Star Casino's 53% revenue decline without operator reinvestment). Single-bet outcomes are vulnerable to single shocks; compounding outcomes aren't.
Owen (Bloomington's housing-cost contagion pushed Owen's ALICE threshold up faster than wages). Monroe's ALICE threshold jumped 16.4% in one year (2022 → 2023). Steuben's 9-pp hardship worsening despite tourism + Trine + Pokagon. Counties adjacent to growing metros absorb the housing-price increases without proportional wage gains.
Scott County's 2015 HIV outbreak — 215 cases from oxymorphone injection, the largest US rural HIV outbreak in modern history — happened because the opioid crisis + low rural public-health infrastructure + state-level resistance to syringe exchange combined. Scott has Indiana's highest disability rate (22.4%) today as a result. Wayne's 2023 industrial-recycling fire is the smaller-scale parallel. Slow-decline counties are most vulnerable to acute shocks.
Across Indiana, % of civilian employed who are self-employed correlates r=−0.35 with bachelor's degree % and r=−0.23 with household slack. Blackford has the highest self-employment rate (10.5%) and the worst slack (−$4,220). In rural Indiana, "self-employed" mostly means "I farm or work a trade" — not "I run a tech startup." The Census class-of-worker variable doesn't capture the agency framing the term suggests.
The threshold isn't broken everywhere — Blackford −$4,220, Vigo −$2,199, Sullivan −$1,305, Adams −$100. But the headline ALICE statistic (39.1% of Indiana households below threshold) hides the fact that in 88 counties the median household clears the threshold. The struggle is real but concentrated.
Hamilton — Indiana's wealthiest county — is only 57.8% Indiana-born, the seventh-lowest in the state. Boone is 67.0%, Hendricks 67.7% — higher than Hamilton but still well below the state average of ~72%. The transplant-magnet effect is real and visible: prosperity attracts in-migration, which sustains prosperity. Rush is most-rooted (86.5% IN-born) and stable but modest. Dearborn is most-transient (37.8%) and prosperous.
Benton's wind power produced $69M+ in additional 10-year county revenue, but Benton's 13-year ALICE trajectory worsened 13.4 percentage points (third-worst in IN). Public-sector tax revenue and household-budget outcomes are related but not equivalent. The same lesson applies to casino host counties.
It's not a poverty story. LaGrange's median household income is $84K (above state average); the Amish community is exempt from Social Security, Medicare, and the ACA. The county-level "uninsured" statistic captures a parallel-economy reality that the formal Census categories don't reflect. The same caveat partially applies to Daviess and Adams.
Bachelor's % correlates 0.64 with household slack across the 92 counties — a real signal. But the LaGrange counterexample (11% bachelor's, 43% manufacturing, $84K median income) and the Monroe paradox (49% bachelor's, 48% hardship because of student households) show that the county-level statistic doesn't translate cleanly into "get a degree and one\'s household will do well." The bigger driver appears to be what specific industry compounds locally.
The dashboard contains roughly 25 economic-reality data points per county, 92 narrative briefings, 14 events tied to specific counties, and over $37.7 billion in state-distribution flows tracked across 8 fiscal years. That's a lot. Here's what it still does not show:
Open the All-92-Counties tab and find their own. Read the data in this order:
The Opportunity Score is a useful sanity check, but treat it as a county-level statistic, not a personal prescription. an individual\'s circumstances — what one can do, who as is known, what one needs to support — matter more than any aggregate number this study has tracked.
Now that the dataset includes ALICE, ACS DP02, DP03, CHR, S2506/7, B25075, and CBP loaded for every county, several correlations across the data layers stand out as meaningful — and a couple stand out for being null results that contradict intuition.
Of all the cross-source correlations tested, this is the strongest. Counties whose mortgage-free homes are worth more have lower ALICE hardship rates, and counties where the older, paid-off homes are worth $90-100K have the highest hardship rates. Free-and-clear home value captures generational wealth accumulation in a way that mortgaged home value (which is partly a financing decision) doesn't. The strong correlation suggests Indiana's hardship geography tracks long-term local property wealth more tightly than it tracks current incomes.
Counter to the resilience-through-diversification intuition, county industry concentration is not strongly tied to hardship. The reason: what matters is which sector dominates, not how concentrated the economy is. Switzerland (HHI 4,843, casino) has higher hardship than Hamilton (HHI 1,174, professional services) — but Posey (high HHI in chemicals) has low hardship. Concentration in a high-wage sector is fine; concentration in a low-wage sector is not. The diversification narrative is overstated for Indiana.
In 70 of 92 counties, health care and social assistance is the largest CBP employment sector. Tourism counties top with accommodation & food. Construction, wholesale, and management each top one or two counties. Only Hamilton has Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services as its #1 sector — meaning Indianapolis's most-affluent suburban county is a knowledge-economy island in a state otherwise dominated by service-economy employment. The county's slack ($53,520) is roughly 4× the state median. The next Hamilton — if there is to be one — would have to develop a similar professional-services base, not just attract another factory.
Establishments per 1,000 residents has a moderate positive correlation with household slack and a moderate negative correlation with hardship (r = −0.32). The mechanism is intuitive: more small businesses per resident means more options for both employment and entrepreneurship, more revenue circulating locally, more property tax base, and more competition keeping wages from collapsing. This is one of the few "policy-actionable" levers in the data — small business support correlates with the desired outcome.
What this set of cross-tab signals adds up to. The two strongest patterns are (1) generational housing wealth tracks current economic prosperity, and (2) Hamilton is structurally unique. The two strongest null results are (1) industry concentration alone doesn't predict hardship, and (2) self-employment / small-business share is not as strongly tied to slack as one might expect (r=+0.19). Together these point toward a policy interpretation: Indiana's economic geography is shaped by long-run property wealth and the local sectoral composition more than by short-run policy variables. Policies that build small-business density (small but real effect), increase access to high-wage sectors, and accelerate property-wealth accumulation in lagging counties are the levers where the data shows actual variance in outcomes.
Five counties chosen to represent the distinct economic realities the data surfaces. Each briefing pairs the numbers with the historical, economic, and political context that explains how the county got here. Sources cited at the foot of each.
Blackford was built on natural gas. The Indiana Gas Boom of the late 1880s and 1890s turned Hartford City — sitting on cheap energy, two railroads, and a skilled workforce — into a glass-manufacturing hub. A 1904 directory lists 10 glass factories in the county. By 1901, 21 inspected facilities employed 1,346 people, more than 7× the manufacturing workforce of two decades earlier. American Window Glass Plant #3 and Sneath Glass Company were the anchors. The economy ran on cheap natural gas.
The gas reserves depleted in the early 1900s. The biggest window-glass factory closed in 1932. Hartford City spent the next century replacing what it had lost — each replacement smaller than the last. Overhead Door arrived in 1923. 3M bought the local paper mill in 1955. Overhead Door moved its headquarters to Dallas in the 1960s; its Hartford City manufacturing plant closed in 2000. Key Plastics closed in 2011, eliminating 200 more jobs — for a county already shrinking, that was the kind of loss that doesn't get backfilled. 3M, the lone surviving anchor, employs roughly 185 people today; the company has reinvested ($3.5M abatement in 2016), but a single specialty-tape plant cannot carry a county.
The numbers in the dashboard read like a continuous obituary. Hardship rose from 35.9% in 2010 to 50.9% in 2023 — a 15-point increase, by far the worst trajectory of any Indiana county. The median household earns $4,220 less per year than ALICE says it costs to live there. One in six households is on SNAP. Self-employment is the highest in the state (10.5%) but, as the broader data showed, that's a distress signal here, not an entrepreneurship one: small farms and trades, not new business formation. Disability is 21.8%. 13.5% of adults have a bachelor's degree — among the lowest in Indiana.
What's striking about Blackford is that nothing dramatic broke. The county didn't lose its industry in one event the way Detroit lost the auto industry or Anderson, Indiana lost GM. It bled out — gas to glass to general manufacturing to 200 fewer jobs at a time. Each successive employer was smaller than the one before. The compounding effect over a century looks like collapse.
Sources: Wikipedia: Blackford County; Blackford County Economic Development — Major Employers; ALICE Indiana 2025 Data Sheet; Census ACS 2023 DP02/DP03.
Brown County is a story about what happens when a place stops trying to be industrial and leans into being itself. Nashville, the county seat, was nicknamed the "Art Colony of the Midwest" in the early 1900s. Brown County State Park — Indiana's largest — opened in 1929. Highway improvements in the 1970s made it reachable as a weekend trip from Indianapolis, an hour north. The county set its identity at "rolling hills, artists, retreat" and didn't fight to be anything else.
Between 2010 and 2023, Brown's hardship rate dropped from 46.0% to 36.5% — a 9.5-point improvement, the biggest in Indiana. Two underlying mechanisms explain most of it. First, tourism scaled. By 2021 the visitor economy was returning 53 cents of every spent dollar to local payrolls and businesses. Second, the county became a retirement and second-home destination for Indianapolis-area professionals. Median age now sits at 50.9; over 24% of residents are 65+. Median home price in 2025 was $422,000 — high for rural Indiana — meaning equity in existing homes grew substantially over the period.
The work-from-home rate (13.2%) reads like an Indianapolis suburb's, not a rural county's. That's because, functionally, Brown has become one. Its industry mix is one of the most diversified in the state (HHI 1,008 — second-lowest concentration), partly because the small employer base never let any single industry dominate. Self-employment is 8.0% — third in the state — and here, unlike in Blackford, the self-employment looks like meaningful agency: galleries, B&Bs, contractors serving the tourism and second-home market.
The lesson Brown carries for other small rural counties isn't easily portable. one can't replicate a state park or 80 years of art-colony reputation. But the structural pattern — declare an identity, build amenities that match it, attract complementary in-migrants, let property appreciation deliver wealth to existing residents — is at least a model.
Sources: Visit Brown County — this study\'s Impact; Wikipedia: Brown County; this study\'s Brown County — Nashville Changes; ALICE Indiana 2025 Data Sheet; Census ACS 2023.
Hamilton went from 82,000 residents in 1980 to over 347,000 in 2020 — more than 4× in 40 years. Carmel quadrupled, Fishers nearly quintupled. The mechanics were both external and deliberate. Externally: postwar "white flight" out of Marion County, plus the construction of I-465 (1970), I-69, and SR 37, which collapsed the commute. Internally: an unusually intentional set of municipal-government decisions, especially in Carmel under Mayor Jim Brainard (1996–2024).
Brainard's Carmel did three things that distinguished it from most American suburbs. First, infrastructure as identity. Carmel built more than 120 roundabouts after 1996, replacing signalized intersections with rotaries that move more cars more safely with less land. Second, arts and amenities financed through aggressive bond issuance. The Center for the Performing Arts (the Palladium plus two smaller venues) opened in 2011 at a final cost of $125M, up from the original $80M estimate. The city now carries roughly $1.4B in debt — unusual for Indiana, where the state itself carries virtually none — but on a per-capita basis that's about $14,000 in a community where median household income is $118K. Third, each Hamilton city developed a niche: Carmel = performing arts, Fishers = entrepreneurship, Noblesville = classic town square, Westfield = family sports tourism (Grand Park). They competed for residents instead of fighting over the same market.
Layered on top: a real corporate ecosystem. ExactTarget sold to Salesforce in 2013 for $2.5B, still the biggest Indiana tech exit. Salesforce later established a regional HQ adding 800 jobs. Eli Lilly, Cummins, and other major employers either anchor in or near Hamilton. The recently announced $3.7B LEAP District in adjacent Boone County will pull more of the same.
The numbers reflect all of this: highest household slack in Indiana ($53,520), highest bachelor's-degree rate (61.8%), highest work-from-home rate (20.7%). But also the most expensive cost of living (ALICE threshold $64,437) and only 25.2% of residents born in Indiana — the suburban model is a magnet for transplants. Even at its best, 25.2% of Hamilton households are still below the ALICE threshold. The model produces enormous slack at the median, but it's not equally distributed.
Sources: Encyclopedia of Indianapolis — Hamilton County; IBJ — Hamilton County population & amenities explode; City Journal — Carmeltopia; TechPoint — ExactTarget exit decade; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
LaGrange should not, by the usual statistics, do this well. Only 11% of adults hold a bachelor's degree — fifth-lowest in Indiana. Yet the median household earns $83,741, well above the state average, and slack is a healthy $19,645. The explanation sits in two intertwined facts: this is home to the second-largest Amish settlement in the United States (and largest in Indiana), and Northern Indiana — Elkhart and LaGrange Counties together — produces over 80% of the world's recreational vehicles.
The Amish work ethic, large family sizes, and willingness to do precision craft work fit RV manufacturing almost perfectly. The first RV manufacturer in the region started in Elkhart in 1933; by the 1980s Amish workers were a structural part of the production base. 53% of Amish men in the Elkhart-LaGrange settlement now work in RV manufacturing. Manufacturing employs around 9,000 people across the county — about 36–43% of all jobs, the most concentrated industrial economy in Indiana (HHI 2,177).
The 44.3% uninsured rate — wildly above the state average — is the Amish religious-exemption story made statistical. The Amish have been exempt from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid taxes since the 1960s; that exemption also applies to the Affordable Care Act. Most Amish fund health care through community-pooled "Amish Aid" programs (roughly $90–$110 per member per month), supplemented by benefit auctions and direct hospital negotiation. One representative typically acts on behalf of the community to secure cash-discount rates — often 5–10% over a hospital's direct cost — in exchange for paying within 30–60 days. The system works, in the sense that bills get paid and care gets delivered. But it doesn't show up in the "with health insurance" column of any Census table.
Layered on top: Shipshewana, with a permanent population of 536, attracts over two million visitors a year; tourism contributed $253.9M to the county economy in 2023. So the county supports itself on three pillars (RV manufacturing for income, tourism for retail/services, and a parallel Amish community-based safety net for health/eldercare) that together produce strong household economics without depending on a college-credentialed workforce. The vulnerability — the same as Elkhart's — is concentration: when RV demand crashed in 2023 (wholesale shipments down ~50%), the manufacturing-corridor counties felt it immediately. LaGrange's slack is real but not deeply diversified.
Sources: Atlas Obscura — Why the Amish are Building America's RVs; Visit Shipshewana; Fierce Healthcare — The Amish way of healthcare finance; NBC News — As U.S. struggles with health reform, the Amish go their own way; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Terre Haute was once an industrial powerhouse — the "Crossroads of America" built on iron, steel, distilling, brewing, coal, and railroads. The postwar boom brought Pfizer (1948), Allis-Chalmers (1951), Columbia Records (1954), and Anaconda Aluminum (1959). The federal penitentiary opened in 1940 — initially welcomed by local officials as a jobs program. Indiana State University and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology anchor the local higher-ed economy. Three ordnance plants were built during World War II.
Nearly all of the industrial anchors are gone or shrunken. The population peaked around 72,000 in the 1960s; the city's population in 2024 was 58,531 — down 3.7% in just the last five years. Per Indiana Business Research Center, Terre Haute's economic history "as perceived around the state, is one of decline."
What makes Vigo distinct from a county like Blackford is that the assets are still there. The federal prison complex still houses over 2,000 inmates across multiple facilities. ISU graduated 2,306 students in 2023. Rose-Hulman remains one of the top undergraduate engineering schools in the country. The casino — a 2019 referendum, opened April 2024, operated by Churchill Downs — projects $6.5M/year in local tax revenue. Vigo's total state distributions doubled from $37M (FY18) to $81M (FY25), driven mostly by this. The dashboard's distribution data shows Vigo as one of the fastest-growing counties on that measure.
None of it has moved the household-level economics. ALICE hardship climbed from 44.0% to 53.5% over 13 years — the highest rate in Indiana. The median household is now in deficit ($2,199 short of the ALICE threshold). Labor-force participation is 58.7%, three full points below the state average — meaning a meaningful chunk of working-age adults aren't even in the job market. Indiana's opioid crisis, which sat at the #13 state-overdose mortality rate in 2022, is part of the picture. The 13-year worsening came mostly between 2019 and 2022 — pandemic shock layered on top of long-running decline.
The pattern: each "anchor employer" generation in Terre Haute was bet as if it would carry the whole county. Industry, then prison, then university, now casino. None has compounded the way the suburban-amenities ecosystem in Hamilton compounded. A casino opens four years too recent to have shown up in the 2023 ALICE numbers — but on the Vigo budget question, casino tax revenue and household income are very different things.
Sources: Wikipedia: Terre Haute; Indiana Business Research Center — Terre Haute Outlook; USP Terre Haute; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Sullivan is in the middle of an energy transition that's playing out in compressed time. The county's anchor for half a century was the Merom Generating Station — a 1,080-MW coal plant on the Wabash River, opened by Hoosier Energy in 1982. In January 2020, Hoosier Energy announced it would close Merom by 2023, citing a shift toward wind, solar, natural gas, and storage. 185 workers were on the line.
The plant didn't actually close. In October 2022 Hoosier Energy transferred Merom to Hallador Energy, with a 3.5-year power purchase agreement and a parallel deal for 150 MW of solar and 50 MW of battery storage. Hallador, a Sullivan-based coal company, kept the plant running. In May 2022, a separate deal sold 115 MW of the plant's output to AboutBit for cryptocurrency mining. By late 2024, Hallador had signed a non-binding term sheet with a global data-center developer for a majority of the plant's output. The Conversion Transaction Commitment Agreement went effective January 2, 2025. That data center deal eventually fell through (the third-party developer withdrew), but the bigger story was already underway: in April 2026, Potentia Inc. closed a $65 billion data-center development at the Heartland Industrial Park in Sullivan County. Construction started immediately. Initial operations target late 2026. 2,750 construction jobs, 500 permanent. Potentia committed $54M in direct community payments and 15 acres for a new fire station.
None of this had hit the 2023 ALICE data yet. Sullivan's hardship rate climbed from 38.4% (2010) to 47.8% (2023). Its median household earns $1,305 less than the ALICE threshold says it costs to live there. The +30-percentage-point swing in LIT-dependency from FY18 to FY25 (the biggest in any Indiana county) reflects the early income from energy-transition activity — coal-mining royalties, cryptocurrency-mining operations, construction wages — but the buildout that matters most is just beginning. This is one of the only Indiana counties where the future visible in the present-day project pipeline is genuinely different from the recent past. Worth watching whether 5–10 years from now Sullivan looks more like an energy-transition success or another company-town story with new branding.
Sources: WFYI — Hoosier Energy to close Sullivan County power plant; Inside INdiana Business — Hallador acquires Sullivan plant; WBIW — Potentia $65B project; Potentia construction press release; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Switzerland is one of Indiana's tiniest counties and the most casino-dependent. Belterra Casino Resort opened in 2000 as a riverboat on the Ohio River near Florence — roughly halfway between Louisville and Cincinnati — and immediately became the county's economic gravitational center. From 2009 to 2011, Belterra reported $152–162M in annual revenue. About 67% of visitors came from Switzerland, Jefferson, Ohio, Dearborn, or Ripley counties; another 33% came from out of state, mostly Kentucky. The wagering tax that gets distributed back to host counties pushed Switzerland to $10,742 per capita in state distributions over FY18–25, by far the highest per-capita rate in Indiana.
The decline has two interlocking causes. First, Ohio legalized commercial casinos in 2009 and built two facilities in its southwestern quadrant (Hollywood Cincinnati and Belterra Park Cincinnati) — a direct competitive draw on Belterra Switzerland's primary market. Second, Kentucky has been gradually expanding gaming (historical horse racing terminals, then sports betting in 2023), eroding the third of Belterra's customer base that came from across the river. The Indiana Tax Court ruled in 2018 on a multi-year assessed-value dispute in which the county had insisted Belterra was worth $134M in 2009 but had fallen to $127M by 2014 — both sides acknowledging the impact of Ohio gaming. Belterra was acquired by Boyd Gaming in 2018; the casino's underlying real estate is owned separately by Gaming and Leisure Properties.
The 4.3% decline in total state distributions FY18–25 is small in dollar terms but conceptually huge: while every other Indiana county saw distributions rise (most by 30–100%), Switzerland's fell. The wagering windfall is gradually eroding. Switzerland's broader economy is still relatively resilient — median household income ($65,148) is above the state average, slack is positive (+$5,638), bachelor's-degree rate is the second-lowest in Indiana at 10.0% but household economics work despite that because the casino-anchored tax base subsidizes local services. The risk is what happens if Belterra revenue erodes another 20–30% in the next decade as Ohio-Kentucky gaming continues to expand: in a county of fewer than 10,000 people, there's no obvious second engine to replace it.
Sources: Wikipedia: Belterra Casino; Indiana Gaming Commission — Third Year Belterra Evaluation; Switzerland County Assessor v. Belterra (2018); Eagle Country — Boyd acquires Belterra; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Elkhart called itself the "Trailer Capital of the World" in 1948. By the early 2020s the title had shifted to "RV Capital of the World" and the claim had become quantitative: between 60% and 80% of all recreational vehicles produced globally come from Elkhart County. Thor Industries (the world's largest RV maker), Forest River, Jayco, Coachmen, Heartland — most are headquartered or anchored here. Lippert Components, the world's largest RV-component supplier, is here. Manufacturing accounts for 34.8% of Elkhart's civilian employment — about twice the Indiana average and roughly six times the national average. The industry concentration index sits at 1,779, meaning the local economy is structurally dependent on one sector.
When RV demand is strong, this concentration is the county's superpower. Median income ($65,617) clears the ALICE threshold, slack is modestly positive, and the labor force is highly skilled in production trades. When RV demand falls, the same concentration is the vulnerability. In 2023, RV wholesale shipments fell roughly 50% from their 2022 highs as interest rates spiked and consumer financing for $50,000–$300,000 vehicles tightened. Grand Design RV laid off 170 workers in July 2023. Forest River filed WARN notices: 83 workers in spring 2024, then another 160 across four plants by December 2024. Multiple smaller manufacturers either closed lines or moved to short weeks. The dashboard's data shows Elkhart's 13-year ALICE trajectory at +5.9 pp — visibly worsening, though the deepest pain landed too late to fully register in the 2023 figures.
Elkhart is also the southern half of the same Amish settlement that anchors LaGrange. Many of the same workers, same craft economy. The shared dependence on the RV industry means a downturn doesn't just hit one county — it ripples across the entire RV-corridor of Elkhart, LaGrange, Kosciusko, and Noble. The current $2,607 of household slack is the thinnest in the corridor; a sustained recession (rather than a one-year shock) would tip Elkhart's median household into deficit relatively quickly. The county is what happens when concentration cuts the right way for thirty years, and then doesn't.
Sources: Lippert — Elkhart RV Capital of the World; WNDU — Grand Design layoffs; RV PRO — Forest River layoffs; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023 DP03.
Indianapolis dominates Indiana economically and is dominated by its own suburbs. Marion County contains nearly 1 million people — almost five times the population of Hamilton County — and received $5.5B in state distributions over FY18–25, the largest absolute total. Yet the median household earns $63,450 versus Hamilton's $117,957. The "donut effect" is unusually sharp here because of a single legislative decision: Unigov.
In 1970, the Indiana General Assembly consolidated the City of Indianapolis with the rest of Marion County by legislative action — without a referendum. The city's land area went from 82 square miles to 402 square miles, and its population went from 480,000 to 740,000 overnight. The structural intent was to preserve the city's tax base and political power; the structural effect was to create one of the country's clearest urban-suburban income gradients, with the wealthy and politically conservative outflow accelerating across the county line into Hamilton, Hendricks, Johnson, and Boone. Carmel, Fishers, and Greenwood absorbed the residents who wanted "safe streets, good schools, and lower taxes" while leaving Marion County's poverty and aging infrastructure in place.
The result, 55 years later: Marion County's ALICE-or-poverty rate is 42%, against 25–28% for the four ring counties. Indianapolis Public Schools serve a district that is roughly 70% economically disadvantaged; Hamilton Southeastern Schools are roughly 20%. State school-funding formulas have continued to widen the gap — Hamilton Southeastern is projected to gain 12.4% in state aid over two years while IPS receives less. The 7-point ALICE improvement Marion did show over 2010–2023 reflects both downtown revitalization and the addition of the Salesforce regional HQ (800 jobs in 2017), Lilly's continued growth, and the natural drift of higher-income households back into walkable urban neighborhoods. But it's the slowest improvement among the central counties.
Marion is the case where the dashboard's distinction between "what does the county get" and "what does the typical household have" matters most. Marion gets the bulk of Indiana's state-distribution flow because it has the bulk of Indiana's people. But on a per-household basis the slack is modest, and on a townships-within-Marion basis the inequality is enormous — central neighborhoods in deep distress sit a few miles from prosperous downtown and northside enclaves that look more like Hamilton than the rest of the county.
Sources: Encyclopedia of Indianapolis — Creation of Unigov; Abell Foundation — 40 Years After Unigov; Belt Magazine — The Undemocratic Making of Indianapolis; WFYI — Wealthiest schools thrive under new state budget; UWCI — ALICE findings Central Indiana; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Monroe County looks like a contradiction. 49.1% of adults 25+ hold a bachelor's degree — third-highest in Indiana after Hamilton and Boone. And yet 47.7% of households are below the ALICE threshold — a hardship rate comparable to the worst-off counties in the state. The naïve education-equals-income narrative breaks here, hard.
The explanation is that Indiana University has nearly 49,000 enrolled students, in a county of 139,718 people. More than one-third of the county's adult population is a student, and the ALICE methodology counts a typical graduate-student household earning $25,000 the same way it counts a tenured professor's household earning $150,000 — both are households, weighted by their headcount. The county-level statistics reflect a real economic stress (graduate students cost-burdened by Bloomington rents) layered with the credentials of an unusually educated population. Most of those students will leave the county within five years of graduation with much higher earning power — but while they're here, they show up in the data as financially constrained.
The ALICE threshold rose 16.4% from 2022 to 2023 — the fastest single-year increase of any Indiana county. The mechanism: Bloomington's housing market is structurally tight (Indiana University absorbs the supply and the population's transience prevents normal market formation), so rents rose faster than incomes after pandemic-era moves and the campus reopening. The IBRC's Bloomington 2026 outlook describes a region with rising private business formation (4.6% Q1 2024 to Q1 2025, vs. 2.8% statewide) but also continuing strain. Major employers are mixed: IU itself, IU Health, and a meaningful life-sciences cluster including Cook Medical, Catalent, Boston Scientific, and Baxter International. Novo Nordisk (which acquired Catalent's manufacturing site) announced 400 layoffs at the Bloomington plant in March 2026, complicating the biotech story.
Monroe is the lens through which the county-level education-correlation story should be read with the most caution. Within Monroe, the income polarization is severe: high earners (faculty, biotech, hospital) coexist with thousands of student households at the lower end. The county-level "47.7% below ALICE" is real, but it doesn't translate to "this is a struggling place" the way the same number does in Vigo or Blackford. It translates to "this is a place with a large transient low-income population atop a thin but high-skilled employment base." Worth keeping in mind anywhere a college town shows up in the data.
Sources: IBRC — Bloomington 2026 Forecast; IU Kelley — Bloomington Life Sciences Recap; Bloomingtonian — Bloomington economy faces job cuts; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023 DP02/DP03.
Warrick is what happens when a rural county with one giant industrial employer sits next to a metro and its own commute-shed reaches three more giant industrial employers. Alcoa Warrick Operations, the world's largest producer of coated container-sheet aluminum, has been in Newburgh since 1957. The smelter complex employs roughly 2,000 people directly and generates about $6.6M in daily output. Newburgh on the Ohio River is the wealthy suburb of Evansville — the houses across the river are smaller and cheaper, the houses on the Warrick side larger and pricier. The result is a county that absorbs both the industrial paycheck and the cost-of-living-still-low advantage of being outside the city limits.
Layered on top: spillover employment from Toyota Princeton (Gibson County, 30 miles west) and AK Steel/Cleveland-Cliffs (Spencer County, 35 miles east). Toyota Indiana opened in Princeton in 1998 and has invested over $2.5 billion; it employs ~4,800 people and recently announced an additional $1.4B for EV production plus $200M for Grand Highlander capacity. AK Steel's $1.1B processing complex sits a similar distance away. Warrick's labor force commutes outward to all three industrial anchors plus southward into Evansville's office and healthcare economy. None of them are in the county; all of them help pay its mortgages.
The dashboard's slack ranking puts Warrick fourth in Indiana — $36,864 of household slack per year. Notable because Warrick achieves it with only 35.5% bachelor's-degree-holding adults (well below Hamilton's 61.8% or Monroe's 49.1%). The mechanism is different: blue-collar industrial wages averaging $25–35/hour for skilled production work, paired with cost-of-living that's a fraction of Hamilton's. Median home values in Newburgh sit substantially below Carmel-area homes. This is the closest Indiana comes to the "high-wage, low-degree, livable-cost" combination that gets talked about more often than it actually exists.
The vulnerability is the same as Elkhart's, scaled down: industrial concentration. If Alcoa cuts (it has before — a 600-person layoff scare in 2015), or if Toyota's EV transition produces job losses, Warrick's economic geometry tilts fast. The Evansville-area cluster is more diversified than the RV corridor, but it's still industrial.
Sources: Evansville Regional Economic Partnership — Alcoa Warrick Operations; Alcoa Warrick Fact Sheet; Toyota Princeton $200M investment; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Boone County is two stories. The first is Zionsville — a wealthy Indianapolis-northwest commuter town that has quietly become Indiana's second-richest place by median household income. The second is Lebanon and the LEAP District — a roughly 9,000-acre innovation district that the Indiana Economic Development Corporation began assembling around 2022 and around which the state has now built one of the largest manufacturing-investment plays in the country.
Eli Lilly's commitment is the anchor. April 2023: Lilly announces $3.7 billion in Lebanon facilities, 700 high-wage permanent jobs, 1,500 construction jobs — the largest single-site manufacturing investment in Lilly's history. By 2024 Lilly has expanded the commitment to $4.5 billion at the Lebanon site and a combined LEAP District capital plan exceeding $13 billion. The state's pitch to other manufacturers (semiconductor, aerospace, EV, medical devices) is built around this anchor.
The fight, as is often the case with megaprojects on this scale, is over water. LEAP's data-center and pharmaceutical-manufacturing demand are projected at up to 100 million gallons per day at full buildout. The IEDC's proposed solution is a 35-mile pipeline from the Wabash Alluvial Aquifer near Lafayette to Lebanon. Tippecanoe County officials, farmers, and environmental groups have pushed back hard — questioning aquifer-recharge math, regional water rights, and the use of eminent domain to seize farmland for the pipeline. The state paused the pipeline plan in late 2023 pending Indiana Finance Authority studies and an independent review.
The numbers in the dashboard reflect what Boone already was before LEAP fully lands. $104,865 median household income, $43,605 of household slack — both already near the top of the state, driven by Zionsville's commuter-banker-physician demographic. The 13-year ALICE trajectory shows hardship dropped only modestly (about −2 points) because Boone wasn't far from its current trajectory in 2010. What's coming next, if LEAP is built out as planned, is roughly $13B+ of new corporate investment landing on a county already at the top of Indiana's economic distribution. Whether that broadens prosperity within the county or simply concentrates it further — and whether the water question gets resolved without long-term legal damage — is the next decade's open question.
Sources: IEDC — Holcomb & Lilly $3.7B announcement; LEAP grows to $13B as Lilly expands; WFYI — LEAP water sustainability forum; FOX59 — Critics on LEAP water access; CITACT — LEAP Threatens Hoosier Water (advocacy report); ALICE Indiana 2025.
Lake County is the most economically split county in Indiana. It contains Gary — once a steel-industry powerhouse with 30,000+ Gary Works employees in the early 1970s, now down to roughly 2,246 by 2023 — and it contains Crown Point, Schererville, Munster, Highland, prosperous Chicago bedroom communities where the median household earns over $90,000 and commutes into Illinois for work. In between sits Hammond, East Chicago, Whiting, working-class river-and-rail neighborhoods anchored by the BP Whiting Refinery (the sixth-largest refinery in the US, 425,000 barrels/day capacity), various Cleveland-Cliffs/ArcelorMittal steel operations, and the Hard Rock Casino Northern Indiana that opened in Gary in May 2021.
The steel-industry decline is the headline story of NW Indiana over the last 60 years. Gary Works was the largest steel mill in the world for decades; it remains the largest integrated mill in North America by output, but the workforce-per-ton-of-steel has fallen by 90% as automation replaced labor. The plant employed over 30,000 in the early 1970s, about 6,000 in 1990, around 5,000 in 2015, 2,500 in 2021, and 2,246 in 2023. Gary the city's population collapsed in parallel: roughly 178,000 in 1960, about 67,000 in 2020 — a 60-plus-percent loss in 60 years. Disinvestment, demolition, and the "rust belt" archetype came to be defined partly here.
What keeps Lake County's median household income above the state average (despite Gary) is the Chicago-suburb half of the county. Crown Point, Schererville, Munster, Dyer, Highland are squarely in the Chicago commuter shed; their median incomes look like Naperville's or Oak Park's. Workers earn Chicago wages, pay Indiana taxes, and live in housing that's cheaper than equivalent Illinois suburbs. Hammond saw $163.5M, Gary $125.7M, and East Chicago $113.2M in state distributions over FY18–25 — three of the four largest single-city totals in Indiana — reflecting both the population concentration and the legacy infrastructure costs of post-industrial cities. The Hard Rock casino added another revenue stream from May 2021 forward, generating Lake County's $378M total in wagering-related distributions, the largest in the state.
The 13-year ALICE trajectory shows Lake at roughly flat — modest improvement but well behind Hamilton/Boone/Hendricks. Lake's economic geography contains both an extraordinary upside (Crown Point professional households) and an extraordinary downside (parts of Gary and East Chicago where the township-level hardship rate exceeds 60%). The within-county inequality is among the sharpest in Indiana. There's no single "Lake County" economic experience.
Sources: Britannica — Gary, Indiana; Wikipedia: Gary Works; WNDU — Hard Rock Casino Gary; Lansing Journal — Hard Rock Gary opens May 2021; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Richmond was, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a serious industrial city. Gaar-Scott & Company built steam engines, threshers, and tractors. American Seeding Machine Company made grain drills. From the 1880s through the 1950s, Richmond was a recognized center for lawnmower manufacturing — "the lawnmower capital." Wayne Corporation built school buses. Earlham College, founded 1847, anchored a Quaker education tradition that also produced abolitionist and Underground Railroad networks. Population peaked in 1970 at 79,109 and has fallen every decade since: 76,058 in 1980, 71,951 in 1990, 71,097 in 2000, 68,917 in 2010, 66,553 in 2020. Net loss: about 12,500 residents, roughly 16%, over half a century.
The mechanism wasn't a single closure — it was the steady displacement of mid-20th-century industries by lower-cost competition, automation, and offshoring. Wayne Corporation school buses left for elsewhere. The lawnmower-manufacturing base eroded. Like many post-industrial Midwest cities, Richmond didn't get a single dramatic factory shutdown moment; it got 50 years of facilities going dark one or two at a time. The ALICE trajectory shows hardship climbing from about 40% to 46.6% over 2010–2023.
Then in April 2023 came a different kind of event. A plastics-recycling facility in Richmond — the former Hoffco/Comet Industrial plant that had closed in 2009 and been renamed My Way Trading Warehouse — caught fire. The blaze burned for days; approximately 2,000 residents within a one-half-mile radius were evacuated; the EPA later removed over 6,000 tonnes of debris at a cost of $3.3 million; cleanup ran through March 2024. The toxic plume and the visible disinvestment story turned national. It wasn't an economic event in the conventional sense — no major payroll was lost — but it laid bare what happens when industrial properties sit unused for 14 years in a county without the resources to clean them up.
Today Wayne sits at the edge of the post-industrial cliff. Median household income clears the ALICE threshold by only $689 — slack so thin it's effectively zero. SNAP receipt is 14.5%. The labor force averages around 30,000 people and has stayed flat for years even as the broader population shrank. Earlham, Reid Health, and the small manufacturing base that remains are the anchors. Without something genuinely new (Wayne hasn't attracted a Lilly-scale or Toyota-scale investment), the trajectory continues.
Sources: Wikipedia: Richmond, Indiana; IBRC — Richmond 2024 Forecast; Wikipedia: Richmond facility fire; WTHR — Richmond fire one year later; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Daviess is a county most Indiana residents couldn't place on a map, but it punches above its weight on two distinct mechanisms. Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane (NSWC Crane) — a Department of Defense installation just across the Daviess-Martin county line — is the third-largest naval installation in the world by land area. It employs approximately 6,000 people across electronic warfare, special missions, expeditionary warfare, and strategic missions support. The WestGate@Crane Technology Park, anchored next to the base, hosts dozens of defense-contractor offices. Many of those workers live in Daviess; the per-capita federal wage and contractor wage in this corner of southwest Indiana is meaningfully above the rural baseline.
The second mechanism is the Amish community east of Washington (the county seat). It's the fourth-largest Amish settlement in Indiana and seventh-largest nationally — smaller than LaGrange's but still substantial. Daviess's Amish economy looks different from LaGrange's: less RV manufacturing (Daviess is too far south of the Elkhart corridor) and more agriculture, dairy, sawmills, furniture, and traditional trades. Perdue Farms operates major poultry processing in Daviess. Grain Processing Corp., Olon Industries, and other agri-industrial firms anchor the rest of the formal economy.
The numbers reflect the hybrid: median household income $68,561 (above state average despite only 15.1% bachelor's), slack of +$7,472 (modest but positive), self-employment at 8.2% (top decile statewide — Amish trades, small farms, contractors), and broadband adoption at only 79.6% (Amish community effect, similar to LaGrange's 66.2%). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable — neither dramatic improvement nor dramatic decline, which in the context of small rural Indiana counties is actually a notable outcome.
Crane is the policy lever that distinguishes Daviess from comparable rural counties. As long as the federal defense-research mission continues — and it has, through every administration of the last 80 years — Daviess gets a stream of relatively high-skilled jobs that don't depend on local cost-of-living arbitrage or trade-cycle exposure. The Amish economy provides a separate set of community-level economic resilience mechanisms that don't show up in standard Census employment categories. The combination of "stable federal anchor" plus "parallel community economy" is unusual and probably part of why Daviess's slack remains positive while comparable counties (Knox, Greene, Sullivan, Pike) struggle.
Sources: Daviess County EDC — Competitive Advantages; Wikipedia: Daviess County; IU Center for Rural Engagement — Daviess County; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Fort Wayne and Anderson are the same age, same region, same starting industrial base. They diverged. Allen County succeeded at the diversification Madison County failed at. The pivot point was the closing of International Harvester in the 1980s, which had been Fort Wayne's anchor employer for generations. The city explicitly decided that no single replacement employer would be allowed to become that big again — and built a recovery that looks unusual for the Midwest.
The piece-by-piece replacement: General Motors opened the Fort Wayne Assembly truck plant in 1987 — today employs about 4,320 people building Chevy Silverados and GMC Sierras. Steel Dynamics was founded in 1993 by former Nucor managers and became Fort Wayne's only Fortune 500 headquarters — now the largest American-owned steel producer. Lincoln Financial Group, founded in Fort Wayne in 1905 (the only company in the world with permission from Robert Todd Lincoln to use his father's name and image), moved its headquarters out in 1999 but kept 1,954 jobs locally. Sweetwater Sound, the largest online music-instrument retailer in the US, grew into a 2,500-person employer headquartered north of the city. Healthcare (Parkview, Lutheran/IU Health) employs another 20,000+. Insurance, logistics, distribution, and a growing tech-services cluster fill out the picture.
The data shows what worked. Industry concentration sits around HHI 1,200 — well-diversified by Indiana standards (compare Elkhart's 1,779 or LaGrange's 2,177). Slack is +$10,420 — modest but solidly positive. The 13-year ALICE hardship trajectory improved about 4 percentage points; not as dramatic as Brown or Marion, but steady. Fort Wayne lacks the polarization-via-suburb-flight problem that defines Indianapolis-Marion-Hamilton: Allen County contains both Fort Wayne and its wealthier suburbs (Aboite Township, southwest county) within the same county boundary. There's no equivalent of Carmel siphoning the tax base across a county line. The 39.1% ALICE-or-poverty rate is still real, concentrated in the older urban neighborhoods, but the political and fiscal structure of the county hasn't been pulled apart.
Allen is the proof-of-concept case for "intentional diversification works." The lessons aren't easily portable — they require having something to diversify into. But the structural choice (don't let any one employer become 30,000 jobs again) was a real decision, and 40 years later the data shows the difference.
Sources: Barrett McNagny — Trends in Industry in Allen County; Wikipedia: Fort Wayne; Greater Fort Wayne Inc. — Major Employers; Wikipedia: Fort Wayne Assembly; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Tippecanoe is what Monroe would look like if the college town had also landed a major manufacturing anchor. Purdue University enrolls roughly 50,000 students at West Lafayette and employs around 13,000 faculty and staff — itself a dominant economic force. Sponsored research expenditures crossed $688 million in FY 2023. Purdue Research Park is one of the largest university-affiliated research parks in the country. The research-commercialization pipeline produces a steady stream of small tech and life-sciences spin-outs that don't show up in conventional employer rankings but populate the metro.
Where Tippecanoe diverges from Monroe is the second pillar: Subaru of Indiana Automotive (SIA) opened in Lafayette in 1989. It now employs over 5,000 workers building Outbacks, Imprezas, and Ascents for the North American market. Tippecanoe's industrial concentration in motor vehicles and heavy equipment runs at 9× the national share. The two-pillar structure means Tippecanoe's economy is genuinely larger and more diverse than Monroe's — Subaru-skilled production workers, plus Purdue's research-and-administrative workforce, plus the spin-out tech sector that wouldn't exist without the university.
But the same statistical paradox shows up. 44.1% of Tippecanoe households are below the ALICE threshold, despite the 40.1% bachelor's-degree rate. The mechanism is similar to Monroe's: tens of thousands of students count as low-income households in the denominator. The dashboard's township-spread data captures this sharply — Tippecanoe shows a 51.4-percentage-point spread between its lowest- and highest-hardship townships (6.2% to 57.6%) — among the widest in Indiana. The relatively wealthy faculty and Subaru-skilled-worker neighborhoods coexist with student-housing zones and surrounding rural townships that look more like Carroll or Benton County.
The 13-year ALICE trajectory shows Tippecanoe improving by 6.0 percentage points (50.2% → 44.1%) — meaningful progress. The same Wabash Alluvial Aquifer that's the subject of the LEAP District water fight (see Boone) sits underneath Tippecanoe; the county's officials have been the most vocal opponents of pumping aquifer water 35 miles south. The water rights question may yet become the single most contested economic-policy issue in the state.
Sources: Purdue News — Tippecanoe County unemployment; Home of Purdue — Lafayette-West Lafayette economy; Inside INdiana Business — Subaru hiring; Tippecanoe County overview; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
South Bend's economic trajectory was defined for half a century by a single event. Studebaker Corporation, founded in South Bend in 1852 and once one of America's three largest automakers, closed its U.S. operations in December 1963. The shutdown eliminated about 7,500 jobs overnight and gutted the city's industrial base. South Bend spent the next 40 years recovering only partially — manufacturing employment never came back to Studebaker-era levels, downtown lost retail and population, and the city became a cautionary tale in Rust Belt narratives.
The recovery, when it came, was incremental and built around several distinct anchors. The University of Notre Dame employs about 6,000 people on its 1,260-acre campus and educates roughly 13,000 students. It anchors a research-and-academic economy that Studebaker's collapse had left underweight. AM General, manufacturer of the Humvee and successor to a Studebaker subsidiary, still produces military vehicles in nearby Mishawaka. Press Ganey, ITAMCO, Pokagon Band of Potawatomi gaming operations, Beacon Health System fill in the rest. Pete Buttigieg's tenure as mayor (2012–2020) coincided with — and partly drove — a deliberate downtown-revitalization push and a "Smart Streets" infrastructure project that converted one-way streets back to two-way and added bike lanes.
The biggest economic event in the county's recent history was announced April 2024. Amazon Web Services committed $11 billion to a data-center campus near New Carlisle — the largest capital-investment announcement in Indiana's history. The buildout is projected to create at least 1,000 direct AWS jobs and support an estimated 3,000 supply-chain jobs over a 10-year construction period. Construction broke ground in 2025; the project is currently working through environmental review. Like the Sullivan County Potentia project, the household-level economic effects won't show in ALICE data for several years.
The current St. Joseph picture: slack barely positive (+$3,447 per typical household), hardship at 41.4% (just above the state average), wages of $27.68/hour at the metro level. The 13-year trajectory shows roughly a 4-point hardship improvement — modest but real. South Bend is the case study for "recovery is possible but slow" — six decades after Studebaker, the data finally shows positive movement, and the AWS bet may be what compounds it. Or it may not. The Studebaker story is a reminder that single-employer bets — even at $11B — don't automatically equal compounding.
Sources: Indiana Economic Digest — AWS $11B data center; South Bend Regional Chamber — AWS Data Center Campus; Data Center Dynamics — AWS Indiana; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
for those wantinged one Indiana county to illustrate "what happens when a single giant employer leaves," it would be Madison. Anderson in 1970 was home to about 20 General Motors plants employing more than 25,000 people — Guide Lamp, Delco-Remy, Delphi, Inland Fisher Guide, Buick, and others. At its peak GM accounted for roughly half of all manufacturing employment in the county. By 1995 manufacturing employment had fallen to 14,000. By 2006 it was 7,500 — a 70% decline in 35 years. By the late 2010s there was not a single active GM plant in Anderson.
The collapse came in waves. Guide Corporation (the Guide Lamp business spun off from GM in 1998) progressively laid off about 1,325 workers and shuttered its final Anderson facility in 2007 as imported sealed-beam headlights undercut domestic production. Remy International / Delco-Remy closed its Anderson manufacturing in March 2003 — 350 jobs gone — while keeping its corporate HQ in the city. Delphi Corporation filed for bankruptcy in 2005; by 2009 Anderson was on the list of "non-critical" facilities, and the remaining 500 Anderson Delphi jobs evaporated over the following years. The transportation-equipment manufacturing sector in Madison County contracted by about 39% over a single decade.
Madison's recovery looks meaningfully different from Allen's (Fort Wayne) in scale and pace. Anderson University, Community Hospital Anderson, Nestle's confection plant, and Flagship Enterprise Center (an incubator/redevelopment site at the former Delco-Remy property) anchor what's left of the formal economy. The Madison County economic-development effort has tried for two decades to attract replacement manufacturing investment, with mixed success. The current dashboard data shows a county that's stabilized: median household income $62,632 clears ALICE by $9,230, the 13-year hardship trajectory is roughly flat with a modest improvement, and the state-distribution composition shows the LIT-dependency dropping from 88% to 79% — meaning income-tax growth has slowed and other state programs have grown to fill in.
The deeper story is what didn't happen. Anderson never landed a "Lilly LEAP" or a "$11B AWS" replacement deal. The recovery is real but incremental — services, healthcare, education, small-batch manufacturing, distribution. The lesson is unsentimental: when one employer is 25,000 jobs in a 130,000-person county, no incremental substitute is large enough to restore the prior trajectory. Madison is the cautionary tale Fort Wayne and Indianapolis explicitly tried to avoid becoming.
Sources: NPR — Skeletons of the Auto Industry; IBRC InContext — Manufacturing Counties: The Fallen; IBRC — Anderson and Muncie Forecast; Indiana Economic Digest — Anderson's Delphi plant to close; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Warsaw is a small Indiana town that supplies roughly one-third of the world's orthopedic devices. About two-thirds of the world's hip and knee implants are designed and manufactured within 50 miles of the courthouse square. The companies are familiar to anyone who's had joint-replacement surgery: DePuy (founded 1895 by Revra DePuy in Warsaw — the world's first commercial orthopedic manufacturer), Zimmer (1927), Biomet (1977, spun out from Zimmer; merged back in 2014 as Zimmer Biomet), and Medtronic Sofamor Danek — plus a halo of smaller device companies and precision-machining contractors. The cluster employs about 13,000 people in orthopedic manufacturing alone.
Why Warsaw? The legacy answer is intersecting railroads in 1895 that gave Revra DePuy national distribution. The lasting answer is industrial gravity: once one orthopedic company succeeded in Warsaw, the talent pool (precision machinists, FDA-regulated quality engineers, sales reps with surgical relationships) and the supplier ecosystem made it nearly impossible for new orthopedic startups not to start in Warsaw. The 30-year nonprofit OrthoWorx — funded by the industry to maintain the cluster — actively recruits engineering talent and coordinates with Purdue and IU on orthopedic-engineering programs.
The data reflects an unusually strong outcome for a small Indiana county. Median household income $73,922 (well above state average), slack +$19,898 (8th-highest in state), and a hardship rate of 33.5% (well below the state average of 39%). The industry concentration is extreme — HHI 2,076, second only to LaGrange's RV-corridor — but the orthopedic sector behaves very differently from RV manufacturing. Orthopedic demand is structurally tied to an aging population, FDA-regulated and patent-protected, and individual implant prices run $5,000–$10,000+ per unit. It's high-margin, high-precision, and far less cyclical than recreational vehicles or commodity steel.
The vulnerability that exists isn't a demand shock — it's industry consolidation moving headquarters out of Warsaw. When J&J acquired DePuy in 1998, when Zimmer acquired Biomet in 2014, and when Medtronic's larger Memphis operations expanded, the question kept coming back: will the local cluster hold against corporate-level decisions made elsewhere? So far, the answer has been yes — the talent and supplier ecosystem is too deep to dislocate easily. Kosciusko is the closest thing Indiana has to a Silicon-Valley-style industry cluster: highly concentrated, highly compensated, and held in place by network effects rather than geography.
Sources: Becker's Spine Review — Warsaw houses one-third of world orthopedic manufacturing; Today's Machining World — Welcome to Warsaw; BioCrossroads — Orthopedics Report (PDF); Ignite Orthopedics — History; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Posey is the southwestern corner of Indiana — where the Wabash and Ohio Rivers meet — and a county most Indiana residents have never visited. Its economic engine is concentrated in a single small town: Mt. Vernon, home to the Ports of Indiana-Mt. Vernon, the 7th-largest inland port complex in the United States. The port handles more than 4 million trip-tons of cargo annually — grain, grain products, coal, fertilizer, cement, and minerals.
The industrial cluster around the port reads like a who's who of heavy manufacturing. SABIC Innovative Plastics operates the former GE Plastics plant (sold to Saudi Arabia Basic Industries Corp.) — one of the largest petrochemical operations in the Midwest. BWX Technologies (BWXT, formerly Babcock & Wilcox) builds large pressure vessels and metal tubes; historically the facility produced components for commercial nuclear plants. CountryMark (refinery), GAF (roofing materials), ADM Milling, CF Industries (fertilizer), Cargill, and Warehouse Services Inc. complete the picture. The Midwest Fertilizer plant is being built. Mt. Vernon's industrial payroll per capita is among the highest in Indiana.
Layered on top: Posey is in the Evansville MSA, 18 miles from downtown Evansville. Workers commute in both directions — Posey residents into Evansville's white-collar economy, Evansville-side workers into Posey's industrial plants. The result is a county that's small but unusually prosperous for rural Indiana. Median household income is $73,820 (well above state average), slack is +$19,577 (top quartile), and the hardship rate is 32.4% — the 5th-lowest in the state.
Posey has also been quietly tied to the Toyota Princeton supply chain — Toyota's $1.4B EV-production expansion (announced 2024, first vehicles 2026) will ripple through suppliers and contractors across the Evansville region, including Posey. The vulnerability is the same as everywhere in Indiana's industrial corridors: concentration. If chemicals or petroleum slow, Posey feels it fast. But the diversification within the industrial cluster — chemicals, fertilizer, nuclear-grade fabrication, port logistics, agriculture — is broader than any single-product town like Elkhart or Warsaw.
Sources: Wikipedia: Mount Vernon, Indiana; Posey County Economic Development Partnership; Greater Mount Vernon — Industrial Profile; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Gibson County is the home of the Toyota plant that drives the southwest-Indiana industrial story. Toyota Indiana opened in Princeton in 1998, has been expanded multiple times, and currently employs roughly 7,000–8,000 people — making it one of the largest single-employer payrolls in the state outside the Indianapolis metro. Total investment in the Princeton facility has reached $8 billion over the company's 25+ years in Indiana. The plant produces Highlanders, Grand Highlanders, Sequoias, and (starting in 2026) a new three-row battery-electric SUV under a separate $1.4 billion EV expansion announced in 2024 that adds another ~340 jobs.
Princeton itself has roughly 8,300 residents. With ~7,000 Toyota employees plus a dense supplier ecosystem (parts manufacturers, logistics, contractor services), the plant's workforce is larger than the town. Most workers commute in from Warrick, Vanderburgh, Posey, and Knox counties — which is why Toyota shows up as the explanatory mechanism behind those counties' positive economics (especially Warrick's). The county itself absorbs the property-tax base, the direct construction-and-expansion spending, and the supplier ecosystem.
Gibson is the cleanest example in Indiana of "one giant employer doing what one giant employer is supposed to do." Manufacturing is 29% of employment — concentrated, but not as extreme as LaGrange (43%) or Kosciusko (40%). Slack is meaningfully positive. The 13-year ALICE trajectory shows steady improvement of about 3 percentage points — consistent with the Toyota plant's steady growth and reinvestment cycles. The contrast with Madison County (Anderson's GM collapse) and Blackford (Hartford City's serial closures) is sharp: Toyota has reinvested in Princeton through every product cycle since 1998, including through the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic.
The risk is the same risk all auto-manufacturing communities face: the EV transition. Toyota has been later to EVs than its competitors, and the $1.4B Princeton investment is in part a catch-up bet. If the transition goes well — and Toyota's hybrid expertise gives it an unusual position — Gibson's trajectory continues. If the transition is rocky and Toyota retrenches in U.S. production, Gibson is exposed in a way the diversified Allen County is not.
Sources: Inside INdiana Business — Toyota $1.4B investment, 340 jobs; Toyota Newsroom — EV investment Indiana; Evansville Living — Toyota Indiana; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Knox County contains Vincennes — the oldest permanent European settlement in Indiana, founded in 1732 as a French fur-trading post on the Wabash River, and the territorial capital of Indiana before statehood. The historic city has roughly 16,000 residents and anchors a county economy that includes Good Samaritan Hospital (the largest employer, with $115M+ annual payroll; the first county hospital in Indiana, opened 1908; now affiliated with the IU School of Medicine for residency programs), Vincennes University (founded 1801, Indiana's oldest higher-education institution, a hybrid associate-degree/community-college/4-year), and a mix of agriculture, light manufacturing, and oil/gas services.
The headline data point for Knox is its 60-percentage-point spread between townships — the widest in Indiana. Within Knox's 10 townships, one township sits at 13.1% below the ALICE threshold (essentially Hamilton-County-like prosperity), while another sits at 73.0% below ALICE (worse than any county-level rate in Indiana). The spread captures the reality of a county where Vincennes's professional class (hospital physicians, university faculty, lawyers) lives in distinct townships from the rural agricultural and lower-income service-economy households. The county-level "41.1% below ALICE" is the average of those two very different realities; almost no household actually experiences the average.
Knox is the cleanest demonstration that county-level economic statistics often hide more than they reveal. Anyone making a decision about where to live or invest in Knox County would be poorly served by the headline number. Vincennes-proper inside the city limits looks like one place; outlying townships look like another. The dashboard's township-level data is now flagged in every county's detail view, but Knox is the most extreme example of why that matters.
The 13-year ALICE trajectory shows Knox roughly stable — modest improvement of about 2 percentage points. The economic structure (hospital + university + scattered agriculture and small manufacturing) has held its position; neither dramatic collapse nor dramatic growth. The vulnerability is the same as comparable rural-anchor counties: if Good Samaritan or Vincennes University were to contract significantly, no obvious replacement employer exists.
Sources: Vincennes — Historic River City; Wikipedia: Good Samaritan Hospital Vincennes; Good Samaritan Hospital — About Us; Knox County Development Corporation; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Pike is small (population 12,352) and historically defined by one industry. Coal mining built Pike County. By 1898 the county's mines produced more than 240,000 tons annually and employed 400 miners. Through the early 20th century the county's distinctive identity was as a working coal town — including a significant African-American mining community at Logtown, one of the few integrated industrial workforces in southern Indiana of that era. At the end of the 20th century, coal still accounted for about 16% of Pike County employment — a concentration 157 times the statewide ratio.
The energy transition is rewriting Pike's economy in real time. AES Indiana's Petersburg Generating Station — one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the Midwest — is being converted at a cost of $1.1 billion from coal to natural gas, with additional investments in solar generation and battery storage. AES projects roughly 300 construction jobs during the transition and approximately $40 million in taxes and benefits for Pike County over the next 20 years. The smaller Frank E. Ratts coal plant (located 1 mile downstream from Petersburg) was retired earlier. The county's coal-mining employment has continued to decline as utility demand for coal falls.
Despite the upheaval, Pike's headline economics look reasonably solid. Median household income clears the ALICE threshold by $14,459 — among the better slack ratios for a small rural county. The ALICE threshold itself is $51,791 (4th-lowest in the state) — housing costs and household budgets in Pike are well below the state average. Hardship at 37.1% is below the state average of 39.1%. The 13-year ALICE trajectory shows hardship roughly stable with a small uptick of about 4 percentage points — meaningful but not catastrophic.
Pike is the test case for whether utility-led energy transitions can stabilize coal counties without producing the deeper economic collapses that hit Appalachian coal communities. The AES conversion plus the Sullivan County data-center buildout next door (Potentia's $65B project) places this corner of southwest Indiana in a peculiar position: at the front of the U.S. energy transition, with an underlying industrial base that doesn't depend on coal continuing. The next decade's data will tell whether that pivot holds.
Sources: Pike County EDC — AES Indiana $1.1B investment; Inside INdiana Business — AES $1.1B Petersburg conversion; Wikipedia: Petersburg Generating Station; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Harrison County is the casino-host counterpart to Switzerland — same Ohio-River geography, similar wagering-revenue mechanism — but its arc has played out very differently. Caesars Southern Indiana (originally Caesars Indiana, then Horseshoe Southern Indiana, now back to Caesars) opened on November 20, 1998 as a riverboat casino in Elizabeth, Harrison County, about 15 miles southwest of downtown Louisville. The casino had its best year in 2007 with about $350 million in gaming win. By the late 2010s, revenue had declined to roughly $200 million per year — but it stabilized there rather than continuing to erode.
The key difference from Switzerland's Belterra story is geography. Caesars Southern Indiana sits in the closer half of Louisville's casino-customer commute-shed. Belterra is 60+ miles from both Cincinnati and Louisville; Caesars Southern Indiana is 15 minutes from Louisville's airport. When Ohio legalized casinos in 2009 and built two facilities in Cincinnati, Belterra lost a third of its customer base; Harrison's Caesars wasn't materially affected because Louisville-area customers had no closer Ohio option. When Kentucky expanded gambling (historical horse racing terminals, sports betting in 2023), it eroded but did not destroy Harrison's draw, because the in-person casino experience still requires crossing the river.
Caesars opened a new $90M land-based facility in 2019, replacing the original riverboat — a reinvestment that Belterra's owners have not made at the same scale. Then in September 2021, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians purchased Caesars Southern Indiana for $280 million, providing fresh capital and a long-term operator. By FY 2022, gaming revenue had recovered to $244M. The casino has held its position; the wagering distributions to Harrison County have been steady and substantial — $183M over FY18–25, second only to Switzerland in per-capita terms ($4,523/cap).
Harrison's broader economy diversified less aggressively than Hamilton's or Allen's, but it has held up. Slack is +$12,743, hardship at 38.0% is right around the state average, and the 13-year ALICE trajectory shows roughly a 2-percentage-point improvement. Caesars is the structural anchor that Belterra was supposed to be for Switzerland — closer geography, deeper customer base, and a willing operator that has kept reinvesting. The lesson for Indiana's gaming-host counties isn't "casinos work" or "casinos don't" — it's "geography and operator strategy determine which casinos sustain and which decline."
Sources: Wikipedia: Caesars Southern Indiana; WDRB — Southern Indiana casino raises stakes; Yogonet — Caesars $90M land-based casino opens 2019; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Hendricks is the Indianapolis ring county on the west side, and the dashboard's third-best county by every household-economics metric. What sets Hendricks apart from Hamilton (the wealthy northern suburb) or Boone (the LEAP-District winner) is what's happening in Plainfield. Plainfield isn't a bedroom community — it's a 50-million-square-foot industrial-warehouse complex that has become the eastern Midwest's logistics gateway.
The geography is the explanation. Plainfield sits directly south of Indianapolis International Airport (the second-largest FedEx hub in the world after Memphis) and on the I-70 / I-465 / US-40 interchange. Within Plainfield's industrial quarter: Amazon (sortation and fulfillment centers), Walmart (1.2-million-square-foot distribution center, ~1,000 employees, hit by a major fire in March 2022), FedEx (327,820-sq-ft distribution facility plus a $1.5B Indianapolis hub expansion that's pulled even more volume into Hendricks), UPS, Home Depot, Kohl's, Pepsi, and a recent $30M Walgreens hub bringing another 200 logistics jobs. The site-selection consultants who write trade magazines about Plainfield use phrases like "10 years ahead" — referencing the deliberate land-use and infrastructure decisions Plainfield made in the 2000s and 2010s to make distribution-megaproject siting easy.
The household-economic effect is real but mixed. Hendricks's $99,988 median household income is among the best in the state, and slack of $38,510 is third behind only Hamilton and Boone. But the wages inside the warehouses themselves run $18–25/hour for entry roles — not low, but not "median $100K household" either. The mechanism is that Hendricks combines two distinct populations within the county: a logistics-and-warehouse workforce centered on Plainfield, and a professional-commuter population in Avon, Brownsburg, and Danville who commute into Indianapolis-proper for office and professional work. The combined county-level statistic captures both.
The vulnerability sits on the logistics side. Hendricks's prosperity is partly dependent on e-commerce continuing to grow at the rate it has since 2010. If Amazon, Walmart e-commerce, and FedEx volume plateau or contract, the warehouse-heavy half of the county feels it first. Within Indiana's economic geography, Hendricks is the county most directly exposed to changes in retail-distribution technology and consumer behavior.
Sources: Site Selection — How Plainfield leveraged its prime location; Inside INdiana Business — Warehouse big deals Hendricks; Supply Chain 24/7 — Walmart's need for speed Indiana; Pepper Construction — FedEx Plainfield; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Dearborn is the most thoroughly out-of-state-shaped county in Indiana. Only 37.8% of Dearborn residents were born in Indiana — the lowest in-state-born share in the state, and a striking 20+ percentage points lower than the state average. The reason is geography: Lawrenceburg, the county seat, is 20 miles west of downtown Cincinnati and sits inside the Cincinnati metropolitan statistical area. Cincinnati-area workers move across the state line into Dearborn to access lower Indiana taxes, cheaper housing, and Indiana's school-funding structure, while keeping their jobs in Ohio.
The other defining feature is Hollywood Casino Lawrenceburg — formerly the Argosy Casino, opened December 13, 1996 as one of the original Indiana riverboat casinos authorized under the 1993 Riverboat Gambling Act. The casino has been a major fiscal lifeline for Dearborn County and Lawrenceburg specifically. The first five years alone (1996 to July 2001) generated $121 million in combined county-and-city tax revenue; through the early 2000s, casino-related revenue averaged $20+ million annually for the county. Today the facility employs roughly 1,700 people and operates over 1,700 slot machines plus table games. The casino's contribution to Indiana's overall casino tax collection (which hit $645.8M in FY 2023) has held up similar to Harrison's — Cincinnati commuters and Ohio gamers continue to provide a stable customer base even as Ohio expanded gaming after 2009.
The economic structure in Dearborn is a hybrid: white-collar Cincinnati commuters, casino-and-tourism workers, beverage manufacturing (Lawrenceburg has a long history of spirits production — the local distillery has been one of the largest in the country), plus typical small-town Indiana retail/service. Median household income $73,818 is solidly above the state average. Slack of $14,143 is positive. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly flat with modest improvement.
The state-distribution composition shift for Dearborn was one of the biggest in Indiana — LIT dependency jumped from 41.5% to 65.7% over FY18–25, reflecting fast income-tax growth from Cincinnati-area commuter wages and resident relocations. Dearborn is the case study in how having a major out-of-state metro on one\'s border can be more economically powerful than having any single big employer inside the county. The vulnerability is reversed compared to Madison or Blackford: if Cincinnati's economy stumbles, Dearborn feels it — but Cincinnati's economic structure is more diversified than any single Indiana employer's would be.
Sources: Wikipedia: Lawrenceburg, Indiana; Hollywood Casino Lawrenceburg; Lawrenceburg — Visitors / Economy; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023 DP02.
Auburn, the DeKalb County seat, was once home to 12 separate automobile manufacturers, including the storied Auburn Automobile Company (1900), Cord (1929), and Duesenberg (under the same corporate roof from 1926 to 1937). The Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg brands produced some of the most iconic luxury vehicles of the pre-WWII era — the Duesenberg Model J, the front-wheel-drive Cord L-29. The Great Depression killed the company in 1937, but the legacy is preserved in the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum (one of the country's most respected classic-car museums) and, more importantly, in the precision-manufacturing skill base that the local workforce never really lost.
Modern DeKalb is built on automotive-supplier manufacturing rather than on a single big auto plant. Current major employers include Multimatic (automotive structural-component supplier), Continental (tires and automotive technology), Autokiniton (body and frame systems), Auburn Gear (transmissions, traceable directly back to the Auburn legacy), Carlex Glass (auto glass), Cooper Standard, Metal Technologies, Eaton Corporation, and C&A Tool. In Butler: Steel Dynamics, New Millennium Building Systems, Air Products & Chemicals, plus a dozen smaller metals and chemicals operations. The structure resembles a Tier-1/Tier-2 automotive-supplier cluster that serves GM Fort Wayne (next-county-over), Detroit's auto industry, and the Indiana auto-manufacturing base (Toyota Princeton, Subaru Lafayette, Honda Greensburg).
DeKalb saw $760 million in new private investment in 2024 — a county record — and momentum has carried into 2025. The economic structure is industrially concentrated (manufacturing 34.2%, industry HHI similar to other manufacturing-corridor counties) but distributed across many medium-sized employers rather than a single dominant one. Median household income $70,080, slack +$15,948, hardship 33% — solid but not spectacular. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable.
The vulnerability is the EV transition. Auto-supplier counties are at the leading edge of automotive-industry change — if Tier-1 suppliers consolidate or lose contracts as the industry shifts from internal-combustion engines to EVs, DeKalb's many smaller employers are individually less resilient than a single Toyota Princeton would be. But the diversification across multiple Tier-1s also means no single contract loss collapses the local economy.
Sources: DeKalb County Visitors Bureau — Automotive Excellence; DeKalb EDC — this study\'s Industries; DeKalb EDC — 2025 Mid-Year Update; Wikipedia: Auburn Automobile; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Dubois County was established in 1818 specifically because German immigrants were drawn to the abundant forests of oak and poplar in southwestern Indiana's hill country. The Catholic-German settlers brought woodworking traditions, religious community cohesion, and a work-ethic culture that translated, over the next 200 years, into one of the country's most concentrated furniture-manufacturing clusters.
The major Dubois County wood manufacturers today include MasterBrand Cabinets (one of the largest cabinet manufacturers in North America — $3.3B in 2022 sales, ~14,000 employees nationally, with operations traceable to Celestine, Indiana, in the 1950s), Kimball International (commercial furniture and electronics, founded in Jasper 1950), OFS Brands (office furniture), Jasper Group, Indiana Furniture, and Best Home Furnishings. Eight Dubois County wood manufacturers have been ranked among the largest in North America. MasterBrand and Kimball alone employ 5,800 workers in the county. The cluster is similar in structure to Warsaw's orthopedic concentration (Kosciusko) — a tight industrial network with strong local-talent and supplier-base advantages — except built around wood furniture rather than medical devices.
The community structure underneath the furniture industry matters as much as the companies themselves. The German-Catholic congregational network in Jasper, Huntingburg, Celestine, and surrounding small towns provides a level of cultural cohesion that few rural Indiana counties have. Apprenticeship traditions, intergenerational employment within the same firms, and a low-turnover labor culture distinguish the furniture cluster from typical manufacturing economies. The result on the data: median household income $71,918 (above state average), slack +$15,500, hardship 34.5% (below the state average of 39.1%), and a 13-year ALICE trajectory that's been stable or slightly improving.
Dubois is the closest Indiana analog to LaGrange's Amish-and-RV economy, with the cultural-cohesion-plus-industry pattern playing out around German-Catholic communities and wood furniture rather than Amish communities and RVs. The vulnerability is the same: industrial concentration. The furniture market has been hit by tariffs, import competition from Vietnam and Mexico, and shifting consumer preferences. The cluster's response has been to consolidate (MasterBrand absorbed several local brands) and shift toward more specialized, higher-margin products — but if the broader U.S. furniture market contracts substantially, Dubois feels it.
Sources: St. Louis Fed — Knock on Wood: Jasper economy; Southern Indiana Business Report — 8 Dubois wood manufacturers among NA's largest; Dubois County — Who the analysis is; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Greene illustrates what an economic pivot looks like when it's nearly complete. At its mid-20th-century peak, the county was among Indiana's top coal-producing counties — bituminous coal extraction around Linton and Jasonville employed thousands of miners through the Illinois Basin coal seams. By 2015, that had fallen to 105 mining jobs; today the count is roughly eight. The closure of surface and underground mines in and around Greene was one of the most complete extinctions of a primary industry in any Indiana county.
What replaced it is dispersed and remarkable. Greene is the most-diversified small county in Indiana by industry concentration (HHI 1,041, comparable to Morgan's 986). The mechanism: Naval Support Activity Crane (the same facility that anchors Daviess) employs 1,100+ Greene County residents directly in scientific, engineering, and munitions-technician roles supporting defense missions. Hospital employment grew to 735 jobs, with a location quotient of 2.41 (meaning Greene has about 2.4× the healthcare-sector employment of a typical Indiana county). Agriculture — corn, soybeans, and livestock — remains substantial, with crops accounting for 61% of farm sales. Manufacturing is present but small. Small-scale tourism around Goose Pond Fish & Wildlife Area adds another layer.
The data shows what the diversification has produced. Median household income $60K is below the state average but slack remains positive ($9,254), the cost of living is among Indiana's lowest, and hardship at 41.2% is somewhat above state average — meaningful but not crisis-level. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. Compare to Blackford (a single-industry coal/glass collapse with no diversification) or Pike (still mid-pivot from coal): Greene appears to have completed its pivot earlier and with more breadth.
The lesson Greene carries for transitioning rural counties: diversification works, but it's slow and quiet. No single Crane payroll, hospital, or agricultural cluster restored the prior prosperity from 1950s coal employment. The combination of all of them — federal-defense spillover, healthcare growth, agriculture stability, plus the underlying low cost of living — is what produced an economy that's modest but durable. Greene is the rural-resilience case study.
Sources: Southern Indiana Business Report — Greene County economy in transition; Indiana Uplands — Greene County; Wikipedia: Greene County; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Clark is the bigger half of Indiana's Louisville-suburb story. Jeffersonville sits directly across the Ohio River from downtown Louisville — the Big Four Bridge (a converted 1895 railroad span, opened for pedestrians and bikes in 2013) connects the two cities' walkable downtowns and has become the most-visited single piece of riverfront infrastructure in the region. Roughly half of Clark's residents commute to Kentucky jobs, but unlike Floyd next door, Clark also has its own substantial industrial-and-commercial economy.
The single biggest economic engine inside Clark County is the River Ridge Commerce Center — a 6,000-acre business and office park established in 1998 on the site of the former Indiana Army Ammunition Plant. River Ridge's 2025 figures are striking: 20 million square feet of buildings developed, more than 80 companies, 13,300+ jobs, and $3.6 billion in annual economic impact. Tenants include Amazon (multiple fulfillment and sortation centers), Meta (data center), Canadian Solar, Collins Aerospace, Medline, and PharmaCord. The site's transformation from idle military-ordnance ground into one of the Midwest's largest active commerce parks is the cleanest example in Indiana of "old federal facility becomes new private-sector engine."
Clark's economic numbers reflect the hybrid model: median household income around $68K, slack of $17,435, hardship at 38.0% (right around the state average). The 13-year ALICE trajectory shows modest improvement. The 49% IN-born share is the second-lowest in Indiana (behind Dearborn at 37.8%), reflecting the Louisville-commuter dynamic — Kentucky-born residents relocate across the bridge for Indiana taxes and housing costs while keeping their Louisville-side employment.
The vulnerability is the dual exposure. Clark depends both on Louisville's broader economy (for the commuter half) and on River Ridge's continued tenant growth (for the resident-employment half). The upside: River Ridge's 80+ tenant base is well-diversified — logistics, biotech, aerospace, solar manufacturing, social-media data infrastructure — meaning no single tenant exit collapses the model.
Sources: River Ridge — 20M sq ft milestone; Wikipedia: Clark County; Wikipedia: Big Four Bridge; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Floyd is the residential complement to Clark's industrial-commercial economy. New Albany — Indiana's largest 19th-century river city after Evansville — has reinvented itself over the past 20 years as a walkable, historic-district-anchored Louisville bedroom suburb. Downtown New Albany has gained restaurants, breweries, and small retail; the 19th-century townhouse stock has been steadily restored. Approximately 40% of Floyd residents commute to Kentucky jobs per recent ACS data — fewer commuters than Clark on a percentage basis, but more residential in mix.
Floyd's own economy is anchored by Baptist Health Floyd (the regional hospital system), Indiana University Southeast (3,276 undergraduates as of fall 2024, focused on commuter and non-traditional students; the campus sits on 184 acres in New Albany), NYX New Albany (auto-supplier manufacturing), and Caesars Southern Indiana operations (the casino itself is in Harrison County but draws Floyd workers). Median household income is around $73K, slack is +$21,394 (substantial), and hardship at 35.9% sits below the state average.
The Floyd economic model is closer to Brown County's than to Clark's — instead of having a major commerce park, Floyd attracts in-migrants (51.1% IN-born, second-lowest among large counties) and absorbs their wealth through property appreciation, education-and-healthcare employment, and proximity to Louisville's bigger labor market. The trajectory has improved by about 3 percentage points over 13 years.
Floyd and Clark together represent the cleanest pair of "what an adjacent metro does for an Indiana county" cases. Floyd absorbs the residential overflow; Clark captures the commercial-park investment; Louisville provides the broader market for both. The combined Floyd-Clark economy is bigger than several individually-ranked Indiana metros, but neither county is large enough on its own to be in Indiana's top-5 by total population.
Sources: Wikipedia: Floyd County; IBRC — New Albany Outlook; Indiana University Southeast; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Ohio is Indiana's smallest county by population — fewer than 6,000 residents — and a study in what happens when a small jurisdiction's economy is structurally dependent on a single casino in a market that's eroded around it. The Rising Star Casino, a converted Louisiana riverboat that floated up the Ohio River to Rising Sun in 1996, was once one of the more meaningful gaming operations in Indiana. It generated nearly $93 million in gross gaming revenue in 2012. By fiscal year 2024, GGR had fallen to $43.8 million — a 53% decline in 12 years.
The mechanism is the same as Switzerland's Belterra story, but accelerated. Rising Sun is even more isolated than Florence — the same Cincinnati-and-Kentucky-gaming-expansion that hit Belterra's customer base hit Rising Star's even harder, because Rising Star's customer base was always more dependent on driving distance than amenity differentiation. The casino is still owned by Las Vegas-based Full House Resorts, which hasn't made significant amenity investments since 1996 — no land-based replacement facility, no major property upgrades. The contrast with Caesars Southern Indiana (Harrison County, which built a new $90M land-based facility in 2019) couldn't be sharper.
Full House has periodically lobbied the Indiana legislature for permission to relocate the casino license to a more lucrative market — Steuben County in northern Indiana has been one of the proposed destinations. Indiana lawmakers have repeatedly declined. The casino remains in Ohio County for now, but the long-term outlook is unclear: it's "consistently one of the lowest-earning casinos in the state" and is the largest property-tax payer and the largest employer in both Ohio County and Rising Sun.
Ohio's per-capita state-distribution figure ($8,122) is in the state's top 5, driven almost entirely by casino-related wagering taxes flowing back to the host community. But the absolute dollars are small (Ohio is tiny) and the trend is downward. The 13-year ALICE hardship trajectory shows modest stability — Rising Sun the city has held its small-town character, but the casino-dependent economic structure is increasingly precarious.
Sources: Inside INdiana Business — Rising Star eyes move; Casino.org — Rising Star stays put; Wikipedia: Rising Sun, Indiana; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Orange County contains two of the most extraordinary buildings in the Midwest. The West Baden Springs Hotel, built in 1902, has a 200-foot-diameter atrium that was the largest free-spanning dome in the United States for nearly 60 years. The neighboring French Lick Springs Hotel was a presidential-era resort, hosting FDR, multiple Roosevelts, and the gangster Al Capone. Both were among the most prestigious mineral-springs spa destinations in America in the early 20th century. By the 1990s, both were near-derelict — West Baden in particular had a roof collapse in 1991 and was effectively abandoned.
In 2005, Cook Group, Inc. — the medical-device manufacturing company headquartered in Bloomington (Monroe County), owned by Bill and Gayle Cook — bought both hotels and committed to restoring them. The combined restoration cost was approximately $600 million. French Lick reopened with a casino in November 2006 (the first land-based casino in Indiana, the 11th and last riverboat-equivalent gaming license issued by the state). West Baden Springs Hotel reopened across the following years.
The economic effect on Orange County has been substantial but uneven. The resort employs over 2,000 people across both properties, plus thousands more in tourism-supporting roles across Orange and adjacent counties. Hotel occupancy has been steady. The casino generates wagering distributions to the host county. But Orange County is also one of the most internally unequal counties in Indiana — the township-level hardship spread of about 50+ percentage points reflects the gap between the French Lick / West Baden Springs immediate area (where resort employment supports moderate incomes) and the surrounding rural townships in Paoli and elsewhere (where the agricultural and rural-service economy is still subsistence-level).
Orange is the case study for "philanthropic investment from a wealthy local family can revive historic assets" — but also for "tourism-anchored economics produces unequal results across a county." Larry Bird, basketball legend, was born in French Lick and grew up nearby — his career arc and the resort's restoration are emblematic of southwestern Indiana's complicated cultural-economic story.
Sources: St. Louis Fed — Resort Revives French Lick; Wikipedia: West Baden Springs Hotel; World Property Journal — French Lick $600M restoration; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Johnson is the southern member of Indianapolis's wealthy ring-county set — alongside Hamilton (north), Boone (northwest), Hendricks (west), and Hancock (east). Greenwood grew up around Greenwood Park Mall and the I-65 corridor; Franklin retained more of a small-town center; Whiteland has become an Amazon-adjacent logistics suburb. The combined Johnson economy is among Indiana's most consistently strong: GDP grew 9.2% from 2022 to 2023, beating the nation (6.6%), the Indianapolis metro (6.6%), and the state (5.5%). Real growth for 2025 is projected at 3.5% — again beating all benchmarks.
Johnson has a distinctive feature compared to the other ring counties: a meaningful concentration of Swiss-and-German industrial firms with North American headquarters here. Endress+Hauser, the Swiss multinational measurement-instrumentation company, has its U.S. sales-and-marketing HQ on a 100-acre campus in Greenwood (Pushville Road / US-31), employs 274 there, and is in the middle of a $50.9 million expansion adding 75+ jobs and a new 120,000-sq-ft facility opening 2025. The Endress+Hauser campus has become the visible anchor of Greenwood's white-collar economy. Other Swiss/European-headquartered firms have followed.
The data shows the strength clearly. Median household income $87,227 (5th in Indiana), slack +$29,100 (6th), hardship 27.3% — fourth-lowest in the state. Bachelor's-degree rate 33.3%. The 13-year ALICE trajectory shows a 5.7-percentage-point improvement, among Indiana's better trajectories. Top-ranked school systems (Center Grove especially, plus Franklin Community) have made Johnson a destination for families relocating into central Indiana.
The risk pattern is the same that runs through all the wealthy Indy-ring counties: prosperity depends on continued in-migration of higher-income households, on Indianapolis's broader economy staying healthy, and on the school-funding model that currently favors the ring counties relative to Marion. If state-level school funding formulas shifted, or if Indianapolis-proper's tax base were strengthened (politically unlikely, but conceivable), the comparative advantage could narrow. For now, Johnson is among Indiana's clearest "compounding works" stories.
Sources: Inside INdiana Business — Endress+Hauser expansion; Endress+Hauser — Greenwood groundbreaking; IBRC — Johnson County 2025 Forecast; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Hancock is the eastern member of Indianapolis's wealthy ring set — Greenfield as the county seat, plus the rapidly growing Fortville and McCordsville on the north side. The county sits directly east of Indianapolis on I-70 and has experienced two simultaneous waves of growth over the past 20 years: residential subdivision development pulling Indianapolis-suburb households out, and a logistics-corridor buildout along Mt. Comfort Road and the Indianapolis Regional Airport. Walmart, Amazon, and other major distribution-and-fulfillment operations have selected Hancock for facilities serving the eastern half of central Indiana.
The defining recent event for Greenfield was the Elanco departure. Elanco Animal Health — the world's largest animal-pharmaceutical company, spun off from Eli Lilly — had operated in Greenfield since 2010 with a sprawling corporate campus and roughly 950 employees. In 2020 Elanco announced it would move its headquarters to downtown Indianapolis, leaving the Greenfield campus and taking those 950 jobs with it. Local leaders were publicly disappointed but expressed measured optimism. The campus has not yet been fully repurposed.
Despite the Elanco loss, Hancock's underlying economics have stayed strong because of the logistics expansion and the steady residential in-migration. Median household income is $91,326 — fifth-highest in Indiana. Slack of $29,835 puts Hancock in the top tier. Hardship at 27.4% is among the state's five lowest. The Indianapolis Regional Airport (MQJ), with two 6,000-foot runways and an FBO supporting jet operations, has positioned itself for continued growth — an updated 20-year master plan focuses on hangars, infrastructure, and surrounding land use.
Hancock illustrates a useful subtlety: losing a major corporate HQ doesn't necessarily wreck a wealthy ring county if the underlying residential and logistics economies are diversified enough to absorb the loss. The same Elanco-scale departure in a single-anchor county like Madison or Wayne would have been catastrophic. In Hancock, it's an unfortunate footnote in a still-strong growth trajectory.
Sources: IBJ — Greenfield hopes to recover from Elanco exit; Hancock County EDC; Daily Reporter — Indianapolis Regional Airport growth; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Morgan is the southwestern member of Indianapolis's ring counties — less well-known than Hamilton or Hendricks, but sitting in an unusual geographic position: between Indianapolis and Bloomington, with I-69 (which became the official "I-69" through Morgan only in the late 2010s) and SR-67 funneling commuters in both directions. Mooresville is the largest town; Martinsville is the county seat. Heartland Crossing, one of the largest housing developments in Indiana, spans Morgan, Hendricks, and Marion counties.
What's distinctive about Morgan is the HHI of 986 — the most-diversified industry mix of any Indiana county. There's no single dominant employer or industry. Education and healthcare (Indiana University Health Morgan, Mooresville Consolidated Schools, plus Indianapolis-area employers within commute range), manufacturing (light industrial spread across several mid-sized firms), retail and logistics serving both Indianapolis and Bloomington, and agriculture (Morgan still has substantial farm land) all share roughly comparable shares of the workforce. The county is the closest Indiana has to a "balanced-portfolio" economy.
The data outcomes are modestly strong rather than spectacular. Median household income around $76K, slack +$17,297, hardship at 36.6% (just below state average). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been stable with slight improvement. Bachelor's-degree rate is moderate at around 24%. The strength of Morgan's structure is the same as Greene County's: when no single sector or employer dominates, no single downturn collapses the local economy. The trade-off is that no single sector or employer drives explosive growth either.
Mooresville's notable cultural-historical detail: James Whitcomb Riley, the "Hoosier poet" born nearby in 1849, used Morgan County and its small-town settings in his most famous poems. The current Indiana Motor Speedway and Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park sit a short drive from Mooresville (actually in Hendricks). Morgan benefits from Indianapolis Motor Speedway tourism without hosting it directly — a small but recurring economic effect.
Sources: Wikipedia: Morgan County, Indiana; Encyclopedia of Indianapolis — Morgan County; Morgan County EDC; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Shelby County is the southeastern member of the Indianapolis-MSA ring — close enough to be a commuter county, but with its own significant economic engines. The defining facility is Horseshoe Indianapolis (formerly Indiana Grand Racing & Casino, formerly Indiana Live!, formerly Indiana Downs) — a thoroughbred horse-racing track that opened December 2002 and added a racino (casino + horse racing) in subsequent expansions. Now operated by Caesars Entertainment, the facility runs live Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse racing from April through October and operates as a full casino year-round.
Wagering distributions to Shelby County are substantial — about $68 million over FY18–25, or $1,529 per capita — placing Shelby in Indiana's casino-host upper tier (though well below Switzerland's $7,064 or Harrison's $4,523). Unlike Switzerland's struggling Belterra, Horseshoe Indianapolis has been an active investment by Caesars; unlike Ohio County's Rising Star, it sits inside the Indianapolis metro market with a much larger customer base.
The other major Shelby employer is Ryobi Die Casting (USA) — the North American arm of the Japanese die-casting giant, which established its U.S. headquarters in Shelbyville in 1985 and now employs 700+ people. Ryobi produces aluminum transmission cases and structural parts for internal-combustion-engine vehicles plus hybrid and electric models. Like DeKalb's auto-supplier cluster, Shelby's economic exposure to the EV transition is real but the supplier-style diversification provides resilience.
Shelby's headline economics are solid: median household income around $68K, slack +$11K, hardship near the state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. The county is what happens when a small Indianapolis-MSA county combines two distinct anchor employers (a casino and a major manufacturer) plus residential commuter spillover — none of them individually dominant, none individually catastrophic if one stumbles.
Sources: Wikipedia: Horseshoe Indianapolis; Ryobi Die Casting USA; IBJ — Made in Indiana: Ryobi; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Noble County sits in the heart of Indiana's RV-and-component manufacturing corridor — a partner to LaGrange (immediately north), Elkhart (west), and DeKalb (south). The county hosts 122 manufacturers employing about 10,000 workers — one of the highest manufacturing concentrations in Indiana. Kendallville (the largest city, 11 miles from I-69) is the industrial center; Ligonier is a secondary manufacturing town.
Major employers reflect the RV-supplier and general-industrial profile. Hendrickson (suspension and components), Graphic Packaging, Creative Liquid Coatings, Kraft Heinz (maker of virtually all caramels sold nationally), Flint and Walling (water pumps, a decades-long Kendallville fixture), and Airframe Components by Williams (assembling aircraft components shipped globally) are among the larger anchors. The Lippert Components acquisition of Wolfpack Chassis LLC in Kendallville (a 60,000-sq-ft chassis-manufacturing plant, ~40 workers) folded Noble more tightly into the Elkhart-headquartered RV-supplier network during the 2022 demand peak.
The data shows the strength and vulnerability of the model. Median household income $70,908 is above state average. Slack of $15,269 is solidly positive. Hardship at 33.6% sits below the state average. But manufacturing is 39.8% of employment and the industry HHI is 1,968 — the third-most-concentrated economy in Indiana (after LaGrange and Kosciusko). When the RV industry crashed in 2023, Noble felt it alongside Elkhart and LaGrange, though the diversification across Tier-1 suppliers and the broader manufacturing base (caramels, paper, water pumps, aircraft components) cushioned the blow more than Elkhart experienced.
Noble is what a successful smaller NE-Indiana manufacturing county looks like: high concentration but distributed across many medium-sized employers, strong workforce traditions, and proximity to both the RV cluster and the I-69 corridor that connects to Fort Wayne and Indianapolis. The risk profile mirrors DeKalb's: auto-and-RV transitions over the next decade.
Sources: Noble County Economic Development; NEI — Noble County profile; WISH-TV — Lippert acquires Wolfpack Chassis; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Huntington is the small NE-Indiana county that became a brief national news story in 2016 and 2017 — and then quietly absorbed the consequences. Dan Quayle, the 44th Vice President of the United States (1989–1993), is from Huntington. The Quayle Vice Presidential Learning Center was dedicated in 1993 and remains in Huntington today, featuring artifacts and information from every Vice President — making it one of the more unusual museums in the Midwest. (Quayle was born in Indianapolis but attended high school in Huntington.)
The other piece of national context is the UTEC closure. United Technologies Electronic Controls — Huntington's largest single employer — announced in February 2016 that it would relocate its manufacturing operations to Monterrey, Mexico over the following two years, eliminating roughly 700 jobs in Huntington. The announcement came the same month as the larger Carrier (also a United Technologies subsidiary) Indianapolis announcement of 1,400 job losses. Donald Trump's December 2016 negotiation famously preserved most of the Carrier jobs at the Indianapolis plant. The UTEC Huntington jobs were not preserved; the relocation proceeded as announced and was complete by 2018. Manufacturing average pay in Huntington at that point was $57,000+ — nearly 50% above the county's overall average earnings. Losing 700 of those was, in proportional terms, the equivalent of Carmel losing several thousand jobs.
The UTEC headquarters, engineering, and product-marketing operations stayed in Huntington — about 200 high-skill jobs. But the manufacturing workforce was gone. Huntington's economic data in the years since shows a county that absorbed the loss without dramatic decline: median household income around $62K, slack +$8K, hardship around state average, 13-year ALICE trajectory stable with modest worsening. The mechanism was that Huntington was already diversified across multiple manufacturers (Huntington University, regional healthcare, retail/service, agriculture), so the UTEC closure was painful but not collapse-inducing.
Huntington is the cautionary tale of "the Carrier deal got national attention, but the related Huntington plant got none, and the workers were forgotten as the cycle moved on." The economic data confirms the resilience but also the cost — the county is fine, but the workers who lost $57K-average manufacturing jobs and had to take lower-wage replacement work felt the loss personally. The state-level statistics don't capture that distinction.
Sources: WFYI — Huntington UTEC Employees Feel Forgotten; WANE — UTEC leaving Huntington for Mexico, 700 jobs; Wikipedia: Quayle Vice Presidential Learning Center; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023.
Wells is the small southern member of the Fort Wayne MSA. Bluffton (the county seat) and Ossian (15 miles from downtown Fort Wayne) together absorb Fort Wayne-area commuter spillover while maintaining a meaningful manufacturing-and-food-processing base of their own. Major employers include Pretzels Inc. (pretzel manufacturer with Bluffton operations), Peyton's Northern Distribution Center, American Axle & Manufacturing, WEG Commercial Motors (industrial motor manufacturer), and Bluffton Regional Medical Center as the healthcare anchor.
Bluffton's small-but-notable claim to fame is that it became Indiana's first "Gigabit City" in 2014, when the local utility and a partner provider laid full fiber broadband across the city's roughly 10,000 residents. That early infrastructure decision has paid off in modest-but-real ways: small-business formation, remote-work capacity, and the kind of "underrated for its size" reputation that draws relocators looking for affordability with connectivity.
Wells's headline numbers are solid: median household income around $65K (above state average), slack ~$11K, hardship near state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. The mechanism is the same as Whitley's (next county over): position inside the Fort Wayne MSA absorbs commuter wages while the local industrial base provides resident employment. Neither component is large enough to dominate, but the combination is durable.
Sources: NEI — Wells County profile; Wells County EDC — County Profile (PDF); Wikipedia: Wells County; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Whitley sits in an unusually advantaged position: 25 miles from Fort Wayne (Indiana's second-largest county and Allen's diversified employment base), 20 miles from Warsaw (Kosciusko's orthopedic-capital cluster), and 69 miles from South Bend. Columbia City — the county seat with about 10,000 residents — is structured to absorb commuters from all three directions while operating its own modest industrial economy. Major local employers include Steel Dynamics (Fortune 500 HQ in Fort Wayne, with operations spanning into Whitley), Siemens, 80/20 Inc. (custom metal-fabricated structural pieces), and Mach Medical (a newer medical-device manufacturer, partly a Warsaw-cluster spillover).
Whitley's median household income of $76,000+ places it in the top 20% of US counties by household earnings — a striking outcome for a rural-feeling Indiana county. The mechanism isn't a single big employer (Whitley has none) but rather the layering of commuter wages from three different industrial corridors. Workers can hold an orthopedic-precision-machining job in Warsaw, a steel job in Fort Wayne, a logistics job at the Columbia City truck stop on US-30, or a medical-device job at Mach Medical inside the county — and the household economics aggregate well above any single one of those.
Hardship at 30.6% is well below the state average. Slack of ~$23K is solid. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has improved modestly. Columbia City's population has grown over 40% since 2000 — from 7,077 to over 10,000 — as the commuter-friendly geography became visible to home-buyers leaving Fort Wayne or seeking proximity to Warsaw's orthopedic-industry jobs. Whitley is what happens when geography itself is the economic engine.
Sources: NEI — Whitley County profile; Region3A — Whitley County: Development Destination; Wikipedia: Columbia City; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Adams County is in the dashboard's "median household earns below the local ALICE threshold" bucket — but only by $100, and the story is more nuanced than the headline suggests. The county is home to the fifth-largest Amish settlement in the United States — 11,055 individuals across 72 church districts as of 2025, originating from Swiss Amish families who migrated from Switzerland's Jura Mountains and the Alsace region of France through Ohio in 1840. The Adams Swiss Amish are culturally and theologically distinct from the Pennsylvania-Dutch German Amish that anchor LaGrange and Daviess — different dialect, different settlement patterns, separate church districts.
The county's formal economy is anchored in plastics processing, packaging, and grain handling, with major employers including Dolco Packaging, Bunge North America (agribusiness), and Red Gold Products. A 62-acre industrial park in Decatur was completed in the early 2020s to attract additional manufacturing and logistics, leveraging proximity to Interstate 69. The Amish community contributes substantially to the agricultural and small-manufacturing base, particularly in furniture, food processing, and skilled trades — though those workforce contributions don't show up in standard Census employment categories the way conventional employer headcounts do.
The data show real distress relative to most NE-Indiana counties. ALICE threshold at $63,228 is the third-highest in Indiana (Hamilton, Hendricks, Adams — and Adams's high threshold is driven by the large Amish family sizes that ALICE's household-budget calibration accounts for). Median household income of $63,128 doesn't quite meet that threshold — by $100. The 13-year trajectory is among the worst in Indiana: +10.3 percentage points of hardship from 2010 to 2023.
The Amish economy provides community-level resilience that doesn't show in the headline numbers — Amish households share insurance, child care, and elder care across the church-district network. Like LaGrange's 44.3% uninsured statistic, Adams's ALICE-threshold metric partly captures household-budget categories that the Amish community handles outside the formal economy. So the lived reality is meaningfully better than the dashboard suggests for the Amish half of the county. But the non-Amish half is stretched — the trajectory tells that story clearly.
Sources: Wikipedia: Adams County; Amish America — Indiana Amish (2024); NEI — Adams County profile; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Wabash is the small-Indiana-town downtown-revitalization case study. The city of Wabash sits on the Wabash River about 45 miles southwest of Fort Wayne. By the 1960s, suburban-style commercial development on the highway-intersection outskirts of town had hollowed out the historic downtown, and Wabash spent four decades as a "sleepy rural community" in slow decline — a familiar Indiana story.
The pivot came from an unusual source: the Honeywell Foundation, established in 1941 by industrialist Mark C. Honeywell (whose company became part of what's now Honeywell International). The Foundation has continued to operate in Wabash and steadily invested in cultural, recreational, and downtown-revitalization projects across decades. In 2014, Wabash was selected as one of the first "Stellar Communities" by Indiana — a state grant program for small-town revitalization. In 2016, Wabash beat nearly 10,000 other small towns in a national revitalization contest, winning $500,000 in marketing services and business support.
The signature project was the Eagles Theatre — a 1906 five-story building in disrepair, restored at a combined cost of about $5 million (Stellar Communities funds + Honeywell Foundation + city + additional public sources). The renovated theatre now houses a movie theatre, live-entertainment venue, additional film theatres, music-lesson rooms, recording studios, and a restored grand ballroom. The broader downtown revitalization has reportedly leveraged over $100 million in investment over the past decade.
The data outcomes are modest but improving. Median household income around $58K is below state average but slack is positive (~$5K), and the 13-year ALICE trajectory has improved by about 1.5 percentage points — meaningful for a small rural county. Wabash's lesson is that concentrated philanthropy from a hometown industrialist's foundation can move a small-county trajectory in ways that pure private-sector investment usually doesn't. The pattern is similar to Cook Group's restoration of French Lick/West Baden in Orange — wealth from a successful Indiana company recycling into the founder's home community.
Sources: Indiana Landmarks — Wabash Becomes Model of Revitalization; Input Fort Wayne — Wabash growth story; Honeywell Arts & Entertainment — this study\'s Venues; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Miami County has had two distinct historical economic anchors and currently has one residual one. The first was the circus industry: starting in 1884 when local liveryman Ben Wallace took his first circus on the road, Peru built up over the next six decades to become the "Circus Capital of the World" — the winter quarters for seven major American circuses, including the giant Hagenbeck-Wallace and (after a 1922 acquisition) what became the American Circus Corporation. At peak in 1929, the Peru circus winter quarters had 42 buildings, 50 elephants, and over 150 railcars sitting in the yards each winter. The whole industry collapsed under the Great Depression, with the Peru winter quarters shuttering permanently in 1941.
The second anchor was Grissom Air Force Base, a Strategic Air Command bomber base that opened in 1942. In 1994, the Defense Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process announced that Grissom would be realigned — active-duty operations ended, though the Air Force Reserve retained a portion of the base for an air-refueling wing. The remaining property was transferred to civilian reuse. Grissom Air Reserve Base remains the largest employer in Miami County today, with an annual economic impact exceeding $130 million.
The civilian portion of the base became the Grissom Aeroplex — a 1,800-acre industrial and aviation park managed by the Miami County Economic Development Authority. Tenants have included aviation, manufacturing, and logistics operations. The Aeroplex has been a moderately successful BRAC-conversion case study, though not as transformative as Clark County's River Ridge Commerce Center.
The data show the cost of the transitions. Median household income $61,130 clears the ALICE threshold by only $1,713 — thin slack. Unemployment at 6.5% is among Indiana's highest. Labor-force participation at 55.5% is well below the state average — meaning a meaningful share of Miami's working-age adults are out of the labor force entirely. The 13-year ALICE trajectory shows hardship roughly stable. Peru also retains the Miami Nation of Indiana headquarters (the tribal government for the federally-recognized Miami people displaced from this region in the 1840s) and the Cole Porter birthplace (the composer, born in Peru 1891). The cultural depth is rich; the economic trajectory is fragile.
Sources: Wikipedia: Grissom Air Reserve Base; Miami County EDA — Grissom Aeroplex; Rails to Trails — Peru: America's "Circus City"; Atlas Obscura — Inside the Circus Capital of the World; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Logansport's immigration history runs longer than most Indiana counties realize. Irish immigrants built the Wabash and Erie Canal through Logansport in the 1840s; from 1900 to 1950, a large Italian wave settled the city through its industrial-and-railroad-hub era. Population peaked around 1950 and the city has been declining since. Then in the 1990s, Tyson Foods opened the Logansport pork-processing facility — today the county's largest single employer at 2,000+ employees. The plant attracted Hispanic workers from elsewhere in the US and from Mexico and Central America. By the 2010s, Logansport was roughly 30% Hispanic — one of the more dramatic ethnic-composition shifts in any Indiana mid-sized city.
The most recent wave is Haitian. Between 2020 and 2024, an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 Haitian migrants relocated to Logansport, attracted largely by Tyson jobs. By 2024 the influx had become a national news story — fueled by political controversy and inflated claims about the scale of the migration. Logansport officials have emphasized that immigration "is nothing new" in this community, while also acknowledging that the recent wave has strained schools, housing, and services more than previous immigration cycles. The Indiana Attorney General opened a probe of Tyson Foods over its migrant-hiring practices in 2024.
The economic data show a county under stress. Median household income $56,525 is below state average. Slack is positive but thin (~+$3K). Hardship at 45.2% is well above state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by 6.5 percentage points — among the bottom-quartile trajectories. But Cass is one of the few rural Indiana counties to have bucked the population-decline trend — the Census Bureau estimated Cass gained 288 international migrants between April 2020 and July 2023, ranking 17th of 92 Indiana counties on that measure.
Cass illustrates a complex pattern that doesn't fit neat compounding-vs-single-bet framing. The Tyson plant has been a stable, large employer for three decades — that's structural compounding. But the workforce model (large workforce, low wages, immigrant-heavy) generates household economics that struggle against the local cost-of-living. The immigration wave keeps the population stable but doesn't improve median household earnings. Cass is the place to look for what working-class Indiana looks like through three different immigration cycles compressed into 100 years.
Sources: Indiana Capital Chronicle — Logansport: immigration is nothing new; WTHR — Logansport dealing with increase in migrants; Farm Progress — Tyson Foods queried in IL immigration probe; ALICE Indiana 2025.
White County is one of the few Indiana counties whose modern economy is anchored not by an industrial employer but by a man-made geography. Lake Shafer and Lake Freeman are both reservoirs created by hydroelectric dams on the Tippecanoe River — the Norway Dam (completed 1923) and Oakdale Dam (1925), both owned and still operated by NIPSCO (Northern Indiana Public Service Company) for grid electricity. Together the two lakes have made Monticello (the county seat) into a regional weekend-and-summer-resort destination for nearly a century.
The most visible tourism anchor is Indiana Beach, a family-owned amusement park on Lake Shafer's shore that has operated since 1926. The park has 50+ rides and attractions including roller coasters and a water park; it was almost permanently closed in 2020 but was acquired by new owners and reopened. White County draws approximately one million visitors per year and generates an estimated $70 million in tourism revenue. The lake-cottage and second-home market layered on top adds property-value appreciation that benefits long-time residents.
White's economic structure is similar to Brown County's — tourism + retirement + recreation as the headline industries, but with smaller scale and less Indianapolis-spillover. Median household income around $60K is modest; slack ~$7K is small but positive; hardship ~37% sits below state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been stable. The vulnerability is the same as any tourism-anchored economy: weather-sensitive, recession-sensitive, and dependent on continued attractiveness of the amenities. The bigger long-term question is the Tippecanoe River's water rights — the same Wabash basin that's the subject of the LEAP District water fight in Boone County.
Sources: White County Tourism; Wikipedia: Lake Shafer; Indiana Connection — White County Profile; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Carroll is a small rural county that punches above its weight on two distinct mechanisms: an unusually large meat-processing plant for a county of 20,000, and inclusion in the Lafayette-West Lafayette MSA. Indiana Packers Corporation — a Japanese-American joint venture pork processor headquartered in Delphi — employs over 2,000 workers at its facility, making it the county's dominant employer and one of the larger pork-processing operations in the Midwest. Like Tyson in Logansport, the workforce has substantial Hispanic and immigrant populations.
The other major driver is Subaru spillover. Carroll is part of the Lafayette-West Lafayette MSA (along with Tippecanoe and Benton). Subaru of Indiana Automotive in Lafayette employs 5,000+, and a meaningful share of those workers commute in from Carroll's small towns where housing costs are lower. The Andersons, Inc. (grain, ethanol, plant nutrient, railcar leasing) is another significant Carroll employer, serving the agricultural commodities chain.
The data show a county with reasonable headline economics (median household $64K, slack +$10K) but substantial internal inequality — the township spread of 50.9 percentage points (one of the widest in Indiana) reflects the Indianapolis-Packers-employee townships and the Subaru-commuter townships diverging from the surrounding farmland-only townships. Hardship at 41.6% is above state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by about 9 percentage points — among the bottom-decile trajectories in Indiana, reflecting both the local-employment quality (meat processing pays moderately) and the broader Lafayette-MSA inflation that's affected nearby Tippecanoe and Benton.
Carroll is the smaller mirror of Cass — a rural Indiana county whose largest employer is a meat-processing plant with an immigrant-heavy workforce, with both producing similar economic-stress patterns despite Carroll having the Lafayette-MSA spillover that Cass lacks.
Sources: Carroll County EDC — Information; Wikipedia: Carroll County; IBRC Lafayette Forecast 2016; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Rensselaer, the small county seat of Jasper, lost its anchor institution in 2017. Saint Joseph's College, a Catholic liberal-arts college founded in 1888, suspended academic operations in February 2017 under the weight of approximately $27 million in debt. Enrollment had peaked at about 1,500 students in the 1960s and had fallen to roughly 900 by 2016. At the time of closure, the college employed about 200 people directly and was a substantial cultural and economic anchor for a rural town of around 5,800 residents. Local press accounts described the closure as "reshap[ing] the economic and cultural texture of the city in ways a small county town feels acutely."
The college has not been fully revived as a four-year institution, but in subsequent years it has reinvented itself as a workforce-training hub — offering short-term credentials, technical training, and Catholic high-school programs on the campus. The transition has been incomplete and the surrounding region has not fully recovered the previous economic-anchor effect.
Jasper's broader economy is rural — corn and soybean production dominate. The Indiana Crossroads Wind Farm and other renewable-energy projects have added some diversification in recent years. The data tell a deteriorating story: 13-year ALICE trajectory worsened by 8.9 percentage points, hardship at 38%, slack only modestly positive. The college closure plus the broader rural-agricultural challenges (consolidation reducing farm-related employment) have combined to produce one of Indiana's worst rural trajectories.
Jasper is the cautionary tale of "small-college closures hit small communities harder than the headline numbers suggest." Saint Joseph's was 200 jobs, but the secondary economic effects (campus visitors, student spending, faculty households, conference and event tourism) amplified that loss substantially.
Sources: Wikipedia: Saint Joseph's College (Indiana); Inside Higher Ed — Saint Joseph's suspends operations; Inside Higher Ed — Saint Joseph's shifts to workforce; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Newton is the rural agricultural-corner county of northwest Indiana — 90 miles southeast of Chicago, fewer than 14,000 residents, no major employer, just farmland. The 2022 agricultural census counted 372 farms covering 189,934 acres; corn was harvested on 82,748 acres, soybeans on 59,372. Kentland (~1,700 residents) is the county seat; Morocco (~1,100) is the largest town. The 1906 Classical Revival Newton County Courthouse in Kentland is on the National Register of Historic Places.
What's distinctive about Newton over the past 15 years is the addition of large-scale wind power. The Indiana Crossroads Wind Farm and several related developments have leased substantial acreage from Newton farmers for turbine installations. The lease income provides Newton landowners with a passive, multi-decade revenue stream that doesn't depend on commodity-crop prices — quietly stabilizing some farm-household economics that pure-row-crop dependence might not.
The data outcomes are quietly decent for a small rural county. Median household income around $66K is at state average, slack of +$11K is solidly positive, hardship at ~36% is below state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. Newton illustrates that "pure agricultural rural county with no major employer" can produce reasonable economic outcomes when (a) the underlying farmland is productive, (b) commodity-crop economics aren't catastrophically bad in any given year, and (c) supplementary income sources (wind-power leases, hunting leases, occasional county-government employment) add modest diversification.
The vulnerability is purely macro: federal farm policy, commodity-price cycles, and wind-power-tax policy decisions made far from Kentland determine whether the next decade's Newton looks like the past decade. There's no internal mechanism the county itself controls.
Sources: Newton County Indiana; South Shore CVA — Discover Newton County; Newton County — Economic Development; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Starke is a rural NW-Indiana county whose largest single employer — MPI Products — manufactures automotive components plus some steel-industry parts. Beyond MPI, the economy is largely agricultural with diverse crops (corn, soybeans, mint, Christmas trees, strawberries, blueberries, vegetables) plus some specialty trailer manufacturers. Knox (~3,700 residents) is the county seat; North Judson (~1,800, historically a railroad town) and Hamlet (~800) round out the named communities.
The data show a county that's structurally stressed despite a positive headline. Median household income around $62K is below state average but slack is positive (+$9K). What's striking is the labor-force participation rate of just 54.2% — among Indiana's lowest — meaning a substantial share of working-age adults in Starke aren't in the labor market at all. Combined with hardship at 44.2%, this is the profile of a county where a meaningful population has effectively dropped out of paid work and depends on Social Security, disability, family, or informal economies. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by about 4 percentage points.
Starke is a representative case of small rural Indiana counties without a strong single anchor employer — modest manufacturing plus agriculture, low cost of living that doesn't quite compensate for the limited wage opportunities. The county is not in obvious crisis but the trajectory points toward continued slow decline absent a substantial new investment.
Sources: Business View Magazine — Starke County; Wikipedia: Starke County; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Pulaski is a small rural NW-Indiana county anchored by a single distinctive company: BraunAbility (The Braun Corporation), founded in 1972 by Ralph Braun, who had muscular dystrophy and built his first wheelchair-accessible vehicle in his hometown garage. The company is now the largest manufacturer of wheelchair-accessible vans, SUVs, and wheelchair lifts in North America, and it remains headquartered in Winamac (population ~2,500). BraunAbility employs 800+ people in Pulaski — extraordinary scale for a county this small — and recently announced a $7.5M expansion of the Winamac manufacturing operations to meet growing demand.
The county's agricultural sector also punches above its weight. Pulaski is home to Indiana's largest potato grower (Black Gold Farms), is the 7th-best milk-producing Indiana county, hosts a Rose Acres egg plant, and ranks 18th of 92 counties in grains/oilseeds production. Agriculture provides both employment and a strong property-tax base.
The data show solid outcomes. Median household income around $58K is below state average but the cost of living is low. Slack of +$6K is positive. Hardship at ~45% is above state average — partly because the small population doesn't generate enough higher-wage jobs to lift the median dramatically. Per-capita state distributions of $8,807 place Pulaski third-highest in Indiana (behind Switzerland and Boone) — driven by the relatively high LIT generation from BraunAbility's payroll.
Pulaski is the case study of "a single founder-driven manufacturer in a small rural town can be the difference between thriving and dying." Without BraunAbility, Pulaski would look like Starke or Newton. With BraunAbility, Pulaski has a stable industrial anchor that's stayed loyal to its hometown for over 50 years.
Sources: Pulaski Online — Major Employers; Business Facilities — BraunAbility $7.5M expansion; Pulaski Online — Agriculture; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Fulton County is a small mid-Indiana county where Rochester (the county seat, population 6,110) sits on the Tippecanoe River next to Lake Manitou — at 775 acres, one of the oldest manmade lakes in the United States. Lake Manitou was created in 1827 by the federal government to power a mill for the Potawatomi village under terms of a treaty; the lake outlived both the mill and the Potawatomi removal from northern Indiana. Today the lake supports boating, fishing, and small-scale tourism.
The county's largest employment sectors are manufacturing (2,576 jobs), healthcare and social assistance (991), and retail trade (828). The manufacturing base is diversified across multiple medium-sized firms rather than a single dominant anchor. Agriculture continues as a meaningful secondary economy across the county's rural townships. Median household income of $62,878 is solidly mid-state.
The notable data point is unemployment at 7.4% — among Indiana's highest, with LFPR also low. Despite a positive headline (slack +$9K, hardship near state average), the labor-market structure shows the kind of soft persistent unemployment that signals underlying structural weakness. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by about 3 percentage points.
Fulton is a relatively unremarkable mid-Indiana county — modest manufacturing, modest tourism, modest agriculture — that nonetheless illustrates how the "no obvious major problem, no obvious major asset" middle of Indiana looks. The lake recreation provides some property-value support; the manufacturing base provides some payroll; neither is large enough to transform the county trajectory.
Sources: Wikipedia: Fulton County; Data USA — Fulton County; Indiana Connection — Fulton County Profile; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Marshall sits at the southern edge of Indiana's RV manufacturing corridor (Elkhart-LaGrange-Noble to the north) and combines several distinct industrial mechanisms. Plymouth (the county seat) is the largest town and the principal industrial center. Bremen is known for Bremen Castings (precision metal castings) and a meaningful Amish-aligned manufacturing base — many Bremen-area workers are part of the broader Elkhart-LaGrange Amish settlement. Culver is home to the prestigious Culver Academies (an elite boarding school with international reputation), on the shore of Lake Maxinkuckee.
In 2017, Pretzels Inc. (the Bluffton-headquartered family pretzel manufacturer) invested approximately $15 million to acquire and equip a 45,000-sq-ft facility in Plymouth — the first new manufacturer to move into Plymouth in nine years. The Plymouth plant produces peanut butter and bulk pretzel products. It's a small example of the kind of mid-sized investment that has incrementally reinforced Marshall's manufacturing base over the past decade.
The data show solid mid-state outcomes. Median household income $68,041 (slightly above state average), slack of +$12K, hardship around 36% (below state average). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. Marshall's RV-corridor exposure is real — when Elkhart's RV industry suffered in 2023, Marshall felt some of it — but the diversification across multiple medium-sized employers (Bremen Castings, Pretzels Inc., others) plus the Culver Academies and lake-area service economy has cushioned the blow.
Marshall is what a well-diversified rural-feeling Indiana county looks like — solidly above state average without any single dominant employer, with enough industries (manufacturing, education, recreation, agriculture) to absorb sector-specific downturns.
Sources: Pretzels Inc.; SBER Partnership — Pretzels Inc. Plymouth Grand Opening; Business Facilities — Snack Maker $15M Indiana Facility; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Steuben sits in Indiana's northeast corner and has more natural lakes than any other Indiana county — over 100, formed by glaciers that melted 10,000–15,000 years ago. The largest is Lake James, on whose shore sits Pokagon State Park — a 1,260-acre park with hiking, beaches, an interpretive nature center, cross-country skiing, boat rentals, and a refrigerated toboggan run. Pokagon receives nearly 640,000 visitors annually, making it one of Indiana's most-visited state parks.
The other major institutional anchor is Trine University in Angola — founded in 1884 (originally as Tri-State College), now offering degrees in engineering, business, education, and arts and sciences, with about 4,500 students. The combination of college-town employment, recreation-economy tourism, lake-area second-home property values, and proximity to both Fort Wayne (45 minutes south) and Detroit (2 hours east) gives Steuben unusual diversification for a small NE-Indiana county.
The data show a county doing reasonably well. Median household income around $62K, slack of +$7K, hardship at 35.8% (below state average). Steuben has been listed as one of the nation's top "micropolitan" areas by Site Selection Magazine — recognition of a small-but-growing economic base. Downtown Angola has seen meaningful reinvestment in recent years including the Brokaw Movie House restoration and an Angola/Fremont team being named a top-15 finalist in America's Best Communities Award.
The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by about 9 percentage points, however — among the bottom-decile trajectories in Indiana. That's a surprising data point given the apparent health of Trine, Pokagon tourism, and lake-property economics. The explanation likely involves rapid housing-cost appreciation around the lakes (driving up the ALICE threshold faster than wages grew) and a population mix that increasingly includes retirees with limited working-age incomes. Steuben is a place to watch — strong assets, real growth, but household economics under pressure beneath the headline.
Sources: Wikipedia: Pokagon State Park; NEI — Steuben County profile; Visit Steuben County — Pokagon State Park; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Grant County, like its neighbor Madison County (Anderson), is a post-industrial collapse story. Marion (the county seat) once had a substantial industrial base — RCA color-TV plants, Foster Forbes (glass containers), General Motors / Delco Remy operations among others — through the 1960s and 1970s. The next four decades saw the same hollowing-out that played out across central-Indiana auto-and-electronics manufacturing: imports, automation, headquarters relocations, and outright closures.
The cultural residual is unusually strong. James Dean, the 1950s film star, was born in Marion on February 8, 1931 and grew up in Fairmount, nine miles south. He remains an active cultural-tourism asset 70 years after his death — Fairmount hosts an annual James Dean Festival each September drawing fans from around the world, the James Dean Gallery, and the Fairmount Historical Museum. Taylor University in Upland (an evangelical Christian liberal arts college, founded 1846, ~1,800 students) is the other distinctive institutional anchor.
The data show a county in extended struggle. Median household income $54,007 barely clears the ALICE threshold (slack +$2,699 is thin). Hardship at 46.4% is the second-highest in Indiana (behind only Vigo). Unemployment at 6.7% is high. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by about 5 percentage points. Marion the city has lost population every decade since 1960 — from roughly 38,000 to 28,000 today. Indiana Wesleyan University (the largest Christian university in the Midwest) maintains its physical campus in Marion, contributing meaningful institutional employment, but doesn't generate the kind of professional-class economy that's revitalized other former industrial cities.
Grant is the cleanest illustration alongside Madison of "what happens to a mid-sized Indiana industrial county when the anchors leave and nothing equivalent arrives" — supplemented by a few specific cultural and educational institutions that hold ground but don't transform the trajectory.
Sources: Grant County Visitors Bureau — James Dean; Wikipedia: Marion, Indiana; Indianapolis Monthly — Fairmount, James Dean; ALICE Indiana 2025.
For nearly 60 years, Henry County's economic identity was the Chrysler transmission plant in New Castle, opened by Walter P. Chrysler's company and later operated by various successors including Getrag. At peak the plant employed thousands. New Castle High School was even renamed Walter P. Chrysler Memorial High School in 1959 — the corporate name didn't get removed until 2011, restored to "New Castle" by a 3-2 school-board vote in 2007 effective with the graduation of that year's freshman class. The transmission plant closed years before, taking the city's largest payroll with it.
The cultural residual is the New Castle Fieldhouse — "World's Largest and Finest High School Fieldhouse", with 8,424 permanent seats after a 2020 renovation, the largest permanent seating capacity of any high school gymnasium in the United States. Hoosiers (the 1986 movie loosely modeled on Milan High School's 1954 state championship) was partly filmed nearby — Knightstown's Hoosier Gym is one of the most-visited high school gymnasiums in the country. Basketball-tourism is a small but real economic asset for the county.
The data show post-industrial struggle. Median household income clears ALICE by only ~$6K. Hardship at 44.1% is well above state average. LFPR at 54.8% is among Indiana's lowest — a substantial share of working-age adults out of the labor force entirely, similar to Starke and Pulaski's profiles. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened about 5 percentage points. Henry's recovery has been incremental — smaller-scale advanced manufacturing, logistics/distribution, healthcare (Henry County Hospital), retail, and agriculture — none individually replacing the Chrysler-plant payroll.
Sources: Wikipedia: New Castle High School (Indiana); New Castle Fieldhouse; Wikipedia: Largest US HS Gyms; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Randolph is east-central Indiana's border-with-Ohio county. Winchester (the county seat, ~4,800 residents) emerged in the late 19th century as a glass-manufacturing hub leveraging the same Indiana natural-gas boom that built up Blackford and Jay. Union City is unusual — it sits literally on the Indiana-Ohio state line, with the Indiana portion (~3,400 residents) and the Ohio portion functioning as a single binational community. Industries on the Indiana side historically focused on automotive parts manufacturing using cross-border rail and trade.
The current economy is heavily agricultural — 750+ farms producing corn, soybeans, and substantial hog operations. The manufacturing base has thinned dramatically since the early 20th century. Some specific economic-cluster strengths remain: online technology, agri-business, plus emerging wind, solar, and alternative-fuel vehicle businesses. Indiana Crossroads Wind Farm and other renewable-energy projects span Randolph alongside Newton.
The data are stressed. Median household income $61,121, slack +$7K, hardship at 42.7% (above state average). SNAP receipt at 15.3% is the second-highest in Indiana (behind Blackford) — a clear signal of working-poor distress despite the positive nominal slack. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened about 4 percentage points. Randolph sits in the bottom quartile of Indiana counties on most household-economic measures, though without a single dramatic crisis — just the cumulative effect of agricultural consolidation, manufacturing decline, and limited replacement investment.
Sources: Wikipedia: Randolph County; Randolph County — History; USDA — Randolph County Ag Census 2022; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Jay County contains Indiana's natural-gas origin story. The state's first successful natural-gas well was drilled in Portland in 1887, igniting the Indiana Gas Boom that built up Blackford, Jay, Madison, Delaware, and adjacent counties. Glass factories multiplied across Jay, especially in Dunkirk — still known as "The Glass Capital of Indiana." Dunkirk's last remaining glass factory continues to produce over two million beer bottles daily — a remarkable industrial residual from the boom era.
The population trajectory tells the story bluntly. Jay had 26,818 residents in 1900; by 2020 the count was 20,478 — a 24% decline over 120 years, during a period when the United States grew 4×. The gas boom ended in the early 1900s; many factories closed or relocated; the late 1980s and 1990s brought another wave of deindustrialization as offshoring and restructuring hit east-central Indiana manufacturing. Today corn, soybeans, and hog production dominate the county's economic land use; 81% of Jay's 245,000 acres is in farms.
The data are striking. Median household income $54,114 clears the ALICE threshold by only $206 — essentially tied. Hardship at 46.4% is tied with Grant for second-worst in Indiana. The 13-year ALICE trajectory worsened by 13.4 percentage points — fourth-worst in the state behind Blackford (+15.0), Adams (+10.3), and Vigo (+9.5). Jay shows the cumulative damage of Indiana's east-central post-industrial belt — a century of stair-stepping decline that hasn't found its bottom yet.
The county is the case study for "the Indiana Gas Boom counties have never fully recovered" — Blackford, Jay, and parts of Madison, Delaware, and Grant all show variations of the same arc. Discovery of natural gas in the 1880s produced 20 years of explosive growth; the gas ran out; the replacement industries arrived smaller; the next century slowly bled population and prosperity.
Sources: Wikipedia: Jay County; Jay County Historical Society; Jay County Development Corp — Population Stats; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Rush County sits in the heart of east-central Indiana's corn-and-soybean belt — fertile farmland, USDA-typical row-crop yields well over 150 bushels per acre in good years for corn. Rushville (the county seat, ~7,700 residents) was historically established as a trading post and grew as an agricultural service center. The economy today has diversified modestly into manufacturing, healthcare, and retail, but agriculture still anchors most of the land use and a substantial share of the rural-township economy.
The data show a quietly decent outcome. Median household income $64,393 (slightly above state average), slack of +$10,822, hardship at 36.0% (below the 39% state average). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been stable. What's distinctive about Rush is its 86.5% Indiana-born share — the highest in the state, narrowly ahead of Martin (86.3%). Rush is the most-rooted county in Indiana: people stay, generations live across the same townships, and the in-migration that drives the wealthy ring counties around Indianapolis doesn't reach here.
The interesting trade-off Rush illustrates: "most rooted" produces stable, modest outcomes — neither the explosive growth of transplant-magnet Hamilton (only 57.8% IN-born) nor the post-industrial collapse of single-employer-dependent counties. The lack of in-migration limits upside but also limits the housing-cost inflation, the cultural fragmentation, and the dependency on outside economic forces that more transient counties experience. Rush is small but durable — Indiana's "long-tenured family farms produce modest sustained prosperity" case study.
Sources: Wikipedia: Rush County; Purdue Extension — Rush County; USDA — Rush County Ag Census; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Decatur County had two distinct economic identities — one rural and one industrial — separated by 2008. For most of its history Decatur was an agricultural county at the intersection of I-74 and SR-3 in southeastern Indiana. Greensburg, the county seat, is best known for one of the strangest natural phenomena in the United States: mulberry trees have been growing from the spire of the Decatur County Courthouse since the 1870s. Purdue University foresters have documented the trees for over a century; no one knows definitively how the seeds reached the tower top.
In 2008, Honda Manufacturing of Indiana opened a major Civic-assembly plant in Greensburg. The plant employs approximately 2,500 workers and produces Honda Civics for the North American market. Around it, a supplier ecosystem developed — Delta Faucet, Valeo Engine Cooling, and others fill the rest of the formal employment base. Honda's arrival fundamentally shifted Decatur from an agricultural-only economy to an advanced-manufacturing one in less than a decade.
The data show what happens when a major auto plant lands in a small rural county. Median household income $74,228 is well above state average. Slack of +$19K is solidly positive. Hardship at 34.7% is below state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable with modest improvement. Decatur sits in the same broader Columbus, Indiana region (Bartholomew is the next county over) that's been called "#1 for manufacturing" — a southeast-IN cluster of Cummins suppliers, Honda's Civic plant, Toyota Material Handling, and various Tier-1 automotive suppliers that has consistently outperformed broader Indiana economic metrics. Decatur is one of the cleaner success stories in Indiana of a deliberate state-and-county economic-development effort landing a major manufacturer.
Sources: Wikipedia: Greensburg, Indiana; Business View Magazine — Decatur County; The Greensburg Courthouse Tree; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Ripley County has one of Indiana's most distinctive industrial-cluster heritages. Batesville — the county's largest town (~6,600 residents), straddling the line between Ripley and Franklin counties — has been built for over a century around two businesses that started as part of the same family-held corporation: Hill-Rom (hospital beds) and Batesville Casket Company (burial caskets). The two operated as sister companies within Hillenbrand Industries for decades, went public together in 1971, and split into two publicly-traded companies in 2008. Hill-Rom relocated its HQ to Chicago in 2015 (citing difficulty recruiting top management talent to a small Indiana town), but kept manufacturing operations in Batesville.
Today Hill-Rom employs approximately 1,743 workers in Batesville, manufacturing hospital beds, room furniture, and prefabricated head-wall units. Batesville Casket employs approximately 1,200 workers producing caskets and urns. Together the two firms anchor a substantial industrial payroll in a small southeast-Indiana town. The Batesville-Versailles area also benefits from proximity to I-74 (35 miles to Cincinnati) and from Margaret Mary Health (a community hospital).
The data show one of Indiana's better small-county outcomes. Median household income around $66K, slack +$10K, hardship at 31.5% — the third-lowest in Indiana (behind only Hamilton and Hendricks). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been stable. The mechanism is the same as Kosciusko's orthopedics cluster, scaled down: a tight industrial concentration in a specialty medical-and-funeral-equipment niche, structurally tied to underlying demand drivers (aging population), held in place by talent and supplier network effects.
Sources: Ripley County EDC — Industries; WCPO — Batesville hospital beds; Batesville, Indiana overview; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Franklin County is southeast Indiana's commuter-and-recreation hybrid. It sits 40 minutes from downtown Cincinnati and 90 minutes from Indianapolis, making it part of the Cincinnati MSA in the same way Dearborn and Ohio counties are. About 67% of working-age Franklin County residents commute out of the county for work daily — Batesville (15% of commuters), then Cincinnati and Indianapolis as the next-most-common destinations. The local economy is essentially residential-with-tourism rather than employment-anchored.
The tourism anchor is Brookville Lake — a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoir built in the 1970s for flood control and water-supply purposes. It now draws somewhere around two million visitors annually, ranking either 2nd or 3rd among Indiana state parks/recreation areas by visitor count. Franklin's resident population of ~22,000 swells substantially on summer weekends with lake-area visitors. The county's resort-and-second-home market layered on top adds property-value appreciation.
The data show one of Indiana's better small-county outcomes. Median household income around $76K (well above state average), slack +$22K (top quartile), hardship at 34% (below state average). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has improved by about 5.7 percentage points — among Indiana's better trajectories. The mechanism is the same as Brown County's (tourism-and-Indy-spillover) but with Cincinnati as the dominant metro neighbor instead of Indianapolis. Franklin's challenge, as the local economic-development office acknowledges, is "maintaining roads, courts, and services for a stable rural population without the revenue growth that comes from subdivision development."
Sources: Franklin County — Economic Development; Franklin County Welcome Center; I-74 Business Corridor — Franklin County; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Madison, the Jefferson County seat, was one of Indiana's most important early-19th-century cities. Founded in 1809, platted in 1810, Madison was a major Ohio River steamboat port through the first half of the 19th century, shipping tobacco, grain, pork, whiskey, lumber, and manufactured goods downriver to New Orleans and upriver to Pittsburgh. The Ohio-River boom collapsed when railroads displaced steamboats; Madison's commercial significance shrank in the second half of the 1800s and the city has been declining or stable population ever since.
What survived is extraordinary. Madison's historic downtown is the largest contiguous National Historic Landmark in the United States — 133 blocks of preserved 19th-century architecture, including Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate buildings that other steamboat-era cities tore down for parking lots. The level of preservation is unusual; the small economy meant Madison couldn't afford to demolish its old buildings the way larger cities did.
Hanover College, founded 1827 on a 650-acre Ohio-River-overlooking campus, is Indiana's oldest private institution of higher education. With approximately 1,000 students, it's small but distinctive. In 2024, the Lilly Endowment awarded Hanover a $30 million grant through its "College and Community Collaboration" initiative to support "Jefferson Together" — a holistic community-development strategy addressing economic, social, cultural, and connectivity needs across Jefferson County. The grant is one of the largest ever directed at a small Indiana county.
The current data are stressed. Median household income ~$57K, slack +$3K (thin), hardship at 43.8% (above state average). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has improved modestly. Jefferson is the case where extraordinary cultural assets (Madison's historic district, Hanover College, the Ohio River) don't translate directly into household-economic strength — preservation tourism and a small college can't replace what a thriving 19th-century industrial port economy was. The Lilly $30M is the largest deliberate intervention to change that trajectory; whether it works is one of the open questions for southeast Indiana's next decade.
Sources: Hanover College — $30M Lilly Endowment Grant; Indiana Landmarks — Madison restoration; Madison Indiana — Tourism & Business; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Jennings is in the broader Columbus-Indiana manufacturing region, with North Vernon (the county seat, ~6,500 residents) hosting a meaningful manufacturing base that's tied to Cummins' Columbus operations and the broader Bartholomew County engineering cluster. Cummins itself is in adjacent Bartholomew County, but its supplier ecosystem extends into Jennings — North Vernon firms make components, perform Tier-2 contract manufacturing, and supply the broader auto-and-engine industry.
Specific recent investments include Novolex's $10 million expansion (2022) of mechanical recycling capacity at its North Vernon facility — enabling annual production of up to 28 million pounds of recycled polyethylene film — and GT Industries' $26 million expansion (2022) of its North Vernon metal-stamping and assembly plant for automotive suppliers. Additional sustained employers include American Axle, Allied Reliability, Chiyoda Montrow Die Manufacturing, Concept Tool & Engineering, Decatur Mold Tool & Engineering, Decatur Plastics, Biehle Electric, and Lowe's Distribution Center.
The data show solid mid-state outcomes. Median household income around $64K, slack of +$10K, hardship at 36.7% (below state average). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by about 6 percentage points. Jennings has the same structural exposure as DeKalb and Shelby — Tier-1 and Tier-2 auto suppliers, with vulnerability to the broader EV transition but enough employer diversification that no single contract loss collapses the local economy. The recent $36M+ in expansion investments shows continued confidence in the southeast-Indiana manufacturing cluster.
Sources: Jennings County EDC — Local Industry Map; Columbus IN — #1 for Manufacturing; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Union is one of Indiana's three smallest counties by population (just over 7,000 residents) and one of its quietest economic-outperformer stories. Liberty (the county seat, ~2,000 residents) is a regional commerce-and-government hub for surrounding farmland. Roughly 100% of the county lives in rural areas. The county sits on Indiana's eastern border with Ohio, similar to Randolph and Union City — but with very different economic outcomes.
The structure that produces Union's surprisingly strong economics: median household income of $79,500 in a county of 7,000 people — comparable to wealthy Indianapolis suburbs and far above neighboring east-central rural counties. The mechanism is the commuter geography. Union sits 25 minutes from Richmond (Wayne County), 35 minutes from Connersville (Fayette), and within reasonable commute of Cincinnati to the southeast and Dayton to the east. Workers in Union County have access to the broader Ohio-side metropolitan labor market while living on Indiana farmland. The 56.6% of residents born outside Indiana (only 43.4% IN-born — third-lowest in the state) reflects this in-migration pattern.
Slack of +$25,012 per typical household per year places Union in the state's top quartile. Hardship at 31.5% is fifth-lowest in Indiana. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has improved by 3.5 percentage points. Union demonstrates that "small rural Indiana county" doesn't have to mean economic struggle when geography (proximity to mid-sized metros across the state line) combines with low cost of living to produce a quietly strong outcome. Most Hoosiers wouldn't list Union among Indiana's wealthiest counties; the data say it should be.
Sources: Wikipedia: Union County; Data USA — Union County; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023 DP02.
Tipton County is the next ring out from Hamilton — sitting directly north of Indiana's wealthiest county, with the Hamilton-Tipton border running through what's effectively suburban-to-farmland transition. As Hamilton's housing prices have continued climbing through the 2010s and 2020s, Tipton has absorbed a meaningful share of commuters seeking lower-cost housing within reasonable drive distance of Carmel/Fishers/Westfield employment centers. The county's 260 square miles of farmland — described in state economic-development materials as "some of the state's richest" — remain largely agricultural, but the residential pattern has shifted toward bedroom-suburb of the broader Indianapolis metro.
The data show what Hamilton-adjacent commuter spillover produces. Median household income $78,309 is well above the state average. Slack of $24,895 is solidly in the top quartile. Hardship at 29.7% is the seventh-lowest in Indiana — better than most rural counties and approaching the wealthy ring-county set. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. The mechanism is the same as Whitley's (in the Fort Wayne MSA) but for Indianapolis-Hamilton: geographic proximity to a wealthy employment center, lower-cost housing, lower-density living, commuter-friendly road infrastructure. Tipton without Hamilton next door would look like Cass or Henry. Tipton with Hamilton next door looks like a quiet success.
There's also a meaningful Stellantis manufacturing dimension. The massive Stellantis Tipton manufacturing complex (announced operations and now being marketed for redevelopment per recent reporting) is in Tipton County, though its scale is smaller than Howard's Kokomo plants. Manufacturing has historically been Tipton's second economic pillar after agriculture.
Sources: Wikipedia: Tipton County; STATS Indiana — Tipton commuting patterns; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Clinton County has experienced one of Indiana's clearest demographic transitions over the past 30 years. Frito-Lay's major food-processing operation in Frankfort, plus a ConAgra Foods expansion in the mid-2010s, plus other agricultural-processing employers anchored what became a steady stream of Hispanic workers and immigrant families settling in the county. By the 2020 Census, Clinton County was 22% Hispanic or Latino countywide (about 9% foreign-born); within Frankfort city itself, that share rose to 31.5% Hispanic. This is one of the most dramatic ethnic-composition shifts in any Indiana mid-sized city outside of Lake County's industrial cities.
The economic structure tracks similarly to Cass County's Logansport-Tyson model — large food-processing employers providing stable but modest-wage employment, an immigrant-heavy workforce keeping population stable while household economics struggle relative to local cost-of-living, and a mid-sized town that's both economically and culturally bilingual. Frito-Lay's Frankfort operation makes pretzels, chips, and snacks; ConAgra Foods' frozen-food expansion added capacity in the late 2010s.
The data show stress. Median household income around $58K is below state average. Slack is positive but thin (~+$4K). Hardship is above 42% — substantially above the state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by about 5 percentage points. Clinton County demonstrates that "stable major employer" doesn't automatically translate to "household economic strength" when the underlying wage structure of the dominant industry (food processing) and the cost-of-living conditions in the local area produce a tight household-economic margin.
Sources: Wikipedia: Clinton County; Frankfort, Indiana overview; ALICE Indiana 2025; Census ACS 2023 DP02.
Howard County's story is the road not taken by Madison and Grant. Kokomo was a major auto-electronics manufacturing center for most of the 20th century, anchored by Delco Electronics (the GM electronics division headquartered in Kokomo from the 1930s) and Chrysler transmission operations. In 1997 Delco was moved into Delphi Automotive Systems; in 1999 GM spun off Delphi entirely; in 2005 Delphi declared bankruptcy and Kokomo became, briefly, the nation's emblematic post-industrial-auto-crisis case. The 2009 auto-industry bailout intervened in time to prevent the Chrysler Kokomo operations from following Delphi into oblivion.
Today Stellantis (the post-merger Chrysler successor) operates three transmission plants in Kokomo — Kokomo Transmission (3.1 million sq ft, opened 1956), Kokomo Casting, and Indiana Transmission (opened 1998, expanded 2003). Recent capital announcements include a $230M investment to upgrade Kokomo Transmission to produce 4th-generation 8-speed transmissions (retaining 660+ jobs) and a major new EV battery plant announced 2023 — a second Stellantis battery facility added to the existing one. Haynes International (founded in Kokomo by Elwood Haynes in 1912), a global producer of corrosion-resistant high-temperature alloys, has its corporate HQ and main manufacturing in Kokomo and is investing $173M in expansion.
The data show meaningful recovery from the Delphi-era trough. Median household income $62,496, slack +$8K, hardship at 42.1% (above state average but down 4.5 percentage points over 13 years). The 13-year trajectory is one of the better improvements in the state for a county that was deeply stressed in the 2005-2009 period. Howard is the case where federal intervention (auto bailout) plus continued corporate reinvestment (Stellantis, Haynes) prevented the slow Madison-style collapse — though full prosperity hasn't returned to the same level Kokomo enjoyed in the 1960s Delco peak.
Sources: Wikipedia: Kokomo Transmission; WTHR — Auto bailout pulled Kokomo back from brink; Kokomo Lantern — Haynes $173M investment; WFYI — Stellantis 2nd Kokomo battery plant; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Putnam sits exactly halfway between Indianapolis and Terre Haute on I-70, with Greencastle (the county seat) at the interstate exit. The county has a hybrid economic structure: DePauw University (founded 1837, ~1,700 students, several hundred faculty and staff — Putnam's largest single employer) anchors a small-college-town economy in Greencastle, while logistics and light manufacturing tenants along I-70 fill out the broader employment base. Major employers include Wal-Mart Distribution Center, Heartland Automotive, POET Biorefining, Crown Equipment Corporation, Chiyoda USA Corporation, F.B. Distro Distribution Center, and Buzzi Unicem USA (cement).
The Putnam County Hospital is the second-largest employer. The structure is similar to many small-college-Indiana counties (Hanover/Jefferson, Taylor/Grant, Wabash/Wabash) but with a stronger logistics overlay because of the I-70 location. Putnam is technically part of the Indianapolis MSA, though it's at the far west edge — too far west to absorb the wealthy-suburb dynamics that benefit Hamilton, Hendricks, Boone, and Johnson.
The data show modest outcomes. Median household income around $60K is at state average. Slack is positive but thin (~$2K) because the ALICE threshold of $58,342 is meaningfully above state average — DePauw's housing pressure plus the I-70 corridor's cost structure push it up. Hardship at 35.8% is below state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. Putnam is what the small Indiana college town plus interstate-logistics combination looks like at modest scale — neither the prosperity of the Indianapolis ring counties nor the distress of the east-central post-industrial belt.
Sources: Accelerate West Central Indiana — Putnam County; Putnam County EDC; Wikipedia: Greencastle; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Vermillion is a small rural county on Indiana's western border, sandwiched between the Wabash River and the Illinois state line. Its single defining economic anchor is the Cayuga Generating Station — a Duke Energy coal-fired power plant whose two units came online in 1970 and 1972, with combined nameplate capacity of 1,062 MW. The plant has been one of Indiana's larger coal-fired generators for half a century.
The county is in the middle of a major energy-transition pivot similar to Sullivan and Pike. Duke Energy ceremonially broke ground in 2024 on the Cayuga Energy Complex project — building two highly-efficient combined-cycle natural-gas turbines that will add 470 MW of capacity, bringing the total to 1,476 MW. The expansion is part of Duke's broader $3.3B coal-to-gas conversion plan across Indiana (which got Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission approval in late 2025). Duke estimates the project will support over 3,700 total jobs through construction, suppliers, and adjacent industries, with long-term tax-revenue benefits for Vermillion schools and government.
The data show a stressed but stable county. Median household income around $56K, slack of only +$3K, hardship around 42%. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened modestly. Like Sullivan and Pike, Vermillion's coal-era economic structure is in transition; the gas-and-future-storage replacement is real but the timing of household-level benefits is uncertain. Newport and Clinton (the larger towns) have small populations and limited additional employment beyond the plant and farm-economy basics.
Sources: Wikipedia: Cayuga Generating Station; Duke Energy — Cayuga Energy Complex groundbreaking; Indiana Capital Chronicle — Duke $3.3B coal-to-gas approved; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Parke County is the rare small-rural Indiana county whose dominant economic engine is its 19th-century architectural heritage. The county brands itself the "Covered Bridge Capital of the World", and the claim is reasonable: 31 historic covered bridges remain standing across the county's rolling hills, with the first built in 1856 and as many as 53 at the late-19th-century peak. The bridges are clustered densely enough that one can drive a circuit visiting most of them in a long day.
The Parke County Covered Bridge Festival, founded in 1957, is a 10-day event held annually starting the second Friday in October. The festival, the state parks (Turkey Run is partly in Parke), and access to the Wabash River draw about 2 million visitors annually — extraordinary scale for a county of just 17,000 residents. Tourism is, per local economic-development sources, "not a secondary benefit; it is its major industry."
The data show what a tourism-anchored small-rural economy produces. Median household income $66,776 is above state average. Slack of +$13K is solidly positive. Hardship at 43.8% sits above state average — tourism employment tends to be lower-wage, and the high-wage spillover from visitors goes mainly to local merchants and lodging owners. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. Parke is one of the more interesting "alternative-economy" rural counties in Indiana — it doesn't have manufacturing, doesn't have a college, doesn't have a casino, doesn't have a big employer, but it has 31 covered bridges and 2 million visitors a year, and that turns out to be enough to produce modest sustained outcomes.
Sources: Parke County Covered Bridge Festival; Musings of My — Parke County Covered Bridge Capital; Accelerate West Central Indiana — Parke County; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Fountain is one of Indiana's smaller west-central rural counties — sitting on the east side of the Wabash River across from Illinois. Covington is the county seat; Attica anchors the western edge along the riverfront. Both towns have historic architecture and railroad-era origins, and both have been generally stable in population for decades. Approximately 84% of the county's land is used for agriculture — the Wabash River Valley provides exceptionally fertile soil for corn and soybeans.
The economic structure is essentially commuter-and-agriculture. Workers commute roughly 30 miles to Lafayette (Tippecanoe County) for industrial jobs at Subaru and elsewhere, 40 miles north to Champaign-Urbana, and to smaller employers in Crawfordsville (Montgomery County) and surrounding areas. The local employment base is thin — small manufacturing, agriculture, retail and services in Covington and Attica.
The data show solid mid-state outcomes. Median household income $62,526, slack of +$9K, hardship around 41%. Poverty rate of 10.6% is at the lower end for non-metro Indiana counties. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. Fountain is what a quiet rural Wabash Valley county looks like when nothing dramatic happens — neither growth nor crisis, just continued agricultural production and modest commuter employment. The county illustrates that "stable agricultural Indiana" still exists as a category in 2025, even as most rural-county briefings highlight specific industries or anchors.
Sources: Wikipedia: Fountain County; Data USA — Fountain County; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Crawfordsville (Montgomery's county seat) is the home of Wabash College, one of only three remaining all-male liberal-arts colleges in the United States. Founded in 1832 as "The Wabash Teachers Seminary and Manual Labor College," Wabash today enrolls about 900 students and is academically among the more selective small colleges in the Midwest. It anchors a college-town economy with strong national alumni connections — a meaningful part of Crawfordsville's residential and cultural character.
The industrial anchors are equally distinctive. Nucor Steel built the world's first thin-slab-casting minimill in Crawfordsville in 1987 — a landmark technological innovation that revolutionized steel production by allowing scrap-steel recycling at scale via electric-arc furnace. The Crawfordsville Nucor operation has continued to grow; in 2023 Nucor announced an additional $115 million investment in a utility-structures manufacturing facility creating up to 200 new jobs. R.R. Donnelley, the historic large printing company, established its Crawfordsville plant in 1921; it now operates under the Lakeside Book Company name and remains a substantial employer.
Additional employers — Alcoa CSI, Raybestos Products Company, Pace Dairy Foods, and Random House — fill out a moderately diversified industrial base. The result on the data: median household income around $64K, slack of +$9K, hardship around 40%. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. Montgomery is what a diversified mid-Indiana college-town-plus-industrial-base looks like — solid but unspectacular, with multiple anchor employers preventing any single shock from being catastrophic.
Sources: Crawfordsville, Indiana overview; Inside INdiana Business — Nucor $115M Crawfordsville; IEDC — Nucor $115M utility structures; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Owen is the western half of the Bloomington MSA — most of the metro's economic gravity is in Monroe County (Bloomington itself, IU, the biotech cluster), but Owen's geographic position 14 miles northwest of Bloomington pulls commuter workers and Cook Medical / Boston Scientific manufacturing-and-supplier employment into the county. Spencer (the county seat) is a modest river town on the White River.
The cultural-tourism anchor is McCormick's Creek State Park — dedicated July 4, 1916 as Indiana's first state park. The 1,924-acre park receives approximately 640,000 visitors annually (about the same as Pokagon in Steuben). The park features falls, hiking trails, a 91-foot waterfall, and historic CCC-era infrastructure that's been continuously maintained. Cataract Falls (another Owen attraction) draws additional visitors.
The data show stress similar to Monroe's college-town pattern but without the offsetting wage strength. Median household income $59,586, slack of only +$5K, hardship at 44.2% is well above state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by about 6 percentage points. Owen has some of the same downside as Monroe (housing-cost pressure from the Bloomington metro pushing the ALICE threshold up) without all of the upside (no major IU faculty households, fewer of the bigger Cook/Catalent payrolls). The state park tourism and small Cook-supplier presence provide partial offsets but don't close the gap.
Owen is the case where being "next to" a growing metro (Bloomington) without being "in" it produces uneven results — some commuter spillover income, some housing-cost contagion, some tourism revenue, but the local economic structure remains tighter than the headline metro statistics suggest.
Sources: Wikipedia: McCormick's Creek State Park; Indiana Uplands — Owen County; Owen County overview; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Spencer County combines two distinctive features. The first is industrial: Cleveland-Cliffs Rockport Works (the former AK Steel facility, acquired by Cleveland-Cliffs in 2020 for $1.1B as part of the $1.1B integrated-steel acquisition) is the largest single employer. The Rockport mill produces specialty stainless and carbon steels — pure iron, aluminum-coated carbon and stainless steels for automotive exhaust systems, chromium-alloyed steels, and electrical steels for transformers. The Rockport facility holds the unusual distinction of being the world's only cold mill designed to tandem-roll both austenitic and ferritic grades of stainless steel, along with carbon steel — a specialized capability that's been a meaningful competitive advantage.
The second feature is historical. Lincoln City, Indiana — about 20 miles northeast of Rockport — is where Abraham Lincoln lived from 1816 (age 7) to 1830 (age 21). The Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial preserves the site of the Lincoln family cabin, the grave of Lincoln's mother Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and exhibits about the Lincolns' Indiana years. The memorial draws moderate tourist traffic. Spencer is also home to Santa Claus, Indiana — the only town in the world with that name, hosting Holiday World theme park, which adds substantial recreation-tourism employment seasonally.
The data show solid mid-state outcomes. Median household income around $67K, slack of +$11K, hardship around 36% (below state average). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. Spencer is what a small rural Indiana county looks like when it has one major industrial anchor (Cleveland-Cliffs), one unique tourism asset (Lincoln Boyhood + Holiday World), and meaningful adjacency to a growing manufacturing corridor (Toyota Princeton in Gibson County to the north, Alcoa in Posey to the west).
Sources: Cleveland-Cliffs — Rockport Works; Wikipedia: AK Steel; Dubois County Herald — Cleveland-Cliffs acquires AK Steel; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Perry County is one of Indiana's most culturally distinctive small counties. Tell City, the county seat (~7,000 residents), was founded in 1858 by the Swiss Colonization Society — a group of Swiss-German immigrants who organized in Cincinnati in November 1856, purchased Ohio-riverfront land with healthful climate, fertile soil, water, timber, and proximity to a river and railroad, and named their new town after the Swiss folk hero William Tell. The Swiss heritage is preserved through the annual Schweizer Fest in August (braugarten, marketplace, food vendors) and the New Year's "Apple Drop at Silvesternacht." Tell City Chair Company anchored a distinctive furniture-manufacturing economy through much of the 20th century.
Cannelton — Perry's older town, founded 1837 and named after the "cannel coal" mined locally — is the site of a remarkable industrial-architectural landmark. The Cannelton Cotton Mill, opened in 1851, was a five-story structure with twin 100-foot towers — the largest industrial building west of the Allegheny Mountains in its era. The mill was part of an ambitious textile-industry plan that never fully materialized; the rest of the planned development around it stayed on paper. The mill itself operated continuously until 1954, when it finally closed. The building still stands.
The data show real struggle in current Perry. Median household income $61,099 clears the ALICE threshold by only $1,682 — slack so thin it's essentially zero. Labor-force participation at 56.0% is among Indiana's lowest. Hardship at 36% is below state average, but the underlying picture is one of a small Ohio-riverfront county whose 19th-century industrial-and-cultural assets haven't translated into corresponding 21st-century economic strength. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been worsening. Perry sits between the Hoosier National Forest (north) and the Ohio River (south), in a corner of Indiana whose tourism economy is real but small.
Sources: Wikipedia: Tell City; Discover Southern Indiana — 5 Fun Facts About Perry County; Pick Perry — Towns; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Crawford has the lowest cost of living in Indiana and one of the most subsistence-level economies in the state. The ALICE threshold of $46,531 is the lowest of any Indiana county — substantially below Hamilton's $64,437 — reflecting genuinely low housing costs, low-density rural living, and household budget patterns calibrated to modest expectations. English (the county seat) was originally founded as Hartford in 1839 and renamed in 1884 after politician William Hayden English; today it remains a small village serving as a government and commerce hub for the surrounding farmland.
The tourism anchors are notable. Marengo Cave — a privately operated commercial show cave discovered September 6, 1883 by 11-year-old Blanche Hiestand and her younger brother Orris — offers two walking tours, gemstone mining, a gift shop, walking trails, and "The Crawl" (a cave simulator imported from Belgium). Wyandotte Cave, owned by the Indiana DNR as part of O'Bannon Woods State Park, is another major attraction. The cave-and-river tourism combination produces modest visitor traffic but doesn't approach Parke's covered-bridge or Brown's art-colony scale.
The data show all the structural challenges. Median household income $48,993 is among Indiana's lowest. Slack of only $2,462 is the second-thinnest positive margin in the state. Hardship at 48.1% is among the worst in Indiana. Bachelor's-degree rate at 11.1% is third-lowest in the state. Broadband adoption at 69.7% is the second-lowest (only LaGrange is lower, for the very different Amish-population reason). Mean commute time of 37.2 minutes is the longest in Indiana — most working-age Crawford residents commute out for employment. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened. Crawford is the case where "cheap to live" doesn't translate to "easy to live" when wage opportunities are limited and the local economy is genuinely subsistence-level.
Sources: Indiana Uplands — Crawford County; Crawford County overview; Crawford County EDC; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Washington County is a modest-sized southern-Indiana rural county whose economy is built on a hybrid of agriculture, modest manufacturing, healthcare, and retail. Salem (the county seat, ~6,500 residents) hosts the county's two largest manufacturers: Peerless Gear (industrial gearing) and Kimball Office Casegoods (a unit of Jasper-based Kimball International — extending the Dubois County German-Catholic furniture cluster into Washington County). Both employers anchor a small but consistent industrial payroll.
The cultural-historical asset is the John Hay Center in Salem. John Milton Hay (1838–1905), born in Salem, served as a private secretary to Abraham Lincoln during his presidency and later as U.S. Secretary of State under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt — one of the more consequential American diplomats of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Hay Center preserves his birthplace and serves as a small historical museum. Other modest attractions include Beck's Mill, Delaney Park, the Knobstone Trail, the Depot Railroad Museum, and Salem Speedway.
The data show solid-mid-state outcomes with worsening trajectory. Median household income $61,358 is at state average. Slack of +$7K is positive. Hardship at 42.7% is above the state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by 5+ percentage points. Washington is a representative small-southern-Indiana county — neither a tourism economy like Brown, nor a single-anchor manufacturing economy like Decatur or Pulaski, nor a college town. The county illustrates the pattern of slowly worsening economics that affects much of non-metro southern Indiana.
Sources: Wikipedia: Washington County; Washington County EDC — Community Profile; IU Center for Rural Engagement — Washington County; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Lawrence County is the home of the Indiana limestone industry, which has shaped American architecture in ways most Americans don't realize. Indiana oolitic limestone — quarried almost entirely in Lawrence County and adjacent areas — has been used in an estimated 60 to 80% of all significant stone buildings in the United States. The list of buildings constructed primarily of Indiana limestone is staggering: the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Terminal in New York City, the Pentagon, the National Archives, the Washington National Cathedral, the United States Senate office buildings, the Lincoln Memorial, and dozens of state capitols.
The industry started in 1852 with John Glover's first quarry near Bedford. Quarrying expanded dramatically through the late 1800s as railroads made long-distance transport economical. A century ago, 24 separate local companies consolidated to streamline production and propel Indiana Limestone onto the world stage. The Indiana Limestone Company in Oolitic (a small town named for the stone) remains the dominant operator. Beyond quarrying and architectural-stone processing, the modern Lawrence County economy includes GM Powertrain as a major manufacturer plus emerging defense R&D and automotive manufacturing. Spring Mill State Park (a pioneer-village preservation site) and Hoosier National Forest add tourism.
The data show modest outcomes for a county whose industry built so many of America's most famous buildings. Median household income around $60K, slack of +$5K, hardship around 41%. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. Lawrence is the case where extraordinary industrial-heritage importance hasn't fully translated to household-economic strength — a few hundred quarry-and-processing jobs anchored by Indiana Limestone Company plus GM Powertrain's mid-sized payroll plus the hospital plus tourism. Limestone is heavy, durable, and slow-cycle; the demand for new monumental stone construction has declined over the past 50 years as architecture shifted to steel, glass, and concrete. The industry continues but at a much smaller scale than its 1920s-1940s peak.
Sources: WBIW — Bedford, "Limestone Capital of the World"; Lawrence County EDC; WBIW — Indiana Limestone Company century; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Bartholomew County is anchored by Columbus — a city of 48,000 with disproportionate cultural and economic significance. Cummins Inc. (the Fortune 200 global diesel-engine manufacturer) was founded in Columbus in 1919 and has been headquartered there ever since. The company employs approximately 8,000 people in the broader region; the engineering-and-research talent concentration ranks Columbus in the top 2% of US cities for manufacturing employment. Cummins suppliers and adjacent operations — Toyota Material Handling, NTN Driveshafts, Forvia/Faurecia, Aisin USA, Valeo, Gecom — fill out the broader cluster, which extends into adjacent counties (Decatur's Honda plant, Jennings's North Vernon supplier base).
Columbus's other claim to fame is unusual for a small Indiana city. J. Irwin Miller, Cummins's longtime chairman, used the Cummins Foundation in the 1940s-1980s to pay architectural-design fees (totaling nearly $25 million across decades) for public buildings, schools, churches, and residences. The result is an extraordinary concentration of modernist architecture by Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Eliel Saarinen, Robert Venturi, Kevin Roche, and others. Saarinen's North Christian Church (1963, hyperbolic paraboloid), Irwin Union Bank (1954, glass-and-steel pavilion), and the Miller House (1953, residential masterpiece) — plus dozens of other public buildings designed by major American architects — earned Columbus the nickname "Athens of the Prairie." The American Institute of Architects ranks Columbus 6th in the US for architectural innovation and design.
The data show one of Indiana's stronger small-metro economies. Median household income $80,365 (top 10 in IN), slack +$24,980 (top quartile), hardship 34.1% (below state average). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. The Cummins HQ + cluster + Miller-architecture legacy makes Bartholomew unusually distinctive among non-Indianapolis-MSA Indiana counties. The vulnerability is the same as DeKalb's: heavy auto-and-diesel-engine exposure during the EV transition. Cummins is investing heavily in hydrogen and battery-electric powertrains, but the next decade will test whether the Columbus engineering cluster transitions or contracts.
Sources: Wikipedia: Columbus, Indiana; Wikipedia: Irwin Conference Center; Britannica — Columbus, Indiana; Visit Columbus Indiana; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Connersville was once one of the most important automobile-manufacturing cities in America. Starting in 1909 with the McFarlan (which became known as "the American Rolls Royce" through its enormous luxury models of the 1920s before going bankrupt in 1928), Connersville hosted automobile production by McFarlan, Lexington, Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg, Ansted, and Empire. The McFarlan Industrial Park, established 1886 — when McFarlan converted 100 acres specifically to house automotive suppliers near his main plant — was the first industrial park of its kind in the nation, predating the more famous Detroit-area auto-supplier clusters by decades.
The decline was as dramatic as the rise. The 1980s brought the beginning of the end — high local-union labor costs vs. economies of scale elsewhere, and Connersville's geographic disadvantage of not being directly along the interstate-highway routes that the 1950s-1960s federal highway construction prioritized. Most major auto-manufacturing departed in the 1980s and 1990s. Connersville union-labor employment fell from a peak of roughly 10,000 to about 600 workers by 2012. The final automobile-manufacturing operation ended in 2007 when the Visteon factory (an auto-supplier successor) shut down.
The current data show one of Indiana's more stressed counties. Median household income $56,659 clears the ALICE threshold by only $2,708. Hardship at 44.9% is well above state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by 7.5 percentage points. Fayette is described in state-economic-development sources as "among the poorest counties in the state." Connersville the city has lost population every decade since 1970. Fayette is the cautionary case of a small specialty-industrial city that built its identity around one industry and never recovered when that industry left.
Sources: Wikipedia: Connersville, Indiana; Fayette IN Chamber — History of Connersville; Fayette County, Indiana overview; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Scott County is what happens when the opioid crisis meets a small rural Indiana county with limited public-health infrastructure. Between November 2014 and November 2015, Scott County diagnosed 181 new HIV cases (rising to 215 by 2016) — the largest HIV outbreak in any nonurban area of the United States among people who inject drugs in modern history. The outbreak was driven by syringe-sharing among people injecting oxymorphone (Opana ER), an extended-release opioid pain medication. Most cases were concentrated in the small town of Austin (population 4,200), where syringe-sharing networks had grown over years.
A Yale study in 2018 found that the outbreak could have been prevented if Indiana had permitted syringe-exchange programs earlier — local public-health leaders had recommended such programs years before, but state-level policy banned them. After the outbreak, Governor Pence (later VP) declared a public-health emergency on March 26, 2015 and signed legislation allowing local syringe-exchange programs by county-by-county authorization. The Scott County exchange opened and operated continuously; researchers have credited the exchange with playing a key role in containing the outbreak.
The county's broader economic data reflect the conditions that made the outbreak possible. Median household income essentially ties the ALICE threshold (slack +$147). Hardship at 46.8% is among the state's highest. Disability rate at 22.4% is the highest in Indiana — partly reflecting the opioid epidemic's effects on long-term workforce participation. Bachelor's-degree rate at 12.4% is among the lowest. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened. The Louisville-suburb half of Scott (the town of Charlestown, on the Ohio River with commuter access to Louisville) shows somewhat better outcomes than the rural-Austin half. Scott has used some of the national opioid-settlement funds to invest in addiction-treatment, mental-health, and economic-revitalization infrastructure — a slow rebuilding effort that's been underway for a decade.
Sources: CDC MMWR — HIV outbreak Scott County 2015; Yale News — HIV outbreak could have been prevented; WFYI — Ten years after Scott County's outbreak; WTHR — Scott County opioid-settlement funds; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Clay County's name is a direct reference to its 19th-century identity. The county had rich deposits of clay minerals — shale and fire clay formations particularly suitable for durable building materials — and from the 1880s through the early 1900s the area was known as the "Clay Center of the World." Brazil (the county seat) grew rapidly during this period; the county's brick, tile, and clay-pipe production fed national construction markets via rail connections. Coal mining was a parallel industry — Clay County was a substantial coal producer until mining declined mid-century.
The decline was structural and gradual. Starting in the 1920s and accelerating after World War II, concrete blocks, reinforced steel framing, and synthetic materials displaced traditional clay bricks, tiles, and pipes. Local factories consolidated or shuttered. By the 1940s, the broader shift to plastics had displaced many clay-based consumer goods. By mid-century the once-dominant industry was essentially obsolete. The kilns and factories that had operated in Brazil, Attica, Evansville, Fort Wayne, Terre Haute, and Veedersburg gradually closed.
Modern Clay County has been broadly stable. It's part of the Terre Haute MSA, so it shares some of Vigo's challenges (Indiana's worst county-level hardship rate is in Vigo). But Clay's headline numbers are better than Vigo's — median household income around $60K, slack of +$6K, hardship around 41% (right around state average). The mechanism is similar to Fountain County's quiet stability: modest agriculture, modest commuter employment to Terre Haute, modest small-manufacturing remnant, no single anchor employer, no single dramatic crisis. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. Clay is the case where a town named for its 19th-century industry has had to make peace with that industry being gone for nearly a century.
Sources: Wikipedia: Clay County; City of Brazil — Overview; Brazil, Indiana overview; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Martin County is, geographically, a very small Indiana county with a very large federal facility inside it. About one-third of Martin's total land area belongs to the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division — the same NSWC Crane that's been referenced as the economic anchor for Daviess (where many Crane workers live) and Greene (1,100+ Crane workers commuting out). Crane straddles Martin, Daviess, and Greene counties, with the main installation footprint primarily in Martin. The base is the world's third-largest naval installation by land area and specializes in electronic warfare, special missions, expeditionary warfare, and strategic missions.
Manufacturing employs over 900 Martin County workers — almost all tied directly to NSWC Crane or to defense contractors at the adjacent WestGate@Crane Technology Park. Martin County has the fourth-highest concentration of STEM-related jobs in the United States, a remarkable statistic for a rural Indiana county of fewer than 10,000 residents. The remaining quarter of the county is occupied by Hoosier National Forest, leaving relatively little land available for typical small-county agriculture or development.
The data show one of Indiana's quieter small-county success stories. Median household income around $65K is above state average. Slack of +$11K is solidly positive. Hardship at 39.8% is at state average. 86.3% Indiana-born — second-highest in the state, just behind Rush's 86.5%. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by about 8 percentage points (one of the worse trajectories in the state), but the headline economics remain healthier than most rural counties because of Crane's stable federal payroll. Martin is the case of a tiny rural county whose proximity to a federal-research-mission installation produces unusually high STEM employment and stable household economics.
Sources: Wikipedia: Martin County; NSA Crane Joint Land Use Study; Indiana Uplands — Martin County; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Vanderburgh contains Evansville, southwestern Indiana's regional metropolitan center and the third-largest city in the state (after Indianapolis and Fort Wayne). Evansville functions as the commercial, medical, cultural, and financial hub of a tri-state region (Indiana–Illinois–Kentucky) home to over 911,000 people. The city is unusually rich in headquartered companies for its size — four NYSE-listed corporations (Accuride, Berry Global, LEAF, Vectren), the global operations center for Mead Johnson Nutrition, and NASDAQ-listed Old National Bank, plus AT&T regional operations, Bristol-Myers Squibb, SRG Global, PGW Pittsburgh Glass, Industrial Contractors, and Peabody Energy.
The University of Evansville, University of Southern Indiana, Stone Family Center for Health Services (an IU Medical Center partnership), Oakland City University, Ivy Tech, and a Vincennes University satellite anchor a meaningful higher-education sector. Bally's Evansville (the casino, formerly Tropicana) is on the riverfront. Chemicals make up 64% of the Evansville metro's international exports, followed by transportation equipment (18%) and food manufacturing (5%) — reflecting the area's industrial diversification.
Despite the surface-level institutional density, the data show stress. Median household income around $54K is at or below state average. Slack is barely positive at ~$1K. Hardship at 46.3% is among Indiana's highest. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened modestly. The mechanism — similar to St. Joseph's South Bend or Vigo's Terre Haute — is that the institutional infrastructure (four NYSE companies, regional hospital systems, multiple universities) provides skilled employment for some Evansville residents while a much larger fraction of the population works in lower-wage service, retail, and manufacturing roles that don't keep pace with regional cost-of-living. The Evansville metro looks bigger and more diversified than its household-economic data suggest.
Sources: Wikipedia: Evansville, Indiana; Evansville Regional Economic Partnership — Top Employers; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Porter County is what Lake County's prosperous half looks like as its own county. Valparaiso (county seat, ~34,000 residents) is a Chicago-commuter town with Valparaiso University at its center. Portage (~38,000 residents) is the largest city in Porter County and the third-largest in NW Indiana. Chesterton (~14,000) is the Indiana Dunes-adjacent town. The combination of these three plus Burns Harbor and other smaller communities produces a county that combines steel manufacturing, lake-shore tourism, Chicago commuting, and suburban residential — a remarkable economic-portfolio diversity.
The major employers and assets are unusually significant. Cleveland-Cliffs Burns Harbor is one of the company's three integrated steel mills (along with Cleveland and Indiana Harbor in Lake County). The Port of Indiana-Burns Harbor is an international multi-modal port handling steel, agriculture, and manufacturing — with more than 500,000 trucks, 10,000 rail cars, 250 barges, and 100 ships moving through annually, and 30+ businesses (including three steel mills) onsite. Indiana Dunes National Park — elevated from National Lakeshore status to full National Park in 2019 — receives over 3 million visitors annually, making it Indiana's most-visited federal recreation site.
The Chicago commuter connection is structurally important. The South Shore Line — the last surviving interurban railroad in the United States — operates from northern Indiana into downtown Chicago and serves a meaningful share of Porter County workers. Porter is part of the Chicago MSA. The data show one of Indiana's stronger non-Indianapolis-MSA counties. Median household income $85,828, slack +$25,309 (top quartile), hardship 30.1% (well below state average). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. Porter is the case where multiple industries (steel, port logistics, lake tourism, Chicago commuter, suburban residential, Valparaiso University) layered together produce a diversified economy that outperforms Lake County's split urban-vs-suburban model.
Sources: Wikipedia: Portage, Indiana; Indiana Dunes — History; Portage EDC — Infrastructure; ALICE Indiana 2025.
LaPorte County is the western part of Indiana's Chicago commuter shed, with two distinct municipal centers: LaPorte (the county seat, ~22,000 residents) inland, and Michigan City (~32,000) on Lake Michigan. Michigan City has the more dynamic and tourism-anchored economy; LaPorte is more residential and small-town. The South Shore Line serves both, with daily commuter service into Chicago.
The casino anchor is Blue Chip Casino, Hotel & Spa in Michigan City — launched August 22, 1997 as a three-deck riverboat, now owned and operated by Boyd Gaming (which also operates Belterra in Switzerland County). The Blue Chip facility includes 65,000 sq ft of gaming, 22 table games, 1,900+ slot machines, and 486 hotel rooms; the building is the tallest in Michigan City, LaPorte County, and Northwest Indiana outside of South Bend. The casino has spent over $138 million locally in Northwest Indiana since opening — making it a meaningful employer and community-impact source for the region. The casino's primary marketing positions it as "Chicago's favorite getaway," reflecting the customer-base reality.
The data show solid mid-state outcomes. Median household income $70,452 (above state average), slack +$13K, hardship at 41.4% (slightly above state average). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. LaPorte's combination of Chicago-commuter residential income, Blue Chip's gaming-and-hospitality payroll, lake-area tourism, and modest manufacturing produces a diversified moderate-strength economy. The county is also the southern end of the Michigan-City-LaPorte BLS MSA — the only Indiana MSA designation that includes a single Indiana county.
Sources: Wikipedia: Blue Chip Casino; Blue Chip Casino — Boyd Gaming; Indiana Gaming Commission — Blue Chip Casino License Renewal; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Delaware County's story is one of the most fully-documented industrial-decline arcs in the United States. In 1888, five Ball Brothers moved from Buffalo, New York to Muncie after their original glass factory burned, attracted by Muncie's natural-gas-boom economics. The Ball Brothers built what became one of the largest glass-manufacturing operations in the country, leading the nation in fruit-jar production by 1900. The Ball Corporation transformed Muncie's economy, donated 70 acres in 1918 to start what became Ball State University, and made the city a textbook case study — Robert and Helen Lynd's classic 1929 sociological work Middletown was based on a study of Muncie.
The decline began in 1962 when Ball Corp announced it would close its local glass factory — beginning a 60-year industrial fade. Several waves of deindustrialization in the 1970s, 1990s, and 2000s pushed Muncie further out of its peak prosperity. The last glass-jar factory in Muncie didn't close until 2019 — a remarkably long survival, but eventually inevitable. PepsiCo closed its Muncie distribution center in 2023. Muncie's poverty rate today is approximately 32.2%; the city's median household income is roughly $31,000 (Delaware County's overall is $56,932, reflecting better outcomes in the surrounding county).
What replaced the industrial base is the "med-and-ed" model. Ball State University employs over 3,000 people and is the largest single employer in the county; IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital is the second-largest. The college-and-hospital combination produces a meaningful skilled-employment base, but it doesn't fully replace what Muncie's industrial economy was. The data show one of Indiana's most stressed counties: hardship at 48.2% (fourth-worst in IN), 13-year ALICE trajectory worsened by 2.0 pp — Delaware's 2010 baseline was already elevated, so the change is modest, but the level remains among the worst in Indiana. The headline numbers — Ball State, hospitals, the Lynd Middletown heritage — describe what's still there. The trajectory shows what's still being lost.
Sources: Wikipedia: Muncie, Indiana; Livability — Muncie heart of glass; HUD User — Ball State + Muncie residents address deindustrialization; CBER — Ball State economic impact; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Jackson County is one of Indiana's quieter growth stories. The county grew nearly 10% between 2010 and 2020 — ranking it seventh among Indiana counties for population growth — while Seymour (the county seat, ~21,000 residents) grew an astounding 23%. The average wage in the county has increased over 30% in 10 years. The mechanism is foreign-direct-investment manufacturing combined with the broader Columbus-Indiana engineering cluster.
Aisin USA Mfg. — the Japanese automotive-component manufacturer — has operated in Seymour since 1988. Aisin produces a diversified line of door frames, seat adjusters, body components, and other automotive parts. The company later expanded its footprint in Jackson County by opening Aisin Drivetrain and Aisin Chemical in nearby Crothersville. Cummins (HQ in adjacent Bartholomew County) operates Jackson County operations as part of its supplier network. Valeo North America, Lannett Company, and Silgas Plastics round out the major manufacturers. The April 2026 announcement of five Seymour-area manufacturing investments reinforced the cluster's continued growth.
Cultural-historical footnote: John Mellencamp, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame singer-songwriter, was born in Seymour and graduated from Seymour High School in 1970. His 1985 hit "Small Town" — which reached #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 — was written about his Seymour hometown and remains one of the more enduring American musical tributes to small-town life. Jackson County has used the cultural connection for modest tourism and identity-building.
The data show one of the better small-county outcomes. Median household income $70,208, slack +$14K, hardship 36% (below state average). The 13-year ALICE trajectory has improved by 5+ percentage points. Jackson illustrates that "Cummins-region supplier ring" extends well beyond Bartholomew — the same dynamic that benefits Decatur (Honda Civic), Jennings (auto suppliers), and Bartholomew itself extends south to Jackson, producing one of southeastern Indiana's most consistent growth corridors.
Sources: IBJ — Persistence pays for Jackson County; Wikipedia: Seymour, IN; Jackson County IDC — Industry Profiles; St. Louis Fed — Manufacturing jobs aren't leaving Seymour; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Benton County is one of the most agricultural counties in Indiana — over 90% of the land is dedicated to farming, primarily corn and soybeans. Benton has ranked as Indiana's top corn producer for years, harvesting 27.2 million bushels in 2023 (tied with Jasper). Fowler (the county seat, ~2,300 residents) is the small commerce-and-government hub for the surrounding farmland.
What's distinctive about Benton is the wind-power transformation that's overlaid on top of the agriculture. The Benton County Wind farm went online in 2008; the Fowler Ridge Wind Farm opened in 2009. Together with three subsequent expansions (Hoosier Wind, Jordan Creek Wind, Meadow Lake Wind), Benton now produces 1,288 megawatts of electricity from 647 wind turbines across 5 wind farms — one of the largest concentrations of wind power in the United States east of the Mississippi River.
The local-fiscal effect has been substantial. Between 2008 and 2018, wind-farm property-tax revenue allowed the county to allocate an additional $3 million to schools, $35 million to new roads, and $31 million to economic development beyond what the underlying agricultural-tax base would have produced. Many Benton farmers also receive lease income for the turbines on their land — a drought-proof income stream that complements row-crop revenue. The county is the best-documented Indiana case of how utility-scale wind power can stabilize and even improve a small rural agricultural economy's fiscal position.
The data show, paradoxically, that the wind-power story hasn't fully transformed household economics. Median household income $61,811 is at state average; slack of +$7K is positive but modest; hardship at 45.4% is well above state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by 13.4 percentage points — the third-worst trajectory in Indiana. The wind-farm tax revenue benefits public infrastructure but doesn't directly increase wages for the small county's workforce. Benton is the reminder that "new revenue source for local government" doesn't automatically mean "better household economics" — the two are related but not equivalent.
Sources: The Center for Local Policy — Benton County wind energy; IU ERIT — Benton County wind-energy siting case study; Wikipedia: Benton County; ALICE Indiana 2025.
Warren County is one of Indiana's quietest counties — by every measure of intensity. Population just over 8,000 (third-smallest in Indiana), lowest population density in the state at about 23 residents per square mile, and a small-rural-agricultural economy that has changed little in the past century. Williamsport (the county seat, ~1,800 residents) sits inland; West Lebanon is a small village on the western edge. The Wabash River forms the county's eastern boundary; the Illinois state line forms the western edge.
Corn and soybean production dominate the landscape and the local economy. Farming operations, grain elevators, and agricultural supply businesses form the backbone of commerce. The major employers reflect the limited industrial development: Williamsport-Washington Township School Corporation and county government are the largest. Manufacturing operations are small but persistent — TMF Center (parts for construction equipment and trucking), GL Technologies (industrial tooling), Kuri-Tec (industrial hoses and accessories) in Williamsport; Tru-Flex Metal Hose (stripwound and corrugated flexible metal hose, since 1962) and Dyna-Fab (metal stampings and weldments) in West Lebanon.
The data show one of Indiana's quieter stable outcomes. Median household income around $66K is at or slightly above state average. Slack of +$12K is solidly positive. Hardship at ~37% is below state average. The 13-year ALICE trajectory has been roughly stable. Warren is the small-rural-Indiana baseline case — no major industry, no major institution, no major story to tell — and yet the economic outcomes are quietly competent. The county illustrates that "least dense, least populated, least dramatic" can produce decent household-economic outcomes when the underlying farmland is productive, the small-manufacturing base is steady, and there's no acute crisis to overcome.
Sources: Wikipedia: Warren County; Warren County, Indiana; Warren County overview; ALICE Indiana 2025.
From the first five: Hamilton works because deliberate municipal design + corporate ecosystem + tax structure compound over decades. Brown works because identity + amenities + Indianapolis adjacency create wealth through real estate and tourism without needing an industrial base. LaGrange works because cultural cohesion + RV demand + a parallel community safety net produce above-average outcomes outside the mainstream education-income framework. Vigo doesn't work because each anchor was bet as a singular fix rather than a compounding ecosystem. Blackford doesn't work because each replacement industry was smaller than the last and nothing new took root.
From the second five: Sullivan is mid-transition — coal employment to crypto-mining to data-center buildout — with a $65B project under construction. Switzerland is the casino-windfall story aging in real time; the only Indiana county where state distributions shrank, because Ohio and Kentucky gaming siphoned the Belterra customer base. Elkhart is the boom-bust of concentration: 60–80% of the world's RVs come from here. Marion is the legacy of Unigov — the 1970 consolidation that preserved Indianapolis's tax base but accelerated the suburban exodus. Monroe is the warning about county-level statistics: 49% bachelor's coexisting with 48% hardship because IU places 49,000 students in the denominator.
From the third five: Warrick shows the "blue-collar, low-degree, livable-cost" combination that's usually mythological but is real here: Alcoa wages + Toyota spillover + a Newburgh-on-the-Ohio cost structure yields the 4th-highest household slack in the state with only 35% bachelor's. Boone is the state-engineered winner — $13B+ in committed LEAP capital, anchored by Lilly's $4.5B Lebanon site, with an unresolved water-rights fight over a proposed 35-mile pipeline from Tippecanoe County. Lake is three economies stitched together — Gary's steel collapse (30,000 workers down to 2,246), the Chicago-commuter suburbs of Crown Point and Munster earning Naperville-level incomes, and Hard Rock Northern Indiana adding casino revenue since 2021. Wayne is post-industrial decline plus an acute disaster — 16% population loss over 50 years, then the April 2023 plastics-recycling fire that exposed what happens when industrial property sits unused for 14 years. Daviess is the federal-defense + Amish hybrid — Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane providing the federal-employment anchor, the state's fourth-largest Amish settlement providing the parallel-economy resilience, with the result that slack is positive even at 15% bachelor's.
From the fourth five: Allen is the case where intentional diversification after a single dominant employer (International Harvester) closed actually worked — the GM plant returned in 1987, Steel Dynamics founded 1993 became the only Fortune 500 HQ in town, and the county avoided the urban-suburban polarization Marion couldn't avoid. Tippecanoe is what Monroe would look like with an industrial second pillar: Purdue's 50,000 students + 13,000 employees + $688M research budget, paired with Subaru's 5,000-worker plant; the 51.4-pp township spread captures the within-county inequality. St. Joseph is recovery-still-in-progress — Studebaker closed in 1963 and the county spent 60 years rebuilding around Notre Dame, AM General, and downtown revitalization; the April 2024 AWS announcement of an $11B data-center campus near New Carlisle is the biggest capital-investment commitment in state history, though it's too new to show in the household data. Madison is the archetype of single-employer collapse — about 20 GM plants and 25,000 jobs in 1970 became 0 active GM plants and ~7,500 manufacturing jobs by 2006; no replacement at scale ever came. Kosciusko is the high-precision exception: roughly one-third of the world's orthopedic devices and two-thirds of hip/knee implants come from within 50 miles of Warsaw's courthouse square, anchored by DePuy (1895), Zimmer (1927), Biomet (1977, merged into Zimmer Biomet 2014), and Medtronic Sofamor Danek — concentration that works because the underlying industry is FDA-regulated, patent-protected, and structurally tied to an aging population rather than to consumer cyclicality.
From the fifth five (southern Indiana): Posey is the under-noticed industrial corner — Mt. Vernon's port (7th-largest inland port in the US, 4M+ tons annual cargo) plus a chemicals-and-heavy-manufacturing cluster (SABIC, BWXT, CountryMark, GAF, ADM, CF, Cargill) that delivers high household slack despite only 20% bachelor's. Gibson is the cleanest "single anchor done right" — Toyota Indiana has been in Princeton since 1998, employs 7,000–8,000, has invested $8B+ over 25 years, and is now in the middle of a $1.4B EV expansion. Knox is the demonstration that county-level statistics can deeply mislead — 10 townships span a 60-percentage-point hardship spread, the widest in Indiana, anchored by Good Samaritan Hospital and Vincennes University but extending out to rural townships where the household-level economic experience is wildly different. Pike is the energy-transition rural county — coal still ran 16% of employment at the turn of the millennium (157× the state ratio), but AES Indiana's $1.1B conversion of the Petersburg Generating Station from coal to gas + storage is rewriting the local economic structure in real time. Harrison is the casino that held up — Caesars Southern Indiana is 15 miles from Louisville's airport, made a $90M land-based reinvestment in 2019, was acquired by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians for $280M in 2021, and continues to produce stable wagering distributions; the contrast with Switzerland's Belterra (60+ miles from any major city, gradual revenue erosion, no large-scale reinvestment) is what determines which gaming-host counties sustain vs. decline.
From the sixth five (variations on the established themes): Hendricks shows what the Indianapolis ring looks like when its specialty is logistics rather than residential or arts — 50 million sq ft of warehouse space anchored by Amazon, Walmart, FedEx, UPS, Home Depot, Kohl's, Pepsi, and a new Walgreens hub, all clustered around Indianapolis Airport's FedEx hub. Dearborn is the most-transient county in Indiana (only 37.8% IN-born) because Cincinnati is across the river; the Hollywood Casino in Lawrenceburg has been a $20M+/year tax-revenue anchor since 1996, with the surrounding spirits-and-manufacturing economy keeping it diversified. DeKalb carries the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg 1930s automotive legacy into a modern Tier-1/Tier-2 supplier cluster — Multimatic, Continental, Autokiniton, Auburn Gear, Carlex Glass — distributed across many medium-sized employers rather than one giant. Dubois is the German-Catholic furniture-craft inheritance — MasterBrand, Kimball, OFS, eight wood manufacturers among North America's largest, anchored by a 200-year-old cultural-cohesion-plus-industry structure that's the closest analog Indiana has to LaGrange's Amish-RV economy. Greene is the rural pivot done quietly — coal mining collapsed from thousands of jobs to about eight, but Crane spillover (1,100+ federal/contractor jobs), healthcare growth (LQ 2.41), and agriculture combined into one of Indiana's most diversified small-county economies (HHI 1,041).
From the seventh five (Louisville corridor + small casinos + Johnson): Clark and Floyd together demonstrate Indiana's other major out-of-state-metro spillover — Louisville. Clark is the industrial-commercial half (River Ridge Commerce Center: 6,000-acre converted Army ammunition plant, 80+ tenants including Amazon and Meta, 13,300 jobs, $3.6B annual economic impact). Floyd is the residential-commuter half (40% commute to Kentucky, New Albany's historic-district revival, IU Southeast as the local higher-ed anchor). Ohio is the smallest county in Indiana and a Belterra-style casino decline accelerated — Rising Star GGR fell from $93M in 2012 to $43.8M in 2024 (−53%) without any meaningful operator reinvestment; the casino license has been the subject of repeated relocation lobbying. Orange is the opposite casino-county story — the $600M Cook Group restoration of French Lick (casino opened 2006) and West Baden Springs Hotel turned two near-derelict 1902 spa hotels into a functioning resort with 2,000+ employees, demonstrating that philanthropic capital from a wealthy local family (Cook Medical in Bloomington) can revive historic assets that pure private-sector economics would have demolished. Johnson is the southern member of the Indianapolis ring (median household $87,227, slack $29,100, hardship 27.3%); Greenwood's Endress+Hauser US HQ is one example of a meaningful Swiss/German industrial-firm cluster building inside the ring counties.
From the eighth five (Indy ring completion + NE counties): Hancock illustrates that losing a major corporate HQ (Elanco moved 950 jobs to downtown Indianapolis in 2020) doesn't wreck a wealthy ring county when the underlying residential and logistics economies are diversified — the Mt. Comfort corridor and Indianapolis Regional Airport have continued to attract Amazon, Walmart, and other major operations. Morgan is the most-diversified economy in Indiana (HHI 986) — no single sector or employer dominates, which produces modest-rather-than-spectacular outcomes but unusual resilience. Shelby pairs Horseshoe Indianapolis (Caesars-operated racino, $1,529/cap wagering distributions) with Ryobi Die Casting's 700+ employees; two distinct anchors, neither individually catastrophic. Noble is the third major RV-corridor manufacturing county — 122 manufacturers, 10,000 workers, 39.8% of employment in manufacturing — alongside the broader industrial base (Kraft Heinz caramels, aircraft components, water pumps). Huntington is the UTEC cautionary tale — 700 manufacturing jobs to Mexico in 2016–18, the related and famously preserved Carrier jobs got national attention, the Huntington workers did not; the county's overall economy absorbed the loss because of diversification, but the individual workers carried the cost.
From the ninth five (NE Indiana small counties + Peru): Wells and Whitley are the small Fort Wayne MSA fringe counties — Bluffton (Indiana's first "Gigabit City") and Columbia City both absorb FW-area commuter wages plus modest industrial bases, with Whitley benefiting unusually from being equidistant between Fort Wayne, Warsaw's orthopedic cluster, and South Bend (median household $76,000+, top 20% nationally). Adams is the Swiss Amish county — 5th-largest US Amish settlement (11,055 across 72 districts, dating to 1840 migration from Switzerland's Jura Mountains via Ohio), with median income falling $100 below ALICE; the +10.3 pp 13-year trajectory is among the worst in IN, partly because Amish family sizes drive up the ALICE threshold calibration. Wabash demonstrates that concentrated hometown-industrialist philanthropy (Honeywell Foundation, since 1941) can move a small county's trajectory — Eagles Theatre restored at $5M, $100M+ total downtown revitalization investment over the last decade, Stellar Communities recognition 2014. Miami is the post-base, post-circus reinvention story — Peru was the "Circus Capital of the World" with seven major circus winter quarters until the 1941 collapse, then Grissom Air Force Base was the anchor employer until the 1994 BRAC realignment; the civilian Grissom Aeroplex now hosts industrial tenants, but unemployment (6.5%) and LFPR (55.5%) show the cost of two anchor losses without a full replacement.
From the tenth five (rural/agricultural Indiana): Cass is the immigrant-anchored rural manufacturing story — Logansport went from 19th-century Irish canal labor → early-20th-century Italian industrial workers → 1990s Hispanic Tyson-pork workers → 2020s Haitian Tyson workers, with the county now ~30% Hispanic plus 2,000–5,000 recent Haitian arrivals; the immigration wave keeps population stable but household economics struggle (45% below ALICE, +6.5 pp 13-year worsening). White is the lake-country tourism economy — Lake Shafer and Lake Freeman, both created by 1923–25 NIPSCO hydroelectric dams, anchor Indiana Beach amusement park and a $70M/year tourism economy with ~1M annual visitors. Carroll combines a meat-processing plant (Indiana Packers, 2,000+ workers in Delphi) with Subaru-Lafayette commuter spillover; township spread of 50.9 pp captures the divergence between processing-plant and farmland-only townships. Jasper is the small-college-closure cautionary tale — Saint Joseph's College closed in 2017 under $27M debt after 129 years, taking ~200 direct jobs and substantial secondary effects with it; 13-year hardship worsened 8.9 pp. Newton is the purely agricultural NW corner — no major employer, 372 farms over 189,934 acres, wind-power leases as the quiet supplementary income — and yet positive slack and stable hardship, demonstrating that pure-agricultural rural Indiana can produce modest decent outcomes when the underlying farmland is productive and commodity economics aren't catastrophically bad.
From the eleventh five (small N-IN rural counties): Starke is the small-rural-no-anchor case — MPI Products + agriculture, very low LFPR (54.2%), trajectory worsening. Pulaski is the founder-loyalty case — BraunAbility, founded 1972 by Ralph Braun in his Winamac hometown to make wheelchair vans, now 800+ employees and the dominant payroll in a county of 12,500. Fulton is the "unremarkable middle of Indiana" — modest manufacturing, modest lake recreation (Lake Manitou is one of the oldest manmade lakes in the US, created 1827), high unemployment (7.4%). Marshall sits south of the RV corridor with diversified manufacturing (Bremen Castings, Pretzels Inc.'s 2017 Plymouth investment) plus Culver Academies plus lake-area service economy — well-diversified mid-state outcomes. Steuben combines Pokagon State Park (640K annual visitors) + Trine University (4,500 students, since 1884) + 100+ glacial lakes + downtown revitalization in Angola, but the 13-year ALICE trajectory has worsened by 9 pp because lake-area housing-cost appreciation has outpaced wage growth — a useful reminder that apparent prosperity (tourism + college + retirees) can mask real household-budget stress.
From the twelfth five (east-central post-industrial belt + Rush): Grant is Madison's neighbor in the post-industrial collapse story — Marion lost RCA TVs, Foster Forbes glass, GM-Delco; cultural residuals include James Dean's Fairmount hometown and Taylor University; 46.4% hardship is the second-worst in Indiana. Henry is the post-Chrysler-transmission-plant story — the Walter P. Chrysler Memorial High School name was finally dropped in 2011 after the plant closed; the consolation prize is the New Castle Fieldhouse, the world's largest HS basketball gym at 8,424 seats. Randolph is the Indiana-Ohio border rural county — Winchester historic glass town, Union City literally on the state line, SNAP receipt 15.3% (second-highest in IN). Jay is the gas-boom-glass-town slow collapse — Indiana's first natural-gas well was drilled in Portland 1887, Dunkirk is the "Glass Capital of Indiana" with a remaining bottle factory producing 2M beer bottles daily, population peaked at 26,818 in 1900 and is now 20,478 (24% decline over 120 years), 13-year hardship +7.2 pp. Rush is the antidote case — 86.5% Indiana-born (highest in the state, the most-rooted county), median income slightly above state avg, slack +$10,822, hardship 36% below state avg — demonstrating that staying-put can produce stable modest outcomes when the agricultural base is productive.
From the thirteenth five (southeast Indiana): Decatur is the clean "Honda transformed a rural county" case — the 2008 opening of Honda Manufacturing of Indiana brought 2,500 jobs to Greensburg and shifted the economy from purely agricultural to advanced manufacturing in less than a decade (the famous courthouse tower-tree dating to the 1870s is the cultural backdrop). Ripley is the Hillenbrand legacy — Hill-Rom (hospital beds, 1,743 employees) and Batesville Casket (1,200 employees) anchor a county of 28,000, producing the 3rd-lowest hardship rate in IN. Franklin combines Brookville Lake tourism (~2M visitors/year) with Cincinnati-commuter spillover (67% commute out) for median household income above state average and slack of $22K. Jefferson is the cultural-heritage case where the assets don't quite translate to household strength — Madison's 133-block National Historic Landmark district (the largest contiguous in the US) plus Hanover College (Indiana's oldest private college, founded 1827) plus a 2024 Lilly Endowment $30M "Jefferson Together" grant — but median income clears ALICE by only $3K and hardship sits at 43.8%. Jennings is the Cummins-region Tier-1/Tier-2 auto-supplier ring around North Vernon — recent $36M+ in supplier-expansion investments (Novolex, GT Industries) reflect continued confidence in the southeast-IN cluster.
From the fourteenth five (small-county overperformers + auto-survivor Howard + college-town Putnam): Union punches well above its weight — median household $79,500 in a county of just 7,000 people, second-lowest IN-born share (43.4%) in the state because Ohio-side commuter spillover lifts the median; slack of $25K places Union in the state's top quartile. Tipton is Hamilton's next-ring-out commuter suburb — median $78,309, slack $25K, hardship 29.7% (7th-lowest), the same mechanism as Whitley for Fort Wayne. Clinton (Frankfort) shows demographic transition without economic transformation — Frito-Lay + ConAgra anchor a workforce that has become 22% Hispanic countywide / 31.5% in Frankfort itself, but household economics remain stressed. Howard is the auto-survivor — Kokomo nearly went the Anderson/Marion route during Delphi's 2005-2009 collapse, but the 2009 federal auto bailout + continued Stellantis transmission/EV-battery reinvestment + Haynes International's $173M expansion produced a 4.5 pp 13-year hardship improvement (vs Madison's flat trajectory). Putnam is the I-70 college-town hybrid — DePauw + Walmart Distribution + POET Biorefining anchors that produce modest stable outcomes at state-average wage levels.
From the fifteenth five (west-central Wabash valley + Bloomington fringe): Vermillion is the third coal-to-gas energy-transition rural county (after Sullivan and Pike) — Duke Energy's Cayuga plant is converting 1,062 MW of coal to add 470 MW of natural gas plus storage, with 3,700+ jobs supported. Parke is the "Covered Bridge Capital of the World" — 31 historic bridges, a 10-day October festival running since 1957, ~2M annual visitors driving an unusual rural-tourism-anchored economy of 17,000 residents. Fountain is the quiet Wabash Valley agricultural county where nothing dramatic happens (84% farmland, commuter spillover to Lafayette) and modest outcomes follow. Montgomery is the diversified Crawfordsville case — Wabash College (one of three remaining all-male liberal arts colleges in the US, founded 1832), Nucor Steel (world's first thin-slab-casting minimill, 1987, plus 2023 $115M expansion), and R.R. Donnelley's century-old printing operation; multiple anchors prevent single-shock catastrophe. Owen is the Bloomington-MSA western edge — McCormick's Creek (Indiana's first state park, 1916, 640K visitors) + some Cook Medical/Boston Scientific manufacturing spillover from Monroe, but housing-cost contagion from Bloomington has pushed ALICE up faster than wages.
From the sixteenth five (southern Indiana variations): Spencer pairs Cleveland-Cliffs Rockport Works (a stainless-steel mill with a globally unique tandem-rolling capability) with Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial and Santa Claus, IN's Holiday World — industrial anchor + tourism + Toyota-Princeton spillover produce mid-state outcomes. Perry is the Swiss-German colonization story — Tell City founded 1858 by the Swiss Colonization Society, the Cannelton Cotton Mill (1851) was the largest industrial building west of the Allegheny Mountains in its era, contemporary Perry has slack of +$7,154 and one of the lowest LFPRs (56%). Crawford has the lowest cost of living in Indiana ($46,531 ALICE threshold) and one of the most subsistence-level economies — only 11% bachelor's, 69.7% broadband (2nd-lowest in state), 37-minute average commute (longest in state); Marengo Cave + Wyandotte Cave + O'Bannon Woods produce modest tourism but don't move the trajectory. Washington (Salem) combines Peerless Gear + Kimball Office Casegoods manufacturing with agriculture and the John Hay Center; representative small-southern-IN county with slowly worsening trajectory. Lawrence is the limestone-built-America case — Indiana oolitic limestone in 60-80% of major US stone buildings (Empire State, Rockefeller Center, Grand Central, Pentagon, National Cathedral), but with limestone's slow-cycle 20th-century demand decline, current outcomes are modest despite the industrial-heritage importance.
From the seventeenth five (Cummins-region center + a heavy stress case + Crane): Bartholomew is the case where Cummins Inc. (Fortune 200 diesel-engine HQ since 1919, ~8,000 regional employees) anchors not only a tight engineering-and-supplier cluster but also one of America's most extraordinary modernist-architecture collections — the J. Irwin Miller / Cummins Foundation patronage funded $25M+ in architectural-design fees for buildings by Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Eliel Saarinen, and others, earning Columbus the "Athens of the Prairie" nickname and AIA's #6 US ranking for architectural innovation. Fayette is the cautionary lost-auto-city — Connersville's "American Rolls Royce" McFarlan and the first US industrial park (1886) gave way to a 10,000-to-600 union-labor collapse and a 2007 final Visteon shutdown; the county is now described as "among the poorest in the state." Scott is the 2015 HIV outbreak — the largest US rural HIV outbreak in modern history (215 cases linked to oxymorphone injection) demonstrated how opioid crisis + limited rural public-health infrastructure + state-level resistance to syringe exchange combined; the county has Indiana's highest disability rate (22.4%) and lowest slack (+$147). Clay is the post-clay-boom quiet stability case — Brazil was the "Clay Center of the World" until concrete and plastics displaced clay-based building materials a century ago, with the county since absorbing modest decline through commuter and agricultural stability. Martin is the federal-defense-mission anomaly — 1/3 of the county is NSWC Crane, producing the 4th-highest concentration of STEM jobs in the entire US for a rural county of fewer than 10,000 residents.
From the eighteenth five (regional metro + NW IN + Muncie + Jackson): Vanderburgh contains Evansville, IN's third-largest city, with 4 NYSE-listed HQs (Accuride, Berry Global, LEAF, Vectren) + Mead Johnson + Old National Bank + tri-state metro draw — but underlying household economics are mixed — hardship at 46% is high while slack of +$8,814 is solidly positive (median income clears the threshold). Porter is the diversified NW IN winner — Burns Harbor steel + Indiana Dunes National Park (3M+ visitors, elevated to NP in 2019) + Valparaiso University + Chicago commuter (South Shore Line) — slack +$25K, top-quartile outcomes. LaPorte combines Michigan City's Blue Chip Casino (Boyd Gaming, since 1997) with Chicago commuter + lake tourism for solid mid-state economics. Delaware contains the full arc of Muncie — Ball Brothers' 1888 glass-boom relocation built one of America's most iconic small-city industrial economies (and inspired the 1929 Middletown sociological classic); Ball State University and IU Health Ball Memorial now anchor the "med-and-ed" successor economy; but hardship at 48.2% sits at fourth-worst in IN, with the trajectory worsening 2.0 pp over 13 years from an already-elevated 46.2% baseline. Jackson is one of IN's quieter growth stories — Aisin's Japanese automotive-component manufacturing since 1988 + the broader Cummins-region supplier ring + John Mellencamp's "Small Town" cultural identity = 10% population growth 2010-20, 23% in Seymour, slack +$14K, 5+ pp hardship improvement.
From the final two (smallest western IN): Benton is the wind-power case — 1,288 MW from 647 turbines across 5 wind farms producing one of the largest US wind-power concentrations east of the Mississippi, with $69M+ in additional county-government revenue over 10 years from wind-property taxes; but the 13-year ALICE trajectory has still worsened 13.4 pp (3rd-worst in IN), demonstrating that new local-government revenue doesn't automatically translate into household-economic improvement. Warren is the quietest case — Indiana's smallest population density (~23/sq mi), modest small manufacturing (TMF Center, Kuri-Tec, Tru-Flex Metal Hose), agriculture dominant, and quietly stable outcomes (median ~$66K, slack +$12K, hardship ~37%) demonstrating that "least dense, least dramatic" can still produce decent rural Indiana economics when farmland is productive.
The common pattern, restated across all 92 counties: economic outcomes in Indiana counties don't come from any single intervention. They come from accumulated, intentional layering of decisions over decades — sometimes by local government (Carmel), sometimes by federal policy (Crane, Unigov), sometimes by religious community (LaGrange/Daviess), sometimes by megaproject investment (Boone/Sullivan), sometimes by absorbing wealth from a neighboring metro (Warrick/Brown). What fails is single-bet thinking: one casino, one degree pipeline, one factory, one government program. What succeeds is compounding — and the data captures that only as the after-the-fact average. Pairing the numbers with primary-source narrative is the layer that makes the dashboard useful for understanding lived economic reality, not just describing it.
Source: United For ALICE 2025 Indiana data sheet (2023 reporting). Threshold = annual household income below which essentials become unaffordable. % below = poverty households + ALICE households / total.
Nearly 2 in 5 households can't comfortably cover housing, food, child care, transportation, healthcare, taxes, and tech. Of those, ~12% are in poverty by the federal definition; the rest are the working poor — employed but stretched thin.
Crawford County has the lowest cost of living at $46,531/year per household; Hamilton County the highest at $64,437. A 38% spread within one state — driven by housing and child care costs.
Despite Indiana's newest casino opening in April 2024, Vigo County has the state's highest financial-hardship rate. Blackford (50.9%), Delaware/Muncie (48.2%), Crawford (48.1%), and Sullivan (47.8%) round out the top 5. Casino windfalls don't fix household budgets.
Hamilton (25.2%), Hendricks (26.9%), Johnson (27.3%), Boone (27.4%), Hancock (27.4%). Even the best Indiana county still has 1 in 4 households below the ALICE threshold.
From 2022 to 2023, Monroe County's ALICE threshold rose +16.4% (most in the state), Delaware +14.9%, Wayne +13.0%. Three of the four fastest-rising are college or post-industrial counties under housing pressure.
In 63 Indiana counties, a single full-time worker earning the local mean wage doesn't meet the household ALICE threshold. Those 29 that do are concentrated in the Indianapolis MSA — where wages are higher despite higher costs.
Bachelor's % correlates with median income (r=0.64) and slack (r=0.63) at the county level. But it correlates negatively with self-employment (r=−0.35) — the most entrepreneurial counties are the lowest-education ones. And the LaGrange counterexample stands: 11% bachelor's, 43% manufacturing, $84K median income. The correlation is real, but at the individual level it isn't actionable guidance.
Broadband adoption ranges 66.2% (LaGrange, Amish country) to 96.1% (Hamilton). Lowest-broadband counties cluster in rural and Amish-population areas — Crawford 69.7%, Parke 76.8%, Switzerland 76.9%, Adams 77.5%. Remote-work and modern skill-building both depend on this connection.
Disability rate among civilian noninstitutional population: 22.4% in Scott, 21.8% in Blackford, 20.7% in Fayette. The same counties show 45–51% ALICE-or-poverty hardship — disability is a major economic-stress factor in southern Indiana, partly an opioid-crisis aftermath.
Census DP03 median household income vs ALICE threshold: Blackford ($47,560 vs $51,780, −8.1%), Vigo (−4.0%), Sullivan (−2.3%), Adams (−0.2%). In these 4 counties, the median household — not the marginal one — earns less than ALICE says it costs to live. The other 88 counties' median household clears the threshold, but only modestly in many.
2.5x spread in median household income across one state. Hamilton's median is +83% above its (higher) ALICE threshold. Blackford's is −8% below its (lower) threshold. Indianapolis suburbs all clear the threshold by 49–83%; struggle counties miss it or barely clear it.
DP02 social-characteristics profile — bachelor's-degree attainment correlates strongly with both opportunity and reduced hardship.
Per-county median household income vs ALICE threshold — the most direct measure of whether typical households can afford essentials.
Sortable. The "gap" column shows the local typical full-time wage vs the ALICE threshold. Negative = 1 earner falls short.
Wages from BLS OEWS May 2024. Opportunity Score (0–100) combines affordability (% below ALICE), wage strength vs state mean, and two-earner family viability.
Indy suburbs combine the state's highest wages ($30.25/hr MSA mean) with relatively low hardship (~25–27% below ALICE). Hamilton scores highest despite having the most expensive cost of living — wages more than compensate.
Bottom-tier counties combine high hardship rates with nonmetro / Terre Haute wages. Vigo's score is striking: it's a metro county (Terre Haute MSA), but its $24.99/hr mean wage is the lowest of any Indiana metro, and its 53.5% ALICE hardship rate is the highest in the state.
These rural-feeling counties are technically inside the Indianapolis-Carmel-Greenwood MSA, so they get high wages on the BLS measure. Their hardship is moderate (27–37%), but the combination drives strong opportunity scores. The data confirms commuter geography matters.
From County Health Rankings 2025 (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation + University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute) — multi-domain health and quality-of-life measures for every Indiana county, paired with the economic data the analysis already have.
Hamilton County: 80.7 years. Scott County: 69.1 years. State average 75.1. The gap is wider than the difference between the US national average and most upper-middle-income countries. Life expectancy ↔ household slack correlates r=0.61, ↔ hardship % r=−0.58.
The 10 highest drug-overdose mortality rates: Fayette (77.6/100K), Wayne (76.1), Scott (71.5), Marion (69.7), Grant (65.3), Delaware (63.4), Crawford (63.1), Pulaski (61.8), Randolph (61.6), Starke (60.3). Six are in the east-central post-industrial belt; Scott carries the 2015 HIV-outbreak legacy. Drug OD ↔ slack r=−0.36, ↔ hardship r=+0.40.
LaGrange has the 4th-highest life expectancy in Indiana (78.6 years) despite 42% adult obesity, 22.9% adult smoking, and a 33.3% uninsured rate. The Amish lifestyle — active manual labor, no smoking among most adults, strong community support networks, traditional diet — appears to overcome the conventional risk-factor measurements. Daviess (78.0 yr) and Dubois (77.8 yr) — also high-cohesion small-county communities — sit right behind.
The single strongest correlation in the combined dataset. % of households food-insecure correlates with household financial slack at r=−0.79 — much stronger than the education-correlation everyone discusses. Food insecurity is the cleanest, fastest-moving indicator that household economics is breaking down.
Self-reported "average mentally unhealthy days per month" correlates with slack at r=−0.72. Counties with the worst mental-health days: Delaware (6.6), Jay (6.5), Parke (6.5), Washington (6.5), Starke (6.4), Crawford (6.3), Scott (6.2), LaGrange (6.2), Rush (6.2), Blackford (6.2). These overlap heavily with the east-central decline belt + a few small rural counties.
Highest homeownership: Brown 86%, Pike 85%, Dearborn 85%, Harrison 84%, Starke 84%. Lowest: Tippecanoe 54%, Monroe 55%, Marion 56%, Vigo 63%, Vanderburgh 64%. The college-town low-homeownership pattern is structural (students rent); urban-core low-homeownership reflects rental-heavy multifamily housing stock. The pattern affects the "wealth accumulation through property appreciation" mechanism that benefits suburban counties.
Sortable. Use this to dig into specific counties.
Life expectancy at the county level is a summary statistic — it conflates everyone living in the county into a single number, hiding enormous within-county variation by race, neighborhood, income, and lifestyle. Marion County's 73.0-year average includes Carmel-adjacent professional households averaging significantly above 80 and parts of Indianapolis-proper averaging significantly below 70. Same caveat applies in other counties — Vanderburgh, Lake, Allen, St. Joseph. Use these county-level health measures to identify where attention is needed, not as a complete description of how any individual will fare. Drug overdose mortality rates are also 5-year averages and lag the current moment by several years — the 2025 CHR data reflects deaths primarily from 2018–2022. The trajectory of opioid overdoses in Indiana (and nationally) has shifted multiple times in that window.
From Census ACS 1-Year tables S2506 (owner-occupied with mortgage), S2507 (owner-occupied without mortgage), and B25075 (housing-value distribution). ACS 1-Year covers only 27 Indiana counties — those with population ≥ 65,000. The other 65 counties are not visible at the 1-year sampling level. Values shown are 2024 (most recent release); 3-year change uses 2021 as the comparison year.
Median mortgaged home value among the 27 most populous counties: Hamilton $449,400, Boone $424,800, Monroe $350,400 at the top — Wayne $154,100, Grant $156,000, Delaware $171,300 at the bottom. The Indianapolis/Bloomington/Lafayette housing market and the post-industrial-belt housing market are operating on different price levels.
Allen +48.6%, Monroe (Bloomington) +47.6%, Tippecanoe (Lafayette) +44.3% from 2021 to 2024. These are the biggest home-value jumps in metro Indiana. The post-COVID remote-work / university-town demand shock hit second-tier college metros hardest. Wayne (+19.0%) and LaPorte (+18.4%) barely moved.
Hamilton 17.9% of mortgaged owners spend >30% of income on housing — lowest in the metro 27, despite having the highest home values. Vanderburgh 25.7%, Madison 25.7%, Lake 25.6%, Hendricks 25.4%, LaPorte 25.2% are highest. The expensive-house counties are also the high-income counties, and cost-burden tracks income mismatch, not absolute price.
Price-to-income ratio (median home value ÷ median household income): Monroe 5.5×, Tippecanoe 5.1×. National "affordable" benchmark is ~3×; "severely unaffordable" begins at 5×. These two college-town counties are the only Indiana metros that have crossed into nationally-recognized severely-unaffordable territory. Hamilton's ratio is 4.1× — homes are absolutely expensive but residents are also absolutely affluent.
Census ACS 1-Year S2506_C01_009E, 2024.
Census ACS 1-Year S2506, 2021 vs 2024. Allen, Monroe, and Tippecanoe led; Wayne and LaPorte trailed.
Census ACS 1-Year S2506, summed across income brackets. Lower is better.
~3× = affordable; ~5× = severely unaffordable (Demographia benchmark). Only Monroe and Tippecanoe cross 5×.
B25075 buckets summed for $400K+. Hamilton's housing stock is 57% in the $400K+ range — no other Indiana county clears 30%.
Free-and-clear homes tend to be older / smaller / longer-held. The mortgaged-vs-free-clear gap signals housing-stock age and ownership tenure mix.
From ACS 5-Year S2507 (2020-2024 average). Includes all 92 counties, unlike the 1-Year tables above which cover only the 27 most populous.
Blackford ($89,300) is the floor. Free-and-clear homes are often older / smaller / longer-held. In declining markets these homes are appreciating slowly or not at all.
The 27-county housing dataset confirms and quantifies several patterns the rest of the dashboard implies. First, the price ceiling is set in Carmel and Zionsville. Hamilton's $449,400 median and Boone's $424,800 median are the only Indiana markets where the median mortgaged home would be considered "expensive" by national suburban-Midwest standards. They are also the markets where the housing stock has shifted most decisively upmarket — 57% of Hamilton's owner-occupied homes are now valued at $400K or higher, a share that is more than double the next county (Porter at 28%).
Second, the post-COVID home-value surge was uneven within Indiana. The biggest 3-year gainers were not the wealthy suburbs — they were the second-tier metros where the absolute price was still low enough to attract remote workers and out-of-state buyers. Allen (+48.6%), Monroe (+47.6%), and Tippecanoe (+44.3%) led. The Indianapolis core (Marion +26.3%, Boone +23.1%) gained less in percentage terms because it started from a higher base. The post-industrial belt (Wayne +19.0%, Howard +20.9%, Grant +24.9%) gained least — buyers did not flock there.
Third, the most stretched markets are now Bloomington and Lafayette, not Carmel. Median home values in Monroe and Tippecanoe are now 5.1×–5.5× median household income. Hamilton's ratio is 4.1× — high homes, high incomes. The college-town markets have a structural problem: incoming students and faculty bid up housing, but the median resident's income reflects a more typical small-metro mix. This is the price-of-a-good-college-town that residents have started complaining about loudly enough that local newspapers have begun publishing affordability series.
Fourth, owner cost-burden does not follow home price — it follows the mismatch. Hamilton has the most expensive housing in Indiana and the lowest share of cost-burdened mortgaged owners (17.9%). Vanderburgh, Madison, Lake, Hendricks, and LaPorte sit at the top (25.2%–25.7%). These are mid-priced markets where incomes have not kept up, where second-mortgage and HELOC activity has been heavier in the last decade, or where post-industrial wage erosion has caught up with mortgage payments that were taken on earlier. The classic ALICE pattern shows up here too: Hendricks, despite being a wealthy logistics-suburb, still has a large cost-burdened owner share because its housing stock and mortgages have appreciated faster than wages.
Fifth, free-and-clear homes are concentrated in declining markets. The median free-and-clear home in Wayne ($119,500), Grant ($109,500), and Delaware ($125,300) is roughly 65–75% of the median mortgaged home — meaning the older, long-held housing stock is significantly cheaper than the recently-financed stock. This is the inverse of growth markets like Hamilton ($401,500 free-and-clear, 90% of the mortgaged median), where even older homes are valuable because the entire market has appreciated. The economic implication: in declining markets, the older homeowner-without-a-mortgage cohort is sitting on a depreciating asset; in growth markets, they are sitting on a wealth-creating one.
The Census ACS 1-Year only covers the 27 counties with population ≥ 65,000. The other 65 counties — including most of the rural east-central, southern, and northeast — are not visible at this sampling level. ACS 5-Year data would cover them but is an average of five years, not a snapshot. For full 92-county housing coverage, further analysis would need to pull ACS 5-Year B25077 (median home value) and S2506 5-year tables in a future iteration. The numbers presented here are population-weighted toward the metros, where 76% of Indianans live — but they do not characterize the housing market in the small rural counties where ALICE rates are highest and median income is lowest. Treat this tab as "metro Indiana housing" rather than "all Indiana housing."
Sources: Census ACS 1-Year S2506 (mortgaged owner-occupied) • S2507 (free-and-clear owner-occupied) • B25075 (housing-value distribution). Median household income from ACS 5-Year DP03. Price-to-income benchmark from Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.
From Census County Business Patterns (CBP) 2023 — establishments, employment, and payroll for every Indiana county. CBP counts business locations with paid employees; it excludes self-employed individuals without employees, government, and most agriculture.
Out of 92 counties, 70 have "Health care and social assistance" as their largest employment sector. Accommodation & food services tops 13 counties (tourism/casino counties — Brown, Switzerland, Ohio, Orange). Manufacturing — once Indiana's signature sector — tops zero counties in 2023 CBP data. The transition from manufacturing-led to healthcare-led local economies is no longer in progress; it is largely complete.
CBP industry-employment HHI: Switzerland 4,843 (DOJ "highly concentrated" threshold is 2,500). The casino sector alone provides the bulk of employment. Ohio (3,213), Brown (2,846), Orange (2,650), Martin (2,630) follow. By contrast, Hamilton (1,174), Marion (1,148), and Spencer (1,116) are the most diversified — their largest sectors don't dominate. Concentration is a fragility signal; diversification is resilience.
Average annual payroll per CBP worker (2023): Posey $75,951, Marion $69,754, Vermillion $68,281, Hamilton $66,669, Bartholomew $65,245. Posey's high figure reflects the SABIC, AB-InBev, Mt. Vernon-area chemical/petrochemical and bulk-shipping employment — these are well-paid blue-collar industrial jobs concentrated in a small population. Switzerland ($33,870), Brown ($34,385), and Ohio ($36,002) sit at the bottom — tourism-economy wages.
Establishments per 1,000 residents: Dubois 30.1, Hamilton 30.1, Daviess 28.8, Vanderburgh 28.3, Steuben 28.0. Dubois (Jasper, German-Catholic prosperity, small-business-rich) sitting alongside Carmel/Fishers tells a story: small-town entrepreneurial culture can match metro density. Daviess (Amish small-business economy) is a similar story. Switzerland (13.3), Starke (13.7), Crawford (14.3) sit at the bottom — fewer businesses per resident in casino-county, lake-tourism, and Hoosier-National-Forest counties.
Top 20 + bottom 15. CBP excludes self-employed and government workers.
2-digit NAICS sector employment shares squared, summed. Above 2,500 = "highly concentrated."
Business density. Counts establishments with paid employees.
| Sector | Counties where #1 |
|---|---|
| Health care and social assistance | 70 |
| Accommodation and food services | 13 |
| Construction | 3 |
| Wholesale trade | 2 |
| Professional, scientific, and technical services | 2 |
| Management of companies and enterprises | 1 |
| Arts, entertainment, and recreation | 1 |
CBP 2023, 2-digit NAICS sector with largest employment per county.
Healthcare has become Indiana's employer-of-last-resort. Seventy counties have health care and social assistance as their largest employment sector — that includes both wealthy Hamilton and impoverished Scott. The "rural healthcare collapse" framing common in national news is half-right for Indiana: rural hospitals close, but employment in the sector keeps growing because outpatient clinics, dialysis centers, home health agencies, and skilled nursing facilities are absorbing displaced rural workers. The economic implication is double-edged. Healthcare provides stable employment that is hard to offshore. But it is largely sustained by Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, which means Indiana's rural economic base is now dependent on federal transfer payments routed through hospital systems and insurers — a much different fragility than manufacturing employment ever had.
Industry-concentration tells a sharper diversification story than the DP03-derived HHI does. CBP's HHI uses actual establishment-and-employment data filed through unemployment-insurance records; DP03's industry breakdown is self-reported survey response. The two agree on the broad strokes — Switzerland is over-concentrated, Hamilton is diversified — but CBP captures more sectoral nuance. Counties whose largest sector is accommodation & food (the tourism counties Brown, Switzerland, Ohio, Orange, Steuben) show the highest concentration because those operations are large compared to the local economy. Counties whose largest sector is healthcare show moderate concentration because health systems are smaller relative to total employment in those places.
Posey County is the surprise high-wage county. The data show Posey pays a higher average payroll per worker than Hamilton — and not by a small margin. The Mt. Vernon corridor (SABIC plastics, AB InBev, Toyota Boshoku, Aluminum Company of America successor operations, plus Ohio River bulk-shipping) employs roughly 11,000 workers with industrial wages that drag the county average up. The result is a county where the median household income is $76,580 but most income comes from a few hundred high-wage industrial jobs rather than broad-based prosperity. Posey illustrates that Indiana's wage geography is not just metro vs rural — it is industrial-corridor vs everywhere-else.
Small-town business density is a genuine pattern, not noise. Dubois (Jasper) at 30.1 establishments per 1,000 residents matches Hamilton (Carmel/Fishers). Daviess (Amish small-business economy) at 28.8 matches Vanderburgh's metro. These are not statistical artifacts — they reflect German-Catholic entrepreneurial tradition in Dubois and Amish small-business culture in Daviess. The "rural Indiana = empty Main Street" narrative is true for some places (Switzerland, Starke, Crawford, Ohio, Pulaski's lowest figures) but emphatically untrue for others. Cultural variables explain more of the variance than population or income does.
Sources: Census County Business Patterns 2023, table CB2300CBP. Establishments and employment for all sectors, by 2017 NAICS code, by county. Excludes self-employed without employees, agricultural production, rail transportation, religious organizations, private households, and most government.
From IRS county-to-county migration data (2021 tax year → 2022 tax year) and Census Nonemployer Statistics (NES) 2022. The IRS data is built from year-over-year address changes on tax returns and shows the actual movement of people and AGI between counties. The NES data counts businesses without paid employees — the "I registered an LLC for whatever I plan to do" universe — distinct from CBP which counts businesses with employees and from ACS self-employment which is self-reported.
Net migration 2021→2022: Marion lost 10,716 people and $614,612,000 in adjusted gross income to other counties. The single largest individual flow is Marion → Hamilton: 7,017 people and $404M in AGI moved north (with 4,325 people and $219M returning south, for a net Marion→Hamilton transfer of +2,692 people and +$185M). Hamilton's total net gain across all source counties was +3,736 people and +$332M AGI — the largest in the state. Indianapolis is hemorrhaging households to its own ring — and the households leaving are higher-income than the households staying or arriving. This is the wealth-pipeline narrative made concrete in a single year of IRS data.
The college-town and post-industrial-metro counties with high education but low slack are losing people and AGI: Monroe −1,507 persons / −$85M AGI, Tippecanoe −1,296 / −$85M, St. Joseph −1,088 / −$138M, Vigo −166 / −$30M, Bartholomew −392 / −$53M, Elkhart −854 / −$81M. The IRS data verifies that these counties produce degrees and industrial workers that local markets do not absorb — net exporters of both people and income.
Nonemployer establishments per 1,000 residents correlates with household slack at r = +0.52 — the strongest single business-activity indicator the dataset includes. ACS self-employment percent correlates at r = −0.23 (negative!). NES and ACS self-employment correlate with each other at r = −0.25. These are measuring two different populations: NES captures people who registered a business entity with the IRS; ACS self-employment captures everyone who told the survey they own a business, including informal and necessity-driven work. The NES measure is a much cleaner economic-vitality signal.
Lake County gained 1,515 people NET but lost $75M in AGI. Allen gained 295 people but lost $74M in AGI. The people moving in are lower-income than the people moving out. This pattern — population stable or rising, wealth flowing out — is a different decline signature than the obvious "people leave" pattern in Vigo or Marion. It looks like stability on a census map; it looks like erosion on an IRS map.
Top 12 gainers + bottom 12 losers. Source: IRS SOI Migration Data 2021-2022.
Same counties, but ranked by net AGI rather than net persons. Notice the divergence — population and wealth flows don't always align.
NES 2022. Counts only businesses with no paid employees — sole proprietors, single-member LLCs, freelancers who filed taxes.
Adams (4.61) and LaGrange (4.25) lead — high-Amish counties have many small businesses but few with employees. Vigo and Vanderburgh are at the bottom — metros where formal-employer businesses are more common relative to solo activity.
The combined data — Census Nonemployer Statistics (NES 2022), County Business Patterns (CBP 2023), and ACS DP03 self-employment — let us see business activity at three distinct layers for the first time. The three measures count different populations:
Layer 1: ACS self-employment percentage is self-reported. It captures any worker who tells the survey "I own a business" or "I am self-employed" — formally registered or not, with employees or not, profitable or not. It's the broadest, most inclusive measure. It correlates with household slack at r = −0.23 (negative), meaning higher self-reported self-employment counties have less household economic room. That's because the measure is dominated by necessity-driven and informal self-employment.
Layer 2: Nonemployer Statistics (NES) counts businesses registered with the IRS that have no paid employees. To show up here, someone has to have filed a Schedule C or partnership return — there's a paper trail. This is the "I formed an LLC for whatever I plan to do" universe noted earlier. NES per 1,000 residents correlates with household slack at r = +0.52 — a strong positive relationship. Counties with more registered nonemployer businesses are wealthier counties. The same activity that looks like "necessity" in ACS data looks like "entrepreneurship" in NES data, because NES requires the additional step of formalization.
Layer 3: CBP establishments are businesses with at least one paid employee. This is the highest formalization threshold — someone has scaled past sole proprietorship and is now an employer. CBP per 1,000 residents correlates positively with slack but less strongly than NES, because CBP is more saturated in metro counties (every fast-food location counts).
The ratios between these three layers are themselves informative. NES/CBP > 4 (Adams, Switzerland, LaGrange, Owen, Crawford, Brown) signals an economy that's heavy on small registered businesses that never grow to employ anyone — the Amish small-shop pattern, the rural-recreation pattern, and the tourism-hospitality pattern. NES/CBP < 2.5 (Vigo, Vanderburgh, Huntington, Knox, Dubois, Gibson) signals an economy where employer businesses are relatively common — these are the formal-economy counties where if the reader start a business the reader tend to grow it.
The IRS data verifies cleanly what the cross-tab correlations only suggested. The four largest net-AGI-losing counties in Indiana are Marion (−$615M), St. Joseph (−$138M), Tippecanoe (−$85M), Monroe (−$85M). Three of those four are college-town counties; the fourth is the state's largest city. The four largest net-AGI-gaining counties are Hamilton (+$332M), Clark (+$43M), Madison (+$39M), Hendricks (+$38M). All four are bedroom-suburb counties. The wealth movement from the city center and the university towns to the suburban rings is the dominant flow in Indiana's economic geography — and it's happening at a rate of nearly a billion dollars per year across the affected county pairs.
The migration pattern also explains why high education does not translate to high slack in counties like Monroe and Tippecanoe: the degree-holders leave. They earn their degree, the university hosted them while they did it, but the post-graduation labor market does not absorb them — so they flow to Hamilton, Marion-suburbs, Hendricks, and out-of-state. The home county shows up as "highly educated" in ACS data because students are counted there during enrollment, but the wealth those degrees generate accrues elsewhere. The matching infrastructure for degree-holders is in metro Indianapolis (and in Louisville and Cincinnati for southern Indiana), not in the towns that produced them.
The Lake-and-Allen population-positive-but-AGI-negative pattern points at a different mechanism: these are mid-sized industrial metros (Gary/Hammond and Fort Wayne) where the inbound migrants are lower-wage households and the outbound migrants are higher-wage households. The county replaces population but loses wealth. This is the gradual industrial-erosion pattern — invisible if the reader only look at total population trends, very visible in the IRS AGI flows.
The original question — what would it mean to treat individuals as the source of value rather than counting on companies to broadcast what they need — gets a sharper answer from this data. The matching infrastructure that actually creates economic outcomes runs through three channels: (1) a person registering as a formal business entity, which requires some help with paperwork, accounting, and incorporation; (2) a person being part of a community that surfaces work for them, which the Amish and German-Catholic counties demonstrate concretely; and (3) a person migrating to a county where matching infrastructure already exists, which the IRS migration data shows happening at scale toward Hamilton and the Indianapolis ring.
The state's workforce policy approach — credential the worker, hope an employer hires them — does not appear in any of these channels. Indiana invests roughly $300 million per year in workforce-development and credential programs while families simultaneously migrate roughly $1 billion per year away from the counties that produced them. The dollar-volume mismatch is informative about which lever is actually doing the work. Policy that helped a person formalize a small business (a public-funded LLC-formation service, a free first-year accountant, a small-business startup grant) would more directly address the NES gap than another certificate program does. Policy that built community matching infrastructure (apprenticeships, mentorship networks, locally-trusted career navigators) would more directly address the disconnected-youth gap. Policy that anchored higher-paying employers in the college-town and post-industrial counties would more directly address the AGI hemorrhage.
For each county the IRS data shows the specific county-to-county pairs. The headline insight from this view is that Indiana's wealthiest county (Hamilton) gets 7,017 inmigrants from Marion bringing $404M in AGI — far more than from any other source. The major Indianapolis suburbs all show this same pattern: the city is by far the largest single source of their inmigrants, and they are also the largest single source of Marion's outmigrants. The Marion-suburbs exchange is the structural backbone of Indianapolis-metro migration.
| County | Top inflow sources (people) | Top outflow destinations (people) |
|---|---|---|
| MARION | Hamilton County (IN) 4,325; Johnson County (IN) 3,740; Hendricks County (IN) 3,215 | Hamilton County (IN) 7,017; Hendricks County (IN) 5,815; Johnson County (IN) 5,399 |
| HAMILTON | Marion County (IN) 7,017; Boone County (IN) 712; Madison County (IN) 634 | Marion County (IN) 4,325; Madison County (IN) 1,528; Hancock County (IN) 926 |
| HENDRICKS | Marion County (IN) 5,815; Morgan County (IN) 569; Hamilton County (IN) 402 | Marion County (IN) 3,215; Morgan County (IN) 698; Hamilton County (IN) 551 |
| BOONE | Marion County (IN) 1,488; Hamilton County (IN) 821; Hendricks County (IN) 465 | Marion County (IN) 819; Hamilton County (IN) 712; Hendricks County (IN) 348 |
| MONROE | Marion County (IN) 460; Lawrence County (IN) 339; Greene County (IN) 294 | Marion County (IN) 645; Lawrence County (IN) 543; Greene County (IN) 357 |
| TIPPECANOE | Cook County (IL) 381; Clinton County (IN) 340; White County (IN) 318 | Marion County (IN) 521; Clinton County (IN) 380; Carroll County (IN) 357 |
| ST. JOSEPH | Elkhart County (IN) 2,032; Berrien County (MI) 617; LaPorte County (IN) 444 | Elkhart County (IN) 1,784; Berrien County (MI) 628; Cass County (MI) 448 |
| VANDERBURGH | Warrick County (IN) 1,384; Posey County (IN) 522; Gibson County (IN) 443 | Warrick County (IN) 1,827; Posey County (IN) 633; Gibson County (IN) 353 |
| BARTHOLOMEW | Johnson County (IN) 522; Jackson County (IN) 373; Jennings County (IN) 306 | Johnson County (IN) 472; Jackson County (IN) 383; Marion County (IN) 344 |
| ALLEN | DeKalb County (IN) 616; Whitley County (IN) 500; Huntington County (IN) 490 | DeKalb County (IN) 890; Whitley County (IN) 637; Huntington County (IN) 500 |
| LAKE | Cook County (IL) 8,718; Porter County (IN) 2,344; Will County (IL) 1,069 | Cook County (IL) 4,060; Porter County (IN) 3,275; Marion County (IN) 696 |
| ELKHART | St. Joseph County (IN) 1,784; Kosciusko County (IN) 509; Cass County (MI) 366 | St. Joseph County (IN) 2,032; Kosciusko County (IN) 603; Cass County (MI) 451 |
| WAYNE | Henry County (IN) 188; Fayette County (IN) 163; Preble County (OH) 134 | Henry County (IN) 155; Fayette County (IN) 148; Randolph County (IN) 128 |
| DELAWARE | Madison County (IN) 729; Marion County (IN) 374; Henry County (IN) 255 | Madison County (IN) 500; Marion County (IN) 408; Hamilton County (IN) 291 |
| VIGO | Clay County (IN) 437; Marion County (IN) 260; Vermillion County (IN) 228 | Clay County (IN) 367; Marion County (IN) 322; Sullivan County (IN) 196 |
| GRANT | Madison County (IN) 194; Marion County (IN) 187; Howard County (IN) 161 | Howard County (IN) 152; Delaware County (IN) 138; Madison County (IN) 133 |
| MADISON | Hamilton County (IN) 1,528; Marion County (IN) 1,150; Delaware County (IN) 500 | Delaware County (IN) 729; Marion County (IN) 652; Hamilton County (IN) 634 |
| KOSCIUSKO | Elkhart County (IN) 603; Allen County (IN) 219; Marshall County (IN) 205 | Elkhart County (IN) 509; Allen County (IN) 276; Whitley County (IN) 215 |
Observations: Monroe and Tippecanoe both have Cook County (Chicago) in their top inflow/outflow pairs — these are college-town counties that exchange residents with the Chicago metro. Bartholomew exchanges mainly with Johnson and Jackson — a tight Columbus-area regional economy. Vigo's IRS migration is small-scale within central Indiana (Clay and Sullivan adjacent counties dominate) — consistent with its declining-metro pattern. The metro-suburb exchange and the regional-cluster patterns explain most of the Indiana migration the data shows in the IRS data; out-of-state migration is mostly confined to college-town counties and the Chicago-adjacent counties.
Construction is the #1 NES sector in 53 of 92 Indiana counties. Small construction businesses — independent contractors, framers, electricians, plumbers — are the most common form of "I registered a business" across most of the state. The exceptions tell the local-economy story.
| County | Total nonemp businesses | Top 3 sectors |
|---|---|---|
| MARION | 79,460 | Transportation (21%); Other services (except public (12%); Professional, scientific, (11%) |
| HAMILTON | 35,982 | Professional, scientific, (19%); Real estate (13%); Transportation (12%) |
| HENDRICKS | 15,201 | Transportation (23%); Professional, scientific, (12%); Other services (except public (10%) |
| BOONE | 6,446 | Professional, scientific, (20%); Real estate (12%); Other services (except public (9%) |
| MONROE | 9,931 | Professional, scientific, (15%); Arts, entertainment, (12%); Real estate (11%) |
| TIPPECANOE | 10,873 | Professional, scientific, (15%); Transportation (13%); Real estate (11%) |
| ST. JOSEPH | 17,843 | Transportation (12%); Other services (except public (12%); Professional, scientific, (12%) |
| VANDERBURGH | 11,252 | Other services (except public (14%); Real estate (12%); Transportation (12%) |
| BARTHOLOMEW | 5,027 | Real estate (13%); Other services (except public (12%); Professional, scientific, (11%) |
| ALLEN | 28,148 | Other services (except public (12%); Transportation (11%); Professional, scientific, (11%) |
| LAKE | 34,953 | Transportation (17%); Other services (except public (14%); Real estate (10%) |
| ELKHART | 14,343 | Transportation (15%); Construction (12%); Other services (except public (11%) |
| WAYNE | 3,876 | Construction (15%); Other services (except public (13%); Transportation (11%) |
| DELAWARE | 6,222 | Other services (except public (13%); Construction (12%); Professional, scientific, (11%) |
| VIGO | 5,321 | Other services (except public (12%); Administrative (11%); Transportation (11%) |
| GRANT | 3,439 | Other services (except public (15%); Real estate (10%); Administrative (10%) |
| MADISON | 7,987 | Other services (except public (13%); Construction (13%); Transportation (12%) |
| KOSCIUSKO | 5,446 | Construction (13%); Real estate (12%); Professional, scientific, (11%) |
Hamilton and Boone are the only counties where Professional/Scientific/Technical Services is the top NES sector (19-20% of nonemployer businesses). This is the consultant-economy signature — financial advisors, lawyers, accountants, and tech professionals working as solo entities. Dubois tops with Real Estate (17%) — German-Catholic small-business culture leans into property and rentals. LaGrange spreads across Construction 17%, Retail 13%, and Manufacturing 13% — the Amish small-shop pattern with cabinetry, wood products, and small fabrication all running as nonemployer entities. Switzerland is 24% Construction — a casino-dominated county where everything else is small contracting. Posey's 14% Administrative/Support top sector reflects the contractor base around the petrochemical corridor (cleaning, security, staffing for SABIC and AB-InBev plants).
The IRS migration data has out-of-state destinations and origins for every county. Aggregated to state-level, the picture is clear: Indiana mostly exchanges residents with neighboring states (Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio) plus the major Sunbelt destinations (Florida, Texas, Arizona).
| State | To (out) | From (in) | Net persons | Net AGI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IL | 9,522 | 17,652 | +8,130 | $+355,778,000 |
| FL | 4,214 | 3,121 | -1,093 | $-169,191,000 |
| MI | 3,978 | 3,604 | -374 | $-30,151,000 |
| KY | 3,937 | 5,241 | +1,304 | $+27,216,000 |
| TX | 3,377 | 1,584 | -1,793 | $-59,367,000 |
| OH | 3,197 | 3,848 | +651 | $+34,005,000 |
| CA | 1,855 | 2,342 | +487 | $+8,647,000 |
| AZ | 1,796 | 1,468 | -328 | $-21,429,000 |
| CO | 857 | 394 | -463 | $-38,204,000 |
| GA | 833 | 383 | -450 | $-13,318,000 |
| NC | 666 | 285 | -381 | $-19,295,000 |
| TN | 626 | 505 | -121 | $-12,734,000 |
| NV | 614 | 538 | -76 | $-2,068,000 |
| WA | 545 | 264 | -281 | $-19,931,000 |
| NY | 420 | 1,257 | +837 | $+10,835,000 |
| From → To | State | People | AGI |
|---|---|---|---|
| LAKE → Cook County | IL | 4,060 | $97,778,000 |
| CLARK → Jefferson County | KY | 1,010 | $29,809,000 |
| MARION → Cook County | IL | 890 | $63,025,000 |
| FLOYD → Jefferson County | KY | 747 | $54,791,000 |
| ST. JOSEPH → Berrien County | MI | 628 | $30,313,000 |
| LAKE → Will County | IL | 475 | $13,101,000 |
| MARION → Maricopa County | AZ | 464 | $15,712,000 |
| ELKHART → Cass County | MI | 451 | $23,560,000 |
| ST. JOSEPH → Cass County | MI | 448 | $27,459,000 |
| DEARBORN → Hamilton County | OH | 442 | $14,789,000 |
| MARION → Harris County | TX | 440 | $10,863,000 |
| PORTER → Cook County | IL | 438 | $21,338,000 |
| ST. JOSEPH → Cook County | IL | 430 | $16,765,000 |
| VANDERBURGH → Henderson County | KY | 324 | $6,637,000 |
| HAMILTON → Cook County | IL | 317 | $22,663,000 |
What this shows: Illinois is by far Indiana's biggest migration partner — 9,522 Indianans moved to IL counties in 2021-2022. The single largest flow is Lake County → Cook County (Chicago): 4,060 people taking $98M in AGI. Despite Northwest Indiana's lower cost of living, the Chicago labor market continues to pull workers across the border. Florida is #2 (4,214) — the retiree migration, dominated by departures from Marion (Indianapolis), Hamilton (suburbs), Lake, and Allen. Michigan #3 (3,978) reflects South Bend/Niles cross-border (Berrien County MI is one of the top single destinations for St. Joseph County migrants). Kentucky #4 (3,937) is mostly the Louisville-metro counties (Floyd, Clark) exchanging with Jefferson County, KY. Texas is the only top destination NOT explained by proximity — Marion sends to Harris (Houston), Dallas, and Tarrant counties annually.
The "Marion exodus" pattern in out-of-state moves: Marion residents who leave the state most commonly go to Cook County IL, Maricopa AZ (Phoenix), Harris County TX (Houston), Clark County NV (Las Vegas), Dallas County TX, Franklin County OH (Columbus), Hamilton County OH (Cincinnati), and Tarrant County TX. These are mostly the largest metros in the Sunbelt and the Great Lakes — Marion's outmigrants are following the same major-metro paths as outmigrants from any Midwestern city. The college-town counties (Monroe, Tippecanoe) send disproportionately to Cook County — Purdue and IU graduates flowing to Chicago for early-career professional work.
Where do new Hoosiers come from? Same answer in reverse — Illinois (mostly Cook County into Lake, then Marion and the suburbs), Michigan (cross-border into NE Indiana), Kentucky (cross-river into Floyd/Clark/Vanderburgh), Ohio (Hamilton OH → Dearborn IN, Cincinnati cross-border), Texas, Florida. Indiana is structurally embedded in a five-state migration system. The state's population growth rate is essentially determined by how this system balances each year. In 2021-2022 it was approximately balanced — but the net AGI flow tells a different story (Indiana exports more AGI than it imports, particularly through the Hamilton-to-Cook County wealthy-migrant flow).
Churn rate = (annual inmigrants + annual outmigrants) ÷ non-migrants × 100. It measures how much of a county's population is in motion vs. rooted. The pattern surfaces a counterintuitive truth: higher-prosperity counties have higher churn. Churn rate correlates with household slack at r = +0.36 and with hardship at r = −0.33.
Bedroom suburbs and college towns. People are moving in and out at high rates.
| County | Churn rate |
|---|---|
| HANCOCK | 18.3% |
| JOHNSON | 17.1% |
| BOONE | 16.9% |
| BROWN | 16.7% |
| MONROE | 16.0% |
| HENDRICKS | 15.9% |
| FLOYD | 15.8% |
| OWEN | 14.9% |
| MORGAN | 14.5% |
| CLARK | 14.3% |
| SCOTT | 14.3% |
| PUTNAM | 14.2% |
Manufacturing, Amish-economy, and post-industrial counties. People are staying put.
| County | Churn rate |
|---|---|
| ADAMS | 6.5% |
| DUBOIS | 7.4% |
| DAVIESS | 7.4% |
| ALLEN | 8.0% |
| JAY | 8.3% |
| KNOX | 8.8% |
| LAGRANGE | 8.9% |
| ELKHART | 8.9% |
| WAYNE | 9.1% |
| WABASH | 9.2% |
| GRANT | 9.3% |
| FAYETTE | 9.3% |
What this shows: The counties with the most movement — Hancock 18.3%, Johnson 17.1%, Boone 16.9%, Brown 16.7%, Monroe 16.0%, Hendricks 15.9% — are the bedroom suburbs and college towns. Their populations are constantly turning over with Marion-departing households arriving and university-related residents cycling through. These counties have more household slack on average than the low-churn counties. The counties with the least movement — Adams 6.5%, Daviess 7.4%, Dubois 7.4%, Allen 8.0%, Jay 8.3%, Knox 8.8%, Elkhart 8.9%, LaGrange 8.9%, Wayne 9.1%, Wabash 9.2% — are the rooted populations: Amish/Old-Order communities (LaGrange, Daviess, Adams), German-Catholic small-business towns (Dubois), large self-contained metros (Allen, Elkhart), and stable but declining post-industrial places (Wayne, Wabash, Jay, Knox).
The economic interpretation: population turnover may be a precondition for economic prosperity rather than a result of it. New arrivals bring fresh capital, demand, professional networks, and consumption patterns. Rooted populations consume locally but don't refresh the economic base. The Amish counties (LaGrange, Daviess) are doing fine with low churn because their rooted population still does productive entrepreneurial work. But declining post-industrial counties (Wayne, Jay, Knox) have low churn because no one is choosing to move there — and their local economies stagnate as a result. The Marion-suburbs ring (Hancock, Johnson, Boone, Hendricks) shows the opposite: high churn driven by Marion-departure inflows is a wealth-generation pattern, not a stability problem.
Sources: IRS SOI Tax Stats — Migration Data 2021–2022 (Indiana file, county-to-county inflow + outflow). Census Nonemployer Statistics 2022, table NS2200NONEMP. AGI figures are in inflation-unadjusted 2021-2022 dollars. NES counts only businesses with no paid employees; CBP counts only businesses with paid employees; ACS self-employment is self-reported and inclusive of both.
From ACS 5-Year DP03 occupational data (2019-2023). Every Indiana county's employed workforce is grouped into five standard occupational buckets. This is a different cut than industry mix — industry asks what kind of organization do one works for, occupation asks what kind of work do a resident actually do. A hospital employs both physicians (Mgmt/Sci/Arts occupations) and aides (Service occupations); the industry data alone can't tell them apart.
Hamilton County: 57.6% of workers are in Management, Business, Science, and Arts occupations. LaGrange: 20.5%. LaGrange's largest occupational bucket is Production/Transportation at 39.0% — the Amish-economy manufacturing workforce. These are two genuinely different labor markets, not just "richer" and "poorer" versions of the same one. The kind of work people do is fundamentally different.
Management/Sci/Arts occupational share correlates with household slack at r = +0.62. The equivalent industry-mix measure (knowledge-sector employment) correlated at only r = +0.27. Why the gap: industry mix puts a hospital aide in the same bucket as a physician (both = "healthcare"), but occupational mix puts them in different buckets. The wage and matching-infrastructure differences are mostly between occupations, not between industries.
Service occupations — food prep, personal care, building cleaning, healthcare aides, security — correlate with ALICE+poverty share at r = +0.48 and with slack at r = −0.47. These are the lowest-paid occupational category and the category with the weakest career ladder. Counties with high service-occupation shares (Switzerland 21.8%, Vermillion 20.3%, Fayette 20.1%, Brown 20.0%) are the same counties showing up in the hardship lists. The mechanism is structural: when 1-in-5 workers does this kind of work, the median household economic outcome is bounded.
The work-from-home economy is essentially the Management/Business/Science/Arts occupational economy. The correlation is the strongest single relationship this study has measured anywhere in this data. The implication: WFH expansion is bounded by the occupational mix of the local economy, not by employer policy. A county can have all the broadband in the world, but if its workforce is in Production/Transport occupations, WFH won't go up much. Conversely, a Mgmt/Sci/Arts-heavy workforce will keep working from home regardless of return-to-office mandates because the work itself is portable.
DP03_0027E / DP03_0026E × 100. The "knowledge worker" occupational bucket.
DP03_0031E. Blue-collar manufacturing/logistics labor. LaGrange leads at 39% — the Amish RV/woodworking economy.
DP03_0028E. Food prep, personal care, cleaning, healthcare aides. The lowest-wage occupational bucket.
Selected counties showing the spread. Same data, stacked as 100% bars.
Using occupational shares, every Indiana county sorts into one of six categories. The categories are descriptive — counties within a category share a basic labor-market structure even if other features differ.
| Category | Counties |
|---|---|
| Knowledge metro (11) | BARTHOLOMEW, BOONE, FLOYD, HAMILTON, HANCOCK, HENDRICKS, JOHNSON, MONROE, ST. JOSEPH, TIPPECANOE, WARRICK |
| Mixed professional (8) | ALLEN, BROWN, DEARBORN, DELAWARE, HARRISON, MARION, PORTER, POSEY |
| Mixed services (20) | BLACKFORD, CLARK, CLAY, DECATUR, GRANT, HENRY, HUNTINGTON, JEFFERSON, LAKE, LAWRENCE, PUTNAM, RUSH, STEUBEN, TIPTON, UNION, WABASH, WAYNE, WELLS, WHITE, WHITLEY |
| Manufacturing-heavy (19) | CASS, CLINTON, CRAWFORD, DEKALB, DUBOIS, ELKHART, FULTON, GIBSON, JACKSON, JAY, KOSCIUSKO, LAGRANGE, MARSHALL, MONTGOMERY, NOBLE, PERRY, PIKE, SCOTT, WASHINGTON |
| Trades / construction (23) | ADAMS, BENTON, CARROLL, DAVIESS, FOUNTAIN, FRANKLIN, GREENE, JASPER, JENNINGS, MARTIN, MIAMI, MORGAN, NEWTON, OHIO, OWEN, PARKE, PULASKI, RIPLEY, SPENCER, STARKE, SWITZERLAND, VERMILLION, WARREN |
| Service-dependent (11) | FAYETTE, HOWARD, KNOX, LAPORTE, MADISON, ORANGE, RANDOLPH, SHELBY, SULLIVAN, VANDERBURGH, VIGO |
Industry mix shows about employers; occupational mix shows about workers. For most policy and economic-development questions, occupational mix is the more relevant measure. A county can recruit a new hospital and look better on industry-mix metrics, but if the hospital staffs primarily with aides, dietary, and housekeeping (Service occupations), the household-slack profile of the county doesn't move much. If the same county recruits a physician group or a biotech research operation that staffs with Mgmt/Sci/Arts occupations, the slack profile does move. Economic development decisions made purely on industry count ("the analysis attracted 200 new healthcare jobs") often disappoint because the occupational composition wasn't tracked.
The strongest single relationship in this data is between the Management/Business/Science/Arts occupational share and the bachelor's-degree share — r = +0.94. These two measures are essentially capturing the same underlying phenomenon: how many local workers do the kind of work that requires (and pays for) a college degree. The 6% of variance not shared between them is the interesting residual — counties where degree-holders are not in Mgmt/Sci/Arts occupations (they're working below their credential level) and counties where Mgmt/Sci/Arts work is being done by people without bachelor's degrees (older long-tenure managers, skilled trade-school graduates in technical roles, etc.). Both kinds of mismatch exist, but the dominant signal is alignment: degree-rich counties also have Mgmt-occupation-rich workforces.
The Service occupational share is the lower-bound predictor of hardship — counties with high service shares have high hardship because service occupations pay poorly and ladder slowly. The reverse is also true: counties with low service shares tend to have low hardship, but for two different reasons. Some (Hamilton, Boone) have low service shares because Mgmt/Sci/Arts is high; the workforce is doing other work. Others (LaGrange, Adams) have low service shares because Production/Transport is high; the workforce is doing blue-collar manufacturing. Both are bound to hardship through different mechanisms — Hamilton because the wages are high, LaGrange because the community has alternative income sources (Amish family economy with multiple earners and asset-light living).
The five-bucket DP03 occupational categories are coarse. A "Management, Business, Science, and Arts" bucket includes everyone from a corporate CEO to an elementary teacher to a freelance graphic designer — wage and career trajectory vary enormously inside that bucket. The same is true of Service occupations: dental hygienist, restaurant server, security guard, and home health aide are all in the same bucket but have very different prospects.
To make the occupational analysis more useful one would need two further datasets. ACS S2401 (Occupation by Sex and Median Earnings, available at 5-Year granularity for all 92 counties) breaks each bucket into roughly 24 detailed occupational groups and reports median earnings for each. That would let us see, for example, whether a county's Mgmt/Sci/Arts share is heavy on managers or heavy on teachers and clergy — very different wage outcomes. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) by Indiana MSA reports specific occupational employment and wages by metro — that would show what a registered nurse, software developer, or welder actually earns locally rather than the national average. Both are worth pulling next.
The other piece worth eventually pulling is LEHD/LODES commute-flow data. The Census tracks job-residence pairs through unemployment-insurance records — so the data shows, county by county, how many residents work in their home county vs. commute to Marion, Hamilton, Allen, etc. That would let us measure the "real" local labor market (where one\'s residents actually find work) vs. the "nominal" local labor market (what employer establishments are located within county boundaries). For commuter-belt counties like Hancock, Hendricks, Johnson, and Morgan, the difference is enormous and structurally important.
Sources: Census ACS 5-Year DP03 occupational categories (2019-2023). Aggregate fives-bucket occupational mix from DP03_0027E through DP03_0031E. The five buckets are the standard Census categorization aggregating the 6-digit Standard Occupational Classification system.
Two data sources combined here. ACS S2411 1-Year (2024) gives median earnings by occupational bucket for the 27 most-populous Indiana counties. BLS OEWS May 2024 gives median wages by specific occupation for all 12 Indiana metropolitan areas. Together they let us see two new patterns: (1) how earnings stack up within an occupational bucket across counties, and (2) how the same specific job pays differently in different Indiana metros.
ACS S2411 median earnings for "Construction and extraction occupations": Boone $87,134, Porter $75,728, Johnson $70,569, Hendricks $67,282 at the top. Marion $37,153, Monroe $37,035, Tippecanoe $42,447 at the bottom. The same job title pays more than double depending on county — partly because Boone construction workers are building $400K+ houses for affluent clients while Marion construction workers are doing inner-city remodels. Local labor markets, not just occupations, set wages.
BLS OEWS shows Fast Food workers earning $26,500-$28,760 across all Indiana MSAs — a 9% spread. Nursing assistants $35,990-$38,170 — 6% spread. But Electricians range from $50,500 (Elkhart-Goshen) to $89,000 (Kokomo) — a 1.76× spread. General managers from $92,860 (Terre Haute) to $123,580 (Indianapolis-Carmel) — 1.33× spread. Service-sector wages have a national floor close to minimum wage that levels them out; skilled and professional wages reflect local demand and produce real spreads.
Median earnings for Mgmt/Sci/Arts occupations correlates with household slack at r = +0.88 — stronger than any other variable this study has measured against slack. Higher than education attainment, household income, or migration. What makes a county prosperous on the slack metric isn't whether it has knowledge workers in some abstract sense — it's whether those workers actually get paid Mgmt/Sci/Arts-level wages locally. And that depends on whether the local economy has the kind of employers who can pay those wages.
The Mgmt-to-Service wage ratio is the cleanest measure of within-county wage inequality. Boone 3.6×, Tippecanoe 3.6×, Kosciusko 3.5×, Delaware 3.4×, Porter 3.4× have the widest gaps between top and bottom occupational buckets. Wayne 2.0×, Clark 2.1×, Howard 2.2×, Hancock 2.2×, Madison 2.4× are the most compressed. Wayne's compression reflects post-industrial decline (top wages have fallen toward bottom wages). Boone's spread reflects bifurcation (top wages are still high while service wages are typical).
Civilian employed population 16+ with earnings. 27 metro counties (1-Year coverage).
Median earnings in Mgmt/Sci/Arts ÷ median earnings in Service occupations. National average ~2.5×.
Twelve Indiana metropolitan areas, ten representative occupations, May 2024 median wages from BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Green = highest, red = lowest. The within-occupation spread tells the reader which Indiana metros pay better for which kinds of work.
← Scroll the table horizontally — all 12 metros →
| Occupation | Bloomington | Columbus | Elkhart-Goshen | Evansville | Fort Wayne | Indianapolis-Carmel | Kokomo | Lafayette | Michigan City–La Porte | Muncie | South Bend-Mishawaka | Terre Haute |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| General & operations managers | $101K | $110K | $117K | $102K | $107K | $124K | $98K | $102K | $100K | $94K | $106K | $93K |
| Software developers | $96K | $103K | $99K | $94K | $102K | $106K | $96K | $86K | $95K | $97K | $98K | $96K |
| Accountants and auditors | $74K | $79K | $79K | $75K | $75K | $80K | $76K | $77K | $73K | $69K | $78K | $64K |
| Registered nurses | $78K | $76K | $81K | $79K | $78K | $81K | $85K | $77K | $79K | $78K | $86K | $79K |
| Elementary school teachers | $57K | $57K | $57K | $49K | $57K | $60K | $60K | $59K | $58K | $56K | $50K | $56K |
| Electricians | $64K | $81K | $50K | $77K | $67K | $64K | $89K | $77K | $63K | $63K | $65K | $78K |
| Heavy & tractor-trailer truck drivers | $57K | $57K | $57K | $58K | $60K | $62K | $59K | $58K | $62K | $65K | $58K | $52K |
| Nursing assistants | $37K | $36K | $37K | $36K | $36K | $38K | $38K | $36K | $37K | $36K | $38K | $37K |
| Retail salespersons | $30K | $29K | $32K | $29K | $30K | $31K | $30K | $29K | $29K | $29K | $30K | $28K |
| Fast food & counter workers | $28K | $27K | $28K | $27K | $28K | $29K | $28K | $27K | $28K | $27K | $28K | $26K |
Indianapolis pays the most for management roles but not for skilled trades. General and operations managers earn a median of $123,580 in the Indianapolis-Carmel MSA — well above any other Indiana metro. Software developers, $105,990 — highest in the state. Accountants, $79,560 — highest. But Indianapolis electricians earn $64,120, well below Kokomo electricians at $89,000. The reason: Kokomo's manufacturing base (Stellantis/Chrysler operations) pays union-scale electrician wages tied to factory maintenance; Indianapolis electricians are mostly in residential and small commercial work where unionization is weaker and rates are lower.
Kokomo, Columbus, and Elkhart-Goshen are the surprise winners for skilled trades. Kokomo's electricians lead the state at $89,000, plumbers and machinists post similar premiums. Columbus pays Cummins-corporate scale for accountants and managers. Elkhart-Goshen's RV manufacturing base pays well for managers (the second-highest in the state at $116,550 median) and adequate for production workers — but compressed for electricians (counter-intuitively, the same RV factories run their own electrical work in-house at modest hourly rates because of the dense supply of regional tradespeople). These are the "manufacturing prosperity" counties showing up in the data: not on Mgmt/Sci/Arts wages broadly, but on specific skilled-worker rates tied to industrial demand.
Service-sector wages have hit a national floor. Fast food and counter workers, nursing assistants, retail salespersons, home health aides all show wage spreads of less than 10% across Indiana's 12 MSAs. This is the practical effect of a tight labor market plus a near-uniform minimum wage and the gravitational pull of national fast-food chain pay scales. There is essentially no Indiana metro where a worker can move and earn meaningfully more in the same low-wage occupation. The wage variation across counties for low-wage workers is largely driven by hours, benefits, and scheduling — none of which OEWS measures. The implication: low-wage workers in declining counties cannot easily improve their lot by moving to growing counties, because the wage they would earn is already near identical.
Professional-services wages reward concentration. Software developers, accountants, and managers all show meaningful wage premiums in larger MSAs. Indianapolis-Carmel pays software developers 23% more than Lafayette pays them. The mechanism is well-known in urban economics: more employers in the same field create competition for talent, denser networks for matching, and more career-progression opportunities — all of which translate to higher wages. The implication: a software developer in Bloomington who could move to Indianapolis would likely take a $10-15K raise just from the move. The matching infrastructure conversation this study has having is partly a wage conversation — places with more matching infrastructure pay more, and people respond to the difference by moving.
The Mgmt-Service ratio is a sharper inequality measure than the Gini coefficient. Within Indiana, Boone County's 3.6× ratio means a typical manager earns nearly four times what a typical service worker earns — within the same county, in the same labor market. Wayne County's 2.0× ratio means the same comparison yields a doubling, not a quadrupling. The two reflect different stories: Boone is a high-wage suburb whose service workers also earn a typical service wage (so the gap is wide because the top is so high). Wayne is a low-wage post-industrial city whose service wages are also typical (so the gap is narrow because the top has collapsed). The narrow Wayne ratio is not a sign of healthy equality — it's a sign of upper-tier wage collapse. The wide Boone ratio is not a sign of inequality-creating dysfunction — it's a sign that high-wage employment exists locally and the service sector is its usual self.
The wage data reframes the matching-infrastructure conversation in a useful way. A young person growing up in Wayne County faces a triple constraint: (1) the kinds of jobs available locally are skewed toward service occupations; (2) even within their "matching" occupation, the local pay is lower than it would be in a growing metro; and (3) the matching infrastructure for the better-paid version of their occupation does not exist locally. To get the Indianapolis software-developer wage of $106K, they don't just need to be a software developer — they need to physically be in Indianapolis where the network of employers, recruiters, and informal opportunities exists. Three constraints stack: occupation, wage, and access. The matching-infrastructure policy lever has to address all three to actually move outcomes for residents of declining counties.
For higher-wage skilled trades the picture is different. A Wayne County electrician who is willing to commute (or relocate) to Kokomo earns roughly 40% more for the same work. The wage signal is sharp enough that this kind of intra-state migration does happen — both Kokomo and Columbus have seen surveys of inbound skilled-trade workers from struggling adjacent counties. The signal is also sharp enough that it explains why the post-industrial belt counties don't recover purely by attracting back former residents: even returning workers tend to lose income in the move. Restoring local wages requires restoring local industrial employment that pays at scale — which is a much harder project than recruiting more retail and restaurant jobs.
Location Quotient (LQ) measures how over-represented an occupation is in a metro compared to its national share. LQ = 1 means the same proportion as nationally; LQ = 5 means five times the national concentration. These are the occupations that make each Indiana MSA distinctive — the work that happens here disproportionately. Filtered to occupations with at least 200 workers and LQ ≥ 1.5.
What the LQs say about each metro: Bloomington is a postsecondary-education engine (Business teachers LQ 13, Art/Drama/Music teachers LQ 8.0) plus a small biomedical-engineering cluster (LQ 21.7, IU Health/Cook Group). Columbus is the Cummins engineering complex made visible — Mechanical Engineers LQ 14.2, Industrial Engineers LQ 10.7, CNC operators LQ 14.2. Elkhart-Goshen is the RV industry, period — Fiberglass Laminators LQ 63, RV Service Techs LQ 34, Cabinetmakers LQ 21. Indianapolis is Eli Lilly-pharmaceutical-services-plus-insurance — Bioengineers LQ 3.2, Actuaries LQ 3.2, Occupational Health/Safety Techs LQ 3.5. Kokomo's LQ 4.0 Plumbers/Pipefitters at $89K median, LQ 3.7 Electricians at $89K, LQ 2.7 Industrial Machinery Mechanics at $89K are the Stellantis-plant skilled-trades cluster — the highest electrician wages in the state. Lafayette is Purdue: Engineering Teachers Postsecondary LQ 23.2, Farm and Home Management Educators (extension) LQ 48.2. Terre Haute hosts the federal prison's Correctional Officers (LQ 5.8). South Bend is Notre Dame plus old industrial: Business Teachers Postsecondary LQ 3.3, Psychiatric Technicians LQ 4.1.
Comparing Indianapolis-Carmel MSA median wages (BLS OEWS) to the average of the three Indiana nonmetro areas (Northern, Central, Southern BOS) reveals a striking pattern: moving to Indianapolis pays well for some occupations and almost nothing for others. The metro-wage-premium varies more by occupation than people commonly realize.
| Occupation | Indianapolis median | Rural Indiana median | Indy premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| General/operations managers | $123,580 | $99,950 | +23.6% |
| Carpenters | $61,870 | $50,927 | +21.5% |
| Production supervisors | $73,970 | $63,920 | +15.7% |
| Office clerks (general) | $45,340 | $39,640 | +14.4% |
| Plumbers/Pipefitters | $63,780 | $55,730 | +14.4% |
| Accountants | $79,560 | $70,030 | +13.6% |
| Auto service technicians | $48,840 | $43,020 | +13.5% |
| Heavy truck drivers | $61,750 | $55,763 | +10.7% |
| All occupations | $48,210 | $44,870 | +7.4% |
| Fast food/counter workers | $28,760 | $27,630 | +4.1% |
| Retail salespersons | $30,710 | $29,567 | +3.9% |
| Electricians | $64,120 | $61,803 | +3.7% |
| Nursing assistants | $38,170 | $36,830 | +3.6% |
| Registered nurses | $81,310 | $78,733 | +3.3% |
| Elementary teachers | $59,990 | $58,187 | +3.1% |
| Janitors/cleaners | $35,600 | $34,930 | +1.9% |
The takeaway: Indianapolis pays general/operations managers 23.6% more than rural Indiana ($124K vs $100K), carpenters 21.5% more, production supervisors 15.7% more, accountants 13.6% more. These are real reasons to move to the metro. But Indianapolis pays janitors only 1.9% more, registered nurses 3.3% more, elementary teachers 3.1% more, retail salespersons 3.9% more. The Indianapolis premium is essentially a credentialed-and-skilled-trades premium. A nurse, teacher, retail worker, or janitor who relocates to Indianapolis trades higher housing costs for almost no wage gain. A manager, accountant, carpenter, or skilled tradesperson who relocates can earn 15-25% more for the same work. This is the wage signal that drives the matching-infrastructure migration — it works for some workers and not for others.
The corollary is also important: rural Indiana wages for licensed professionals (nurses, teachers, accountants) are remarkably competitive with Indianapolis wages. A registered nurse in Northern Indiana nonmetro ($77K) earns 95% of a registered nurse in Indianapolis ($81K). For a worker whose occupation has nationally-set licensure wages, staying rural can make economic sense if housing and commute costs are factored in. The professionals who lose by staying rural are the ones whose wages depend on local employer mix and competition (managers, accountants, engineers) — those wages do require metro density.
Sources: ACS S2411 1-Year (2024), Occupation by Median Earnings — 27 Indiana counties. BLS OEWS May 2024 Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Area data — 12 Indiana MSAs.
From the Census LEHD/LODES 2022 origin-destination data — built from unemployment-insurance records that track every job by both work and residence location. Aggregated from 2,604,535 block-to-block flows to 92×92 county-to-county pairs. This is the cleanest direct measurement of Indiana's actual labor markets: where workers live, where jobs are located, and how the two connect.
Marion County has 647,433 jobs and only 460,044 working residents. The 187,389-worker daily gap is filled by commuters from 91 other Indiana counties. Marion's daily-population gain through commuting alone is larger than the entire workforce of any other Indiana county. The largest inbound flows: 79,965 from Hamilton, 43,161 from Hendricks, 34,023 from Johnson, 19,163 from Hancock, 14,749 from Boone, 14,158 from Morgan. Every Indianapolis suburb runs partly on Marion paychecks.
Hamilton has 170,315 jobs of which 55.4% are high-earn ($3,333+/month). Hamilton residents number 182,674, of whom 64.9% are high-earn — a 9.5-percentage-point gap. The mechanism: 79,965 Hamilton residents commute out (mostly to Marion) for higher-paying jobs than the Hamilton job market offers locally. They bring the money back home. Hamilton's prosperity is partly built on Marion's job market — not a substitute for it.
The least self-contained labor markets: Hancock (19.8% work locally), Morgan (19.1%), Switzerland (20.7%), Carroll (20.8%), Hendricks (26.0%). These counties function less as labor markets and more as residential supply for adjacent metros. Hancock's local economy is essentially Greenfield retail and services; the actual job market for its residents is Marion. Morgan's local economy is Mooresville retail and small manufacturing; its actual job market is Marion. The "county" as labor-market unit is a misleading frame for these places.
Counties where local jobs pay MORE than the wage distribution of residents (negative jobs-workers earn gap): Marion (-7.4pp), Elkhart (-6.5pp), Gibson (-11.3pp), Posey (-6.2pp), Tipton (-6.8pp). The high-paying jobs in these counties are largely filled by commuters from elsewhere, not by local residents. Marion has 647K jobs paying mostly well, but Marion residents earn less than Marion jobs would suggest because the better-paying Marion jobs are filled by people from Hamilton, Hendricks, Johnson, and Boone. The wealth created stays in the suburbs.
jobs − residents who work. Positive = imports workers daily.
Negative numbers; the more negative, the more "bedroom" the county.
Allen, Elkhart, Vanderburgh top — large enough to absorb their own workforce.
Hancock, Morgan, Switzerland — fewer than 1 in 5 residents work in-county.
| From → To | Workers/day | Pattern |
|---|---|---|
| HAMILTON->MARION | 79,965 | Indy suburb → city |
| MARION->HAMILTON | 43,352 | City → suburb |
| HENDRICKS->MARION | 43,161 | Indy suburb → city |
| JOHNSON->MARION | 34,023 | Indy suburb → city |
| MARION->HENDRICKS | 27,903 | City → suburb |
| PORTER->LAKE | 24,776 | Cross-county |
| ST. JOSEPH->ELKHART | 22,892 | Cross-county |
| HANCOCK->MARION | 19,163 | Indy suburb → city |
| MARION->JOHNSON | 17,732 | City → suburb |
| WARRICK->VANDERBURGH | 14,986 | Cross-county |
| BOONE->MARION | 14,749 | Indy suburb → city |
| MORGAN->MARION | 14,158 | Indy suburb → city |
| LAKE->PORTER | 13,385 | Cross-county |
| MARION->BOONE | 11,645 | City → suburb |
| MADISON->MARION | 11,633 | Indy suburb → city |
The Marion-Hamilton corridor is the central labor flow in the state. 79,965 Hamilton residents commute to Marion daily. 43,352 Marion residents commute to Hamilton. The net daily flow from Hamilton to Marion is 36,613 workers — and they are disproportionately the higher-paid workers (the high-earn share differential confirms this). Hamilton's apparent prosperity in median income, household slack, and home values is partly a transfer effect from the Marion labor market. If Marion's job base shrank, Hamilton would feel it within months — not as a population loss but as an income loss.
Hancock County is almost not a labor market at all. 19.8% of Hancock workers work in Hancock. 80% commute out — 19,163 to Marion, others to Hamilton and Madison. The "Hancock economy" is Greenfield retail, services, and a small light-industrial base. The actual economic activity that produces Hancock household income happens 20-40 miles west in the Indianapolis metro. This is true to varying degrees of Hendricks, Johnson, Morgan, Hancock, and Boone — the Indianapolis ring is one labor market with a six-county residential footprint.
The "inner-city paradox" is real and measurable. Marion, Elkhart, Gibson, Vanderburgh, and Tippecanoe all have local jobs that pay better than the resident wage distribution would suggest. The best-paying jobs in these counties are filled by commuters. Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett's office has published estimates that about 250,000 commuters work in Marion daily — the LODES data confirms 187,389 net plus additional in/out churn. Marion residents number 977,203 and their household economic outcomes are dragged down by the gap between which Marion jobs exist (mostly high-paying) and which Marion residents can fill (constrained by education, transportation, and matching infrastructure). The story of Indianapolis is two stories: a thriving regional job center, and a city whose own residents only partially benefit from the jobs that are physically located within its borders.
The "self-contained" counties have a different problem. Allen (72.3% work locally), Elkhart (72.1%), Vanderburgh (67.8%) absorb most of their own workforces. That's a sign of a functioning local labor market — but the wage levels matter. Allen has plenty of jobs but moderate wages; Elkhart has lots of RV-manufacturing jobs at decent blue-collar wages but limited paths upward; Vanderburgh has Evansville healthcare and manufacturing but the same constrained career ladder. Self-containment without high wages is just a smaller version of the same matching-infrastructure problem.
The matching-infrastructure hypothesis is now empirically confirmed three ways. The IRS migration data showed people moving toward Hamilton and away from Monroe and Vigo. The wage data showed wages cluster geographically (Indianapolis software developers earn 23% more than Lafayette ones). And now the LODES data shows the daily commute flows that knit the matching infrastructure together. The Indianapolis metro's matching infrastructure pulls workers from a 60-mile radius (Tipton, Shelby, Decatur, Putnam, Madison, Howard, and back). The post-industrial-belt counties don't have a comparable pull because their wage premiums aren't sharp enough to overcome commute friction. The economic geography of Indiana is shaped not by where people live but by where work is — and the "where work is" map has gotten progressively more concentrated.
The LODES OD file lets us see commute flows by earnings tier, not just by total. Once the reader split the daily flows into high-earn ($3,333+/month) and low-earn ($1,250/month or less), a sharper picture emerges. The suburbs send their high-earners into Marion. Marion sends its low-earners out to suburban warehouses, retail, and service jobs. The reverse commute is real, and it is income-tiered.
58,850 of Hamilton's 79,965 daily Marion-bound commuters earn more than $3,333/month. 75% of Boone→Marion, 69% of Hendricks→Marion, 68% of Hancock→Marion, 67% of Morgan→Marion, 66% of Johnson→Marion are similarly high-earn. The suburbs deliver the high-wage talent to the city's professional-services jobs. This is the flow that creates Marion's per-job high-wage profile.
The reverse-commute is dominated by lower-wage Marion residents traveling to suburban service-economy jobs. Marion→Hendricks: 6,170 low-earners (22% of the 27,903-worker flow) — warehouse and logistics. Marion→Johnson: 4,166 low-earners (23%) — suburban retail and service. Marion→Hamilton: 8,129 low-earners (19%) — cleaning, food service, retail in Carmel/Fishers. The pattern is clean: the city sends its low-wage workforce to the suburbs to staff suburban consumer-facing jobs while the suburbs send their high-wage workforce to the city to fill professional jobs. Both flows are large and both are income-stratified.
| Flow | Total | High-earn % | Low-earn % | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HAMILTON → MARION | 79,965 | 74% | 12% | Suburb→city (high) |
| MARION → HAMILTON | 43,352 | 53% | 19% | City→suburb (low) |
| HENDRICKS → MARION | 43,161 | 69% | 12% | Suburb→city (high) |
| JOHNSON → MARION | 34,023 | 66% | 14% | Suburb→city (high) |
| MARION → HENDRICKS | 27,903 | 43% | 22% | City→suburb (low) |
| PORTER → LAKE | 24,776 | 61% | 15% | Mixed |
| ST. JOSEPH → ELKHART | 22,892 | 65% | 12% | Mixed |
| HANCOCK → MARION | 19,163 | 68% | 12% | Suburb→city (high) |
| MARION → JOHNSON | 17,732 | 41% | 23% | City→suburb (low) |
| WARRICK → VANDERBURGH | 14,986 | 57% | 18% | Mixed |
| BOONE → MARION | 14,749 | 75% | 11% | Suburb→city (high) |
| MORGAN → MARION | 14,158 | 67% | 12% | Suburb→city (high) |
| LAKE → PORTER | 13,385 | 51% | 21% | Mixed |
| MARION → BOONE | 11,645 | 48% | 18% | City→suburb (low) |
| MADISON → MARION | 11,633 | 60% | 14% | Mixed |
| ELKHART → ST. JOSEPH | 9,988 | 47% | 23% | Mixed |
| MADISON → HAMILTON | 8,327 | 53% | 16% | Mixed |
| CLARK → FLOYD | 7,636 | 50% | 19% | Mixed |
The LODES OD data splits commute flows by age tier (under 30, 30-54, 55+). The age composition of flows shows what kind of work is being done. Older professional flows look like Hamilton → Marion (17% under-30) — mature careers in established jobs. Younger flows look like Marion → Johnson (33% under-30) and Marion → Hendricks (30%) — entry-level service and warehouse work. The reverse commute is younger than the forward commute. Marion sends young workers OUT to suburban warehouses and retail; the suburbs send older workers IN to Marion's professional jobs.
Of 79,965 Hamilton residents who commute to Marion daily, only 13,901 are under 30. The flow is dominated by mid-career and older professionals (30-54 and 55+). This is the established-career signature.
Of 17,732 Marion residents commuting to Johnson, 5,898 are under 30. Marion → Hendricks: 30% under-30. Marion → Boone: 29% under-30. The reverse commute is significantly younger — these are entry-level warehouse, retail, and food-service jobs in the suburban consumer economy.
LaGrange has the youngest inbound-commuter mix in Indiana — 4,282 of its 13,419 daily inbound commuters are under 30. The Amish-economy manufacturing workforce is structurally younger than the state average. Older workers are more often on farms or in family businesses; the formal-payroll workforce skews young.
Johnson 29.9% under-30, Hendricks 29.4%, Boone 27.2%. The Indianapolis-ring logistics and warehouse counties have the largest concentration of jobs filled by young workers. This is the Amazon/FedEx/retail-distribution warehouse economy — physically demanding work paying moderate wages with high turnover.
Sources: Census LEHD LODES8 (2022 vintage) — Indiana origin-destination (OD), work area characteristics (WAC), residence area characteristics (RAC) at Census block level. Aggregated to county pairs via FIPS county codes. Includes "main" jobs only (primary employment). Earnings tiers: low ≤ $1,250/mo, mid $1,251-$3,333/mo, high > $3,333/mo.
From the same LEHD/LODES 2022 data, but using the full demographic dimensions — age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and 20-sector industry mix — for jobs in each county (WAC) and workers living in each county (RAC). Available for all 92 counties since LEHD is built from unemployment-insurance records and doesn't have the small-county suppression problem that affects CBP. Where dimensions differ between "jobs" and "residents," that gap is itself informative — it shows who fills the jobs that are physically located in a county.
The CBP-based "Industry" tab earlier shows zero counties where manufacturing is the top employer in 2023. The LODES data shows it's actually 59 of 92. The discrepancy is data-suppression: CBP blanks out manufacturing in small counties where it would reveal individual-employer data. LODES uses unemployment-insurance records that don't suffer that limitation. Indiana remains a manufacturing state — far more thoroughly than CBP-based analyses suggest. Health Care leads in 18 counties (mostly Indianapolis metro + small rural). Educational Services leads in 4 (college and college-adjacent counties).
The education gap between jobs and residents reveals the bedroom-suburb pattern with hard data. Boone -6.9pp, Hendricks -4.6pp, Johnson -4.2pp, Hancock -3.8pp, Morgan -4.0pp — every Indianapolis ring suburb has residents who are significantly more educated than the local job mix. The local jobs they fill exist somewhere else. Conversely, Marion has +3.2pp (jobs more educated than residents) — Marion has more degreed work than its own residents can fill, importing degreed labor from the suburbs.
Public Administration's share of local jobs varies enormously. Sullivan (17.8%, Carlisle Wabash Valley Correctional Facility), Parke (14.1%, Rockville Correctional Facility + county seat), Miami (10.7%, Grissom Air Reserve Base), Perry (10.5%, Tell City + correctional) top the list — prisons and federal installations dominate. Hamilton (2.2%), LaGrange (2.0%), and Elkhart (1.9%) sit at the bottom — private-sector-dominated economies. Government share of jobs correlates negatively with slack (r = −0.32) — government-heavy counties tend to be lower-slack counties, both because government work pays moderately and because counties pick up federal facilities partly to compensate for weak private sectors.
The gender composition of locally-located jobs varies wildly by county. Brown 60.2%, Ohio 57.4%, Franklin 56.6%, Switzerland 56.1% are female-skewed — tourism and hospitality dominate. Posey 35.1%, Gibson 34.7%, Spencer 38.9%, LaGrange 39.8% are male-skewed — industrial manufacturing and Amish-economy work. Residents' gender mix is essentially 48-50% female everywhere; the local-job mix is what gets gendered. In Posey, women who want full-time work largely have to commute out — the local labor market doesn't match the resident gender distribution.
Local jobs bach+% minus resident bach+%. Negative = residents commute out for higher-skill work.
CNS20 sector from LODES — prisons, federal facilities, local govt. Includes employment CBP excludes.
Tourism, healthcare, education-heavy counties.
Manufacturing + agriculture + Amish-economy + industrial corridor.
RV manufacturing belt + meatpacking corridor + NW Indiana logistics.
| Sector | Counties |
|---|---|
| Manufacturing | 59 |
| Health Care/Social Assistance | 18 |
| Educational Services | 4 |
| Transportation/Warehousing | 3 |
| Accommodation/Food Services | 2 |
| Arts/Entertainment/Rec | 2 |
| Public Administration | 2 |
| Retail Trade | 1 |
| Professional/Scientific/Tech | 1 |
Manufacturing is #1 in 59/92 — once the reader stop letting CBP suppression hide it.
The CBP vs LODES manufacturing discrepancy matters enormously. The "Business & Industry" tab earlier said healthcare is the #1 sector in 70 of 92 counties and manufacturing is #1 in zero. The LODES data — which doesn't suffer from cell-suppression — says manufacturing is #1 in 59 counties. Both are true measurements; they just answer different questions. CBP asks "what kind of organizations operate here that the analysis is allowed to count without revealing employer data?" LODES asks "what industry is providing the most jobs here?" The LODES answer is the more accurate one for understanding the actual employment base. Indiana is still substantially a manufacturing state in 2022, in ways the published CBP tables don't show.
The bedroom-suburb education gap is the cleanest evidence yet for the matching-infrastructure thesis. Boone, Hendricks, Johnson, Hancock, Morgan all have populations of degreed residents that exceed what local jobs can absorb. Boone residents are 31% bachelor's+ but Boone jobs are 24% bachelor's+. That 7-point gap is filled by commuting out. The reverse pattern (Marion +3.2pp, Martin +1.8pp, Vanderburgh +0.8pp, St. Joseph +1.4pp, Allen +0.2pp) shows where the jobs require more credentials than the local population provides — these counties import degreed labor from elsewhere. Indianapolis-Marion is the clearest case: its job mix demands more education than its resident workforce can supply, so it imports educated workers from the suburbs every day.
Government-heavy counties are an underdiscussed economic category. Sullivan, Parke, Miami, Perry, Switzerland, Pike, Crawford, Union, Benton, Ohio all derive 8-18% of local employment from public administration. Most of this is federal facilities (Grissom Air Reserve, Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane satellites) and state correctional facilities (Carlisle, Rockville, Branchville, etc.). These employment bases are stable and recession-resistant but they also pay moderately and grow slowly. The presence of these facilities is partly historical accident (where the federal government chose to put things in the 1940s-70s) and partly a deliberate political-economic compensation for counties that lost industrial employment. Either way, they constitute a significant share of the local labor market that conventional industry analyses miss.
The gender-composition of jobs is a structural feature of the local economy. Brown County's 60% female job mix reflects tourism, hospitality, and arts/recreation — industries that are nationally female-skewed. Posey County's 35% female job mix reflects chemical/petrochemical manufacturing and Ohio River industrial — industries that are nationally male-skewed. These percentages aren't preferences; they're the shape of the available work. In Posey, a woman wanting a full-time, well-paid job has to commute to Evansville (~30 min) because the local jobs aren't there for her. In Brown, a man wanting a full-time year-round job has to commute to Bloomington or Indianapolis for the same reason. The labor market by-county-and-gender is the missing dimension in most economic-development analyses.
The Hispanic-share-of-jobs map traces RV manufacturing and meatpacking corridors directly. Elkhart 15.6%, Lake 14.9%, Carroll 14.4%, Cass 13.8%, Clinton 12.2% lead. Elkhart and Lake's Hispanic workforces are concentrated in RV/steel manufacturing — both industries with significant Latino representation. Carroll, Cass, and Clinton are tied to meatpacking (Tyson, Indiana Packers) which has hired heavily from Latino communities since the 1990s. The Hispanic share of jobs in these counties is not a coincidence; it's the residue of specific industry hiring patterns over three decades. The composition of the labor force is largely determined by which industries chose to locate where and what hiring networks they built.
The "young jobs" pattern in Hendricks, Boone, and Johnson is the warehouse and logistics signature. Hendricks jobs are 29.4% under-30 (vs. residents 22.5% under-30). Boone 27.3% (vs 20.8%). Johnson 30.0% (vs 23.9%). These are the Indianapolis-ring counties that host massive logistics operations (FedEx, Amazon, retail distribution centers) plus retail and food service tied to the suburban consumer base. These jobs hire young, pay moderately, and have high turnover. The residents who live in those counties skew older and more affluent because they commute to professional work elsewhere — usually Marion. The two populations within the same county boundaries are operating in different labor markets.
Comparing the industry mix of jobs located in a county (LODES WAC) to the industry mix of residents who work somewhere (LODES RAC) reveals counties whose residents work in industries the local economy doesn't actually provide. The pattern is sharpest for the post-industrial counties and the Indianapolis ring.
Residents work in this industry more than local jobs offer — they commute out for this kind of work.
| County | Exported industry | Gap | Residents | Local jobs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PIKE | Manufacturing | +15.7pp | 21.5% | 5.9% |
| SWITZERLAND | Manufacturing | +14.0pp | 21.4% | 7.4% |
| OHIO | Manufacturing | +13.2pp | 16.6% | 3.4% |
| BROWN | Manufacturing | +9.7pp | 17.1% | 7.4% |
| CARROLL | Health Care/Social Assistance | +9.5pp | 12.9% | 3.4% |
| POSEY | Health Care/Social Assistance | +9.4pp | 13.5% | 4.1% |
| UNION | Health Care/Social Assistance | +9.1pp | 16.6% | 7.5% |
| MARTIN | Health Care/Social Assistance | +8.4pp | 12.2% | 3.8% |
| STARKE | Manufacturing | +7.9pp | 24.1% | 16.2% |
| ST. JOSEPH | Manufacturing | +7.7pp | 18.9% | 11.2% |
| OWEN | Health Care/Social Assistance | +7.6pp | 12.5% | 4.9% |
| DEKALB | Health Care/Social Assistance | +7.6pp | 12.2% | 4.7% |
| BOONE | Health Care/Social Assistance | +7.4pp | 15.1% | 7.7% |
| SPENCER | Health Care/Social Assistance | +7.1pp | 12.2% | 5.1% |
| PARKE | Health Care/Social Assistance | +7.0pp | 11.8% | 4.9% |
Local jobs in this industry exceed what residents do — commuters from elsewhere fill them.
| County | Imported industry | Gap | Residents | Local jobs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OWEN | Manufacturing | -30.4pp | 21.8% | 52.2% |
| BOONE | Transportation/Warehousing | -28.2pp | 6.8% | 35.0% |
| MARTIN | Professional/Scientific/Tech | -25.2pp | 4.8% | 30.0% |
| GIBSON | Manufacturing | -23.2pp | 24.7% | 47.9% |
| SWITZERLAND | Arts/Entertainment/Rec | -23.2pp | 7.8% | 31.0% |
| WHITLEY | Manufacturing | -17.2pp | 25.6% | 42.8% |
| OHIO | Arts/Entertainment/Rec | -17.0pp | 5.9% | 22.9% |
| CARROLL | Manufacturing | -16.3pp | 25.2% | 41.4% |
| CLAY | Manufacturing | -15.1pp | 21.5% | 36.5% |
| DECATUR | Manufacturing | -13.2pp | 23.2% | 36.4% |
| POSEY | Manufacturing | -12.4pp | 18.9% | 31.3% |
| ORANGE | Accommodation/Food Services | -12.2pp | 18.6% | 30.8% |
| CLINTON | Manufacturing | -12.1pp | 26.8% | 39.0% |
| HENDRICKS | Transportation/Warehousing | -12.1pp | 10.0% | 22.1% |
| DEKALB | Manufacturing | -12.0pp | 33.8% | 45.8% |
Key patterns: Pike, Switzerland, Ohio, Brown all export manufacturing workers — their residents drive 30+ minutes to factory jobs while the local economy runs on extraction or tourism. Hendricks imports transportation/warehousing labor (10% of residents work in it, 22% of local jobs are in it) — the Plainfield logistics complex. Boone imports transportation/warehousing labor too (residents 6.8%, local jobs 35%) — the LEAP District warehouses and supplier base. Martin imports professional/scientific/technical workers (residents 4.8%, jobs 30%) — Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center contracts. Switzerland imports arts/entertainment workers (residents 7.8%, jobs 31%) — the casino. Owen imports manufacturing (residents 22%, jobs 52%) — the Spencer plants commute in from Bloomington.
Sources: Census LEHD LODES8 (2022 vintage) — Indiana WAC and RAC files at Census-block granularity, aggregated to county totals. Dimensions: age (CA01-03), earnings tier (CE01-03), sex (CS01-02), race (CR01-05/07), Hispanic origin (CT01-02), education for workers 30+ (CD01-04), and 20-sector industry mix (CNS01-20).
Throughout this dashboard this study has used broad labor-market categories — "managers", "service occupations", "knowledge workers" — because that's how the Census reports the data. But those buckets contain very different specific jobs with very different wages. This tab opens up the buckets. The data is BLS OEWS May 2024 detailed-occupation data; the analysis use Indianapolis-Carmel MSA as the example because it has the most variation, but the same kind of disaggregation applies everywhere.
"Management occupations" in Indianapolis splits into 28 specific sub-occupations. The median wage range is $50K (Preschool Education and Childcare Administrators) to $214K (Chief Executives). When the dashboard's earlier numbers said "Indianapolis pays general managers 23% more than rural Indiana," that referred specifically to "General and Operations Managers" — the catch-all 16,750-person bucket that itself spans department heads, store managers, plant supervisors, and small-business owners. The wage variation inside the manager category is larger than the wage variation between most occupations and any other occupation.
The most-employed specific occupation in the Indianapolis MSA is warehouse-and-distribution labor — picking, packing, and moving goods in fulfillment centers and shipping operations. 46,530 workers, more than 50% larger than the next biggest occupation (Fast Food workers, 30,950). Median wage $41,680, top-10% $52,810. This is the actual job base of the Indianapolis distribution-economy, not the abstract "Management/Sci/Arts" share.
The top four most-employed occupations — Laborers/Movers (46,530), Fast Food (30,950), Retail Sales (28,710), Registered Nurses (26,240) — together employ 132,430 people. That's 13% of all Indianapolis-MSA jobs concentrated in four specific kinds of work. The "diverse metro labor market" of Indianapolis is, at this level of detail, dominated by warehouse logistics + service consumption + healthcare practice. The rest of the long tail (over 600 specific occupations) employs the remaining 87%.
The "service occupations" category groups together Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers ($80,700 median), Firefighters ($66,290), Medical Assistants ($45,080), Restaurant Cooks ($36,040), Janitors ($35,600), and Bartenders ($23,610). When the dashboard's correlations say "service-occupation share correlates with hardship at r = +0.48," that's true on average — but a county whose service share is heavy on Police, Firefighters, and Medical Assistants is very different from one whose service share is heavy on Fast Food and Bartending. The 2-digit occupational bucket conflates very different kinds of work.
Sorted by median wage. Each row is a specific BLS occupational code with at least 100 workers in Indianapolis.
| Specific occupation | Employment | Median wage | 90th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chief Executives | 920 | $214,170 | — |
| Architectural and Engineering Managers | 1,660 | $156,820 | $219,860 |
| Financial Managers | 4,750 | $139,660 | $228,110 |
| Computer and Information Systems Managers | 3,870 | $138,920 | $209,810 |
| Purchasing Managers | 460 | $131,610 | $204,740 |
| Human Resources Managers | 1,240 | $131,480 | $216,740 |
| Sales Managers | 3,880 | $131,110 | — |
| Marketing Managers | 1,920 | $127,770 | $212,420 |
| General and Operations Managers | 16,750 | $123,580 | — |
| Industrial Production Managers | 1,940 | $120,810 | $206,610 |
| Administrative Services Managers | 2,430 | $111,910 | $202,150 |
| Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers | 1,600 | $106,400 | $164,690 |
| Fundraising Managers | 130 | $103,810 | $221,990 |
| Medical and Health Services Managers | 4,940 | $103,110 | $172,970 |
| Construction Managers | 2,310 | $102,720 | $168,790 |
| Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary | 2,070 | $101,740 | $137,890 |
| Facilities Managers | 1,410 | $99,080 | $175,450 |
| Education Administrators, Postsecondary | 650 | $96,480 | $221,940 |
| Education Administrators, All Other | 130 | $84,570 | $107,830 |
| Natural Sciences Managers | 960 | $83,530 | $167,020 |
| Managers, All Other | 3,990 | $78,820 | $169,800 |
| Social and Community Service Managers | 940 | $71,640 | $115,800 |
| Property, Real Estate, and Community Association Managers | 1,600 | $66,010 | $125,000 |
| Lodging Managers | 310 | $63,950 | $100,350 |
| Entertainment and Recreation Managers, Except Gambling | 140 | $63,420 | $165,300 |
| Food Service Managers | 1,980 | $62,510 | $97,740 |
| Education and Childcare Administrators, Preschool and Daycare | 360 | $49,800 | $82,360 |
| Legislators | 300 | — | — |
| Specific occupation | Employment | Median wage |
|---|---|---|
| Fast Food and Counter Workers | 30,950 | $28,760 |
| Home Health and Personal Care Aides | 21,760 | $31,490 |
| Janitors and Cleaners, Except Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners | 16,290 | $35,600 |
| Waiters and Waitresses | 15,910 | $28,180 |
| First-Line Supervisors of Food Preparation and Serving Workers | 9,660 | $43,180 |
| Nursing Assistants | 9,430 | $38,170 |
| Cooks, Restaurant | 9,210 | $36,040 |
| Security Guards | 8,290 | $39,030 |
| Medical Assistants | 8,130 | $45,080 |
| Landscaping and Groundskeeping Workers | 6,960 | $37,380 |
| Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners | 5,160 | $31,640 |
| Food Preparation Workers | 5,150 | $31,180 |
| Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers | 4,690 | $80,700 |
| Bartenders | 4,030 | $23,610 |
| Dining Room and Cafeteria Attendants and Bartender Helpers | 4,000 | $29,320 |
| Hosts and Hostesses, Restaurant, Lounge, and Coffee Shop | 3,720 | $29,650 |
| Firefighters | 3,660 | $66,290 |
| Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria | 3,150 | $36,100 |
| Childcare Workers | 3,110 | $29,620 |
| Animal Caretakers | 2,630 | $29,090 |
This is what the Indianapolis economy actually is, ranked by number of people employed in each specific occupation.
| # | Specific occupation | Employment | Median wage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers, Hand | 46,530 | $41,680 |
| 2 | Fast Food and Counter Workers | 30,950 | $28,760 |
| 3 | Retail Salespersons | 28,710 | $30,710 |
| 4 | Registered Nurses | 26,240 | $81,310 |
| 5 | Stockers and Order Fillers | 22,000 | $35,740 |
| 6 | Home Health and Personal Care Aides | 21,760 | $31,490 |
| 7 | Office Clerks, General | 20,960 | $45,340 |
| 8 | Cashiers | 20,070 | $29,010 |
| 9 | Customer Service Representatives | 19,470 | $42,130 |
| 10 | Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers | 19,340 | $61,750 |
| 11 | General and Operations Managers | 16,750 | $123,580 |
| 12 | Janitors and Cleaners, Except Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners | 16,290 | $35,600 |
| 13 | Waiters and Waitresses | 15,910 | $28,180 |
| 14 | Miscellaneous Assemblers and Fabricators | 12,460 | $39,680 |
| 15 | Industrial Truck and Tractor Operators | 11,290 | $45,840 |
| 16 | Accountants and Auditors | 10,760 | $79,560 |
| 17 | Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Except Technical and Scientific Products | 10,460 | $65,150 |
| 18 | Maintenance and Repair Workers, General | 10,350 | $49,100 |
| 19 | Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks | 10,010 | $47,640 |
| 20 | First-Line Supervisors of Food Preparation and Serving Workers | 9,660 | $43,180 |
| 21 | Nursing Assistants | 9,430 | $38,170 |
| 22 | Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education | 9,380 | $59,990 |
| 23 | Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks | 9,350 | $48,060 |
| 24 | Cooks, Restaurant | 9,210 | $36,040 |
| 25 | Construction Laborers | 9,170 | $50,070 |
| 26 | Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel | 8,890 | $64,370 |
| 27 | First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers | 8,390 | $72,220 |
| 28 | Light Truck Drivers | 8,370 | $45,010 |
| 29 | Security Guards | 8,290 | $39,030 |
| 30 | Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary | 8,190 | $30,890 |
Median annual wages for specific occupations across the 12 Indiana MSAs. Green = highest, red = lowest. Where one lives really does change what an electrician or a software developer earns — but where one lives does not change much what an elementary teacher or a registered nurse earns.
| Occupation | Indianapolis | Fort Wayne | Evansville | South Bend | Bloomington | Lafayette | Columbus | Elkhart-Goshen | Kokomo | Muncie | Terre Haute | Michigan City |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Registered Nurses | $81K | $77K | $79K | $85K | $78K | $77K | $76K | $81K | $84K | $77K | $79K | $79K |
| Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers | $49K | $50K | $50K | $47K | $47K | $48K | $46K | $49K | $49K | $49K | $46K | $49K |
| Electricians | $64K | $66K | $77K | $64K | $64K | $76K | $80K | $50K | $89K | $62K | $77K | $63K |
| Software Developers | $105K | $102K | $94K | $97K | $96K | $85K | $103K | $99K | $96K | $96K | $96K | $95K |
| Pharmacists | $139K | $140K | $137K | $138K | $134K | $119K | $130K | $138K | $142K | $131K | $138K | $133K |
| Elementary School Teachers | $59K | $56K | $49K | $50K | $56K | $58K | $56K | $56K | $60K | $55K | $55K | $58K |
| Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers | $80K | $75K | $67K | $70K | $69K | $75K | $73K | $74K | $63K | $68K | $57K | $64K |
| Firefighters | $66K | $75K | $67K | $54K | $38K | $55K | $44K | $64K | — | $67K | $45K | $58K |
| Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics | $62K | $57K | $55K | $61K | $60K | $59K | $50K | $58K | $68K | $50K | $52K | $60K |
| Sales Reps, Services (insurance/financial excluded) | $64K | $57K | $59K | $59K | $52K | $59K | $58K | $61K | $50K | $59K | $56K | $58K |
| General & Operations Managers | $123K | $106K | $102K | $106K | $100K | $102K | $109K | $116K | $97K | $94K | $92K | $99K |
| Medical & Health Services Managers | $103K | $102K | $99K | $99K | $100K | $100K | $96K | $102K | $97K | $97K | $97K | $96K |
Throughout the analysis this study has used aggregated occupational and industry categories because that's how Census reports the data. The aggregations are useful — they let us compute correlations and identify patterns across all 92 counties. But the aggregations also flatten real differences. When It can be said "Hamilton County is 57.6% Management/Business/Science/Arts occupations," the analysis mean Hamilton is 57.6% in a bucket that contains everyone from elementary school teachers to senior corporate executives. That's a real measurement but it elides the question of which specific jobs are filling the bucket. A 57.6% Mgmt/Sci/Arts share dominated by Eli Lilly research scientists is very different from a 57.6% Mgmt/Sci/Arts share dominated by elementary school teachers and clergy.
The S2411 county-level data (used in the Wages tab) does break the categories into sub-buckets at the county level — Healthcare Practitioners separately from Healthcare Support, Computer/Engineering separately from Education/Legal/Arts, Sales separately from Office/Admin. That helps. But the Census doesn't publish 6-digit SOC-level detail at the county level for confidentiality reasons. The BLS OEWS data the analysis just used to make this tab does publish 6-digit detail, but only at the metro level — so it works for the 12 Indiana MSAs but not for the 30+ rural counties.
The practical implication: when reading any of the earlier tabs in this dashboard, the broad categories should be understood as population descriptors, not as homogeneous things. "Manager" doesn't mean one job; it means a population of workers in a specific Census bucket whose composition the analysis can only partially see. The correlations this study has found are real signals about how those populations behave on average. But for any specific county or any specific worker, the average obscures more than it reveals. The 23.6% Indianapolis manager wage premium the analysis cited earlier is the premium for the General-and-Operations-Managers catch-all bucket — not the premium for any specific manager job a real person might hold. Some specific managerial jobs (Chief Executive, Financial Manager) have larger metro premiums; others (Food Service Manager, Lodging Manager) have much smaller ones.
This is one of the limitations of every economic-geography analysis built from Census occupational data. The level of aggregation determines what one can see. The trade-off is between covering all 92 counties (which requires aggregated categories) and seeing specific job titles (which requires the metro-level OEWS data and excludes rural Indiana). The dashboard tries to do both — broad categories for full state coverage, then drill-downs at the metro level for the 12 MSAs. But a reader is right that the categories themselves can mislead, and the dashboard's headline numbers should always be read with the disaggregation in mind.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics May 2024, Indianapolis-Carmel-Greenwood MSA (code 26900) and other Indiana MSAs at 6-digit SOC detail.
From the Census LEHD Job-to-Job Origin-Destination (J2JOD) data — built from quarterly worker-level unemployment-insurance records that track when individual workers change jobs. EE = Employer-to-Employer transitions (worker A leaves Employer X and arrives at Employer Y within the same quarter). AQHire = Adjacent-Quarter Hires (worker comes into employment from non-employment). J2J = total mobility events. The data is state-level only for the years available in this download (2019-2022 Q1).
In 2019, 624,613 Indiana workers changed jobs — either moving directly to a new employer (EE = 447,974) or being newly hired into work from non-employment (AQHire = 176,639). Indiana had roughly 3.3 million employed workers that year, so the annual job-change rate is about 19%. Indiana's labor market is not static; roughly one in five Hoosier workers is in a new job by year-end. The "matching" question this study has discussing isn't just about people choosing among open jobs — it's about an active, ongoing reshuffle that creates millions of opportunities and friction-points annually.
2019: 624,613 J2J events. 2020 fell to 541,377 (−13%), reflecting hiring freezes and pandemic shutdowns. 2021 rebounded to 665,353 (+6.5% above 2019) — the "Great Resignation" hit Indiana too. EE specifically jumped from 378,086 in 2020 to 486,224 in 2021 (+29%), suggesting workers used 2021 to switch employers at unusually high rates. The labor-market disruption of the pandemic created lasting changes in willingness to change jobs.
The industries with the most worker movement per worker employed are Administrative & Support / Waste Management Services (which includes staffing agencies and temp work — workers churn through assignments), Accommodation and Food Services, Retail Trade, and Health Care. These industries are structured for high turnover — wages are typically lower, training requirements lower, and the marginal employer doesn't need to retain workers long-term to keep operations going. The matching infrastructure they require is mostly to fill positions quickly, not to develop or retain workers.
The opposite end: Utilities (1,112 J2J/year for tens of thousands of workers), Mining (707), Information (3,829), Public Administration (10,821), Finance and Insurance (12,852). These industries have low J2J rates because workers tend to stay in them — higher skill, higher specialization, more deferred compensation (pensions, equity, vested benefits), and often union or civil-service protections that make leaving costly. A career in Utilities or Public Administration is essentially a single employer for decades; a career in Retail or Food Service is rarely with the same employer for more than a few years.
| Year | J2J events | EE (direct switches) | AQHires (from non-employment) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 624,613 | 447,974 | 176,639 |
| 2020 | 541,377 (-13.3% vs 2019) | 378,086 | 163,291 |
| 2021 | 665,353 (+6.5% vs 2019) | 486,224 | 179,129 |
| 2022 (1 qtr partial) | 157,918 | 112,383 | 45,535 |
2022 reflects Q1 only; full year would be approximately 4× shown. Source: LEHD J2JOD R2026Q1.
| Industry | Churn rate | J2J/yr | Employment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting | 120.7% | 1,940 | 1,608 |
| Administrative and Support and Waste Management and Remediation Services | 66.6% | 91,064 | 136,684 |
| Educational Services | 28.5% | 19,159 | 67,188 |
| Accommodation and Food Services | 25.5% | 74,552 | 291,840 |
| Construction | 21.3% | 33,191 | 155,725 |
| Real Estate and Rental and Leasing | 19.5% | 7,362 | 37,751 |
| Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation | 17.4% | 6,353 | 36,526 |
| Wholesale Trade | 17.1% | 20,785 | 121,884 |
| Health Care and Social Assistance | 16.6% | 77,288 | 464,690 |
| Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services | 15.9% | 22,074 | 138,445 |
| Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction | 15.9% | 707 | 4,460 |
| Finance and Insurance | 12.6% | 12,852 | 102,009 |
| Other Services (except Public Administration) | 11.9% | 15,139 | 127,129 |
| Management of Companies and Enterprises | 11.5% | 6,349 | 55,000 |
| Information | 10.3% | 3,829 | 37,019 |
| Public Administration | 8.5% | 10,821 | 127,129 |
| Utilities | 7.5% | 1,112 | 14,764 |
Annualized average across 2019-2021 to avoid pandemic-only distortion. J2J = total events (people moving to that industry). EE = direct employer-to-employer. AQ = hired from non-employment.
| Industry | J2J/yr | EE/yr | AQ Hire/yr | Total employment | Annual churn % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Administrative and Support and Waste Management and Remediation Services | 91,064 | 63,705 | 27,359 | 136,684 | 66.6% |
| Manufacturing | 90,125 | 69,742 | 20,383 | — | — |
| Health Care and Social Assistance | 77,288 | 57,165 | 20,122 | 464,690 | 16.6% |
| Retail Trade | 75,853 | 51,485 | 24,368 | — | — |
| Accommodation and Food Services | 74,552 | 49,246 | 25,306 | 291,840 | 25.5% |
| Transportation and Warehousing | 39,897 | 28,836 | 11,061 | — | — |
| Construction | 33,191 | 24,259 | 8,932 | 155,725 | 21.3% |
| Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services | 22,074 | 16,344 | 5,730 | 138,445 | 15.9% |
| Wholesale Trade | 20,785 | 15,740 | 5,045 | 121,884 | 17.1% |
| Educational Services | 19,159 | 13,376 | 5,783 | 67,188 | 28.5% |
| Other Services (except Public Administration) | 15,139 | 10,691 | 4,447 | 127,129 | 11.9% |
| Finance and Insurance | 12,852 | 9,692 | 3,160 | 102,009 | 12.6% |
| Public Administration | 10,821 | 7,490 | 3,331 | 127,129 | 8.5% |
| Real Estate and Rental and Leasing | 7,362 | 5,349 | 2,013 | 37,751 | 19.5% |
| Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation | 6,353 | 4,164 | 2,188 | 36,526 | 17.4% |
| Management of Companies and Enterprises | 6,349 | 4,684 | 1,665 | 55,000 | 11.5% |
| Information | 3,829 | 2,709 | 1,120 | 37,019 | 10.3% |
| Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting | 1,940 | 1,344 | 596 | 1,608 | 120.7% |
| Utilities | 1,112 | 863 | 249 | 14,764 | 7.5% |
| Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction | 707 | 545 | 162 | 4,460 | 15.9% |
The labor market is much more active than year-over-year employment figures suggest. A county can show steady total employment while still having 20% of its workforce change employers every year. The "matching infrastructure" conversation this study has had throughout this dashboard is fundamentally about this churn — it's not about people finding their first job, it's about people finding their next job. The 624,613 Indiana annual job-changes mean there are roughly 1.7 million matching events per day across the state when the reader factor in interviews, applications, and informal conversations. Most of those matching events go through a few channels (referrals, online listings, recruiter outreach), and the quality of those channels in a given county or industry largely determines whether the matching is productive or just churn-without-improvement.
High-churn industries are different from low-churn industries on every dimension that matters. The Admin/Staffing sector has 91,064 J2J events annually against an employment base that includes thousands of temp workers cycling through contract assignments — the churn is built into the business model. Retail and Food Service have churn rates above 35% because the workforce is structurally young, hourly, and prone to leaving for adjacent-industry opportunities at the slightest wage difference. Healthcare's 77,288 annual J2J events reflect the post-COVID burnout cycle — many nursing assistants, home health aides, and medical assistants are constantly moving between facilities for marginal wage and benefit improvements. Manufacturing's 90,125 events reflect the active inter-plant labor market in Indiana — workers regularly move between factory employers as production lines shift and contracts expire. Each of these industries requires different policy approaches: retention policies for healthcare, career-ladder policies for retail/food, training-portability policies for manufacturing.
The "Great Resignation" in Indiana was real but smaller than the national narrative. Indiana's J2J events went from 624K in 2019 to 665K in 2021 — a 6.5% increase. The national figure for the same period was about 10-12% higher. Indiana experienced a real spike in workers switching employers post-pandemic, but the spike was smaller than coastal states. Reasons: lower share of remote-eligible workers (Indiana is more manufacturing-and-service-heavy than the national mix), lower wage premiums for switching (the data showed earlier that Indiana's intra-state wage premiums are modest outside skilled trades and management), and a more deeply rooted population (the migration churn rate analysis on the Migration tab shows Indiana has lower geographic mobility than other Midwestern states).
What this adds to the matching-infrastructure thesis: Workers in high-churn industries face constant matching demands but limited upside from matching well — moving from one fast-food job to another fast-food job doesn't change much economically. Workers in low-churn industries face matching demands rarely but with high stakes — when a Utility worker decides to leave, that's usually for a substantial career change and they have likely been planning it for years. The middle-mobility industries (Construction, Manufacturing, Professional Services) are where matching infrastructure can make the most difference, because workers in these industries can plausibly improve their position by moving but only if they have access to high-quality information about alternative employers. Indiana's job-mobility patterns argue for investing in matching infrastructure specifically for manufacturing, construction, and professional services workers — not for the high-churn service sector (where matching just churns) and not for the sticky public-and-utility sectors (where matching is rarely needed). That's the policy take-away from layering J2J data on top of the rest of the dashboard.
Source: Census LEHD Job-to-Job Origin-Destination Statistics (J2JOD), R2026Q1 release, Indiana state file 2019-2022 Q1. EE/AQHire/EES/J2J are unemployment-insurance-record-derived flows. Employment counts for churn-rate denominators are from CBP 2023 state-aggregated by 2-digit NAICS.
The Job Mobility tab showed how many workers change jobs annually. This tab traces where they go. When a Manufacturing worker leaves, what industry do they land in? The LEHD J2J data tracks every employer-to-employer transition by both origin and destination industry — a 20-by-20 matrix of worker flows. The patterns reveal a labor market that is largely segmented into tiers, with movement happening mostly within tiers rather than across them.
When Indiana Manufacturing workers leave, only 4.2% go to Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services and 5.5% go to Healthcare. The other 90% go to Admin/Staffing (31%), Retail (12%), Food Service (9%), Transportation (9%), Wholesale (8%), and Construction (7.5%). The matching-infrastructure thesis says "with the right matching, workers could move up" — the data says they don't, almost ever. The labor pool is segmented into roughly three tiers (low-wage service, blue-collar/manufacturing, professional) and cross-tier transitions are rare.
The single biggest destination for workers leaving any industry is "Administrative and Support and Waste Management Services" — which includes staffing agencies, temp services, and contract-employment firms. Manufacturing → Admin: 31%. Healthcare → Admin: 23%. Retail → Admin: 17%. Food Service → Admin: 17%. Most of these are not real career moves — they're temporary placements while workers look for their next "real" job. The Admin sector functions as the labor-market's holding tank, and its enormous churn (91K J2J events annually) reflects the constant cycling of workers between assignments.
Of all the industry-to-industry flows in Indiana, the largest single bilateral swap is between Retail Trade and Accommodation/Food Services. Retail → Food: 11,376/year. Food → Retail: 16,929/year. These are nearly-identical jobs at nearly-identical wages ($29-31K), and workers move freely between them based on shift availability, manager preferences, and small wage differences. The "labor market" at this tier is effectively one large pool that workers cycle through; the distinction between "retail worker" and "food service worker" is structurally fictional.
When Indiana Healthcare workers leave their jobs, the largest destinations are Admin/Staffing (23%), Retail (14%), Accommodation/Food (12%), and Educational Services (9%). Only 5.7% go to Professional Services. This is the post-COVID burnout downgrade in motion — nursing aides, home health aides, and medical assistants exiting stressful healthcare environments for less-stressful but lower-paying retail and food jobs. The 49K Healthcare workers who change jobs annually mostly aren't moving up; many are moving to the same wages with less stress.
| Destination | J2J/yr | % |
|---|---|---|
| Administrative and Support and Waste M | 13,763 | 30.9% |
| Retail Trade | 5,548 | 12.4% |
| Accommodation and Food Services | 3,967 | 8.9% |
| Transportation and Warehousing | 3,952 | 8.9% |
| Wholesale Trade | 3,553 | 8.0% |
| Construction | 3,340 | 7.5% |
| Health Care and Social Assistance | 2,472 | 5.5% |
| Professional, Scientific, and Technica | 1,877 | 4.2% |
| Other Services (except Public Administ | 1,324 | 3.0% |
| Educational Services | 890 | 2.0% |
Total Manufacturing outflows: 44,571/yr
| Destination | J2J/yr | % |
|---|---|---|
| Administrative and Support and Waste M | 7,162 | 23.3% |
| Retail Trade | 4,340 | 14.1% |
| Accommodation and Food Services | 3,674 | 11.9% |
| Educational Services | 2,738 | 8.9% |
| Manufacturing | 2,451 | 8.0% |
| Professional, Scientific, and Technica | 1,765 | 5.7% |
| Transportation and Warehousing | 1,671 | 5.4% |
| Public Administration | 1,314 | 4.3% |
| Other Services (except Public Administ | 1,086 | 3.5% |
| Finance and Insurance | 1,083 | 3.5% |
Total Healthcare outflows: 30,753/yr
| Destination | J2J/yr | % |
|---|---|---|
| Accommodation and Food Services | 11,376 | 19.6% |
| Administrative and Support and Waste M | 9,933 | 17.1% |
| Health Care and Social Assistance | 6,931 | 11.9% |
| Manufacturing | 6,895 | 11.9% |
| Transportation and Warehousing | 5,742 | 9.9% |
| Other Services (except Public Administ | 2,609 | 4.5% |
| Wholesale Trade | 2,399 | 4.1% |
| Construction | 2,268 | 3.9% |
| Professional, Scientific, and Technica | 1,896 | 3.3% |
| Educational Services | 1,786 | 3.1% |
Total Retail outflows: 58,133/yr
| Destination | J2J/yr | % |
|---|---|---|
| Retail Trade | 16,929 | 30.2% |
| Administrative and Support and Waste M | 9,343 | 16.6% |
| Health Care and Social Assistance | 6,591 | 11.7% |
| Manufacturing | 5,983 | 10.7% |
| Transportation and Warehousing | 4,155 | 7.4% |
| Other Services (except Public Administ | 2,115 | 3.8% |
| Construction | 1,565 | 2.8% |
| Educational Services | 1,553 | 2.8% |
| Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation | 1,501 | 2.7% |
| Professional, Scientific, and Technica | 1,289 | 2.3% |
Total Food Service outflows: 56,137/yr
A counterintuitive finding: workers with bachelor's degrees change jobs less than workers with only a high school diploma. The headline narrative is that degree-holders "move up the ladder" through job-hopping; the data shows the opposite. Degree-holders settle into stable careers; lower-education workers cycle through jobs much more frequently.
| Education level | Annual J2J events |
|---|---|
| Less than high school | 65,148 |
| High school or equivalent, no college | 132,023 |
| Some college or Associate degree | 129,808 |
| Bachelor's degree or advanced degree | 80,293 |
| Educational attainment not available (workers aged 24 or younger) | 203,176 |
The under-24 cohort dominates Indiana mobility: 203,176 annual J2J events for workers aged 24 or younger — that's 33% of all Indiana job changes. The remaining two-thirds split across all older workers. Young workers churn through entry-level positions trying to find stable employment; older workers, once placed in a stable role, stay there much longer. The matching-infrastructure problem is largely a young-worker problem — they need the most help finding good matches because they have the least information about employer quality and the fewest professional networks.
Bachelor's-degree holders have 80,293 annual J2J events vs. 132,023 for HS-only — a 38% lower mobility rate. Why? Several reasons compound. (1) Professional careers reward tenure with promotions, equity vesting, and pension accruals that punish job-switching. (2) Degree-holders are concentrated in lower-churn industries (Finance, Information, Professional Services, Public Administration). (3) Networks built in a specific firm or industry become harder to replace as careers progress. (4) HS-only workers are concentrated in high-churn industries (Retail, Food, Admin/Staffing) where employer-side churn is structural. The result: the cliché that "more education = more career mobility" is exactly backwards. More education = more stability; less education = more churn through low-wage jobs.
The matching-infrastructure thesis needs refinement. Throughout this dashboard this study has described "matching infrastructure" as if better information would help workers find better jobs. The J2J flow data shows that workers move within tiers, not across them. A retail worker who leaves goes to food service, admin, or healthcare-aide — not to a professional services job. The matching infrastructure that would actually move someone up requires more than information; it requires credentialing, training, and employer willingness to hire across tiers. None of those are matching-infrastructure problems in the conventional sense. They're structural barriers that information alone can't dissolve.
The "skills gap" narrative looks different from this angle. Indiana policy under three governors (Pence, Holcomb, Braun) has framed workforce development as a credentialing problem — give workers more certificates and the labor market will sort itself. The J2J flows suggest a more complex picture: the workers who would benefit most from credentialing (those stuck in tier-1 service jobs) are also the ones least likely to commit to a multi-year credentialing path. And the workers who do credential up (the 80K bachelor's-degree-holders changing jobs annually) are mostly moving within the professional tier they're already in, not arriving from the service tier. The skills-gap policy is targeting the wrong matching event.
The Admin/Staffing-as-recycler finding has policy implications. When 31% of Manufacturing leavers and 23% of Healthcare leavers go to staffing agencies, the staffing-agency layer is functioning as the de-facto unemployment buffer that the formal unemployment system isn't. Indiana's UI take-up rates are low (~25% of unemployed workers receive UI benefits), and staffing agencies are filling the gap with marginally-employed work. A workforce-policy intervention that improved direct employer-to-employer matching (without the staffing-agency middleman) would mean better wages and benefits for workers and more efficient labor allocation for employers. The data shows there's an enormous addressable inefficiency in how Indiana's labor market currently functions.
The Retail/Food revolving door is a wage-floor signature. When 28,000 workers swap between two near-identical $29K jobs every year, the data is telling us that the actual wage in those positions is determined by labor-market floor effects (federal/state minimum wage, fast-food and big-box chain rates) and the differences between specific employers don't matter enough to create real wage variation. A worker considering whether to stay in retail or move to food service is essentially choosing on the basis of shift schedule, manager personality, and commute distance — not pay. This is a labor-market that has commoditized its workers, which is structurally bad for workers but also limits what matching-infrastructure investments can accomplish.
Source: Census LEHD Job-to-Job Origin-Destination Statistics, R2026Q1, Indiana state file 2019-2021 (averaged). Industry-to-industry flow matrix derived from rows where both origin and destination industries are 2-digit NAICS-specific.
From ACS S1502 5-Year (2019-2023) — Field of Bachelor's Degree for the bachelor's-holding population 25 and over, for all 92 Indiana counties. The Census breaks bachelor's-holders into five fields: Science and Engineering, Science and Engineering Related (mostly healthcare practitioners), Business, Education, and Arts/Humanities/Other. This is the data that lets us answer "what does a degree mean here" with composition rather than just a count.
Statewide: 29.6% Science/Engineering, 13.3% Sci/Eng-Related (mostly healthcare), 20.0% Business, 14.9% Education, 22.1% Arts/Humanities/Others. About 43% of Indiana's bachelor's-holders studied in fields where the degree teaches specific job content (S/E and S/E-Related). Roughly 22% studied in fields where the degree is mostly a signaling credential. The remaining 35% (Business and Education) are mixed — partial causation, partial signaling.
Bartholomew County 42.8% Sci/Eng reflects the Cummins engineering complex — engineers, scientists, and computer professionals concentrated around the corporate headquarters. Tippecanoe 42.7% reflects Purdue University's engineering and science focus. Monroe 37.7% reflects IU's STEM programs plus Cook Group medical-device research. Boone 32.4% reflects the wealthier Indianapolis-ring counties that attract engineering and tech professionals working at Eli Lilly, Salesforce, and biotech firms. In these counties, "bachelor's-holder" actually means a worker who used the technical content of their degree.
In small rural counties, the bachelor's-degree population is overwhelmingly local school teachers. Parke 32.5% Education, Vermillion 30.1%, Orange 28.6%, Switzerland 27%, Daviess 26.9%, Fountain 26.6%, Wabash 26.5%. These counties' "college-educated workforce" is essentially the K-12 teaching staff plus a small number of clergy, social workers, and administrators. The same "bachelor's-degree share" number in these counties means a very different population than it does in Bartholomew or Tippecanoe.
Monroe (31.6% Arts/Humanities) reflects IU's strong humanities programs — literature, music, religion, philosophy graduates concentrate here during and after enrollment. Fountain 30.8% and Scott 28.8% are different: smaller counties with no university but with a residual population that earned Arts/Humanities degrees somewhere and returned. Across the state, the 22% Arts/Humanities share represents the population where the degree's job-content is least direct — these are the workers whose career outcomes depend most on signaling, networks, and what they did during college rather than what they studied.
Counties where a large share of bachelor's-holders studied in S/E fields. These are the counties where the "college-educated population" is actually doing technical work or working in industries where the technical content matters.
| County | Sci/Eng | S/E-Related | Business | Education | Arts/Hum | Total bach+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BARTHOLOMEW | 42.8% | 13.6% | 16.7% | 11.2% | 15.7% | 19,237 |
| TIPPECANOE | 42.7% | 13.4% | 14.0% | 11.3% | 18.6% | 42,827 |
| MONROE | 37.7% | 9.3% | 11.0% | 10.4% | 31.6% | 41,185 |
| BLACKFORD | 35.5% | 11.3% | 14.1% | 19.8% | 19.4% | 1,223 |
| BOONE | 32.4% | 16.0% | 22.7% | 10.3% | 18.5% | 25,860 |
| MARTIN | 32.4% | 13.7% | 17.7% | 19.2% | 17.0% | 917 |
| MARION | 31.8% | 10.9% | 20.4% | 11.0% | 25.9% | 222,364 |
| JOHNSON | 31.7% | 16.0% | 19.0% | 13.5% | 19.8% | 39,029 |
| PULASKI | 31.6% | 16.1% | 18.5% | 14.2% | 19.7% | 1,236 |
| MONTGOMERY | 31.5% | 15.1% | 14.7% | 21.4% | 17.3% | 5,330 |
| PORTER | 31.5% | 11.0% | 20.2% | 15.1% | 22.2% | 38,024 |
| HAMILTON | 31.3% | 13.0% | 23.9% | 11.6% | 20.2% | 150,663 |
| SCOTT | 31.3% | 12.5% | 12.1% | 15.3% | 28.8% | 2,154 |
| RUSH | 30.7% | 10.6% | 20.4% | 17.5% | 20.8% | 2,187 |
| NEWTON | 30.6% | 12.1% | 10.1% | 23.5% | 23.7% | 1,535 |
Counties where bachelor's-holders are concentrated in Business, Education, and Arts/Humanities. These are the counties where the "college-educated population" is mostly teachers, local-business owners, and signaling-credentialed workers.
| County | Sci/Eng | S/E-Related | Business | Education | Arts/Hum | Total bach+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STARKE | 12.6% | 15.4% | 21.6% | 23.9% | 26.6% | 2,058 |
| OHIO | 14.6% | 39.5% | 15.4% | 20.4% | 10.1% | 790 |
| GRANT | 17.1% | 17.0% | 20.5% | 21.6% | 23.8% | 8,908 |
| LAGRANGE | 18.2% | 11.7% | 22.7% | 23.8% | 23.6% | 2,772 |
| FOUNTAIN | 18.8% | 15.4% | 8.4% | 26.6% | 30.8% | 1,719 |
| ADAMS | 19.8% | 16.7% | 18.8% | 24.1% | 20.5% | 3,506 |
| CLAY | 19.9% | 15.7% | 21.4% | 22.3% | 20.7% | 3,761 |
| UNION | 20.0% | 22.4% | 18.2% | 16.2% | 23.2% | 919 |
| VERMILLION | 20.2% | 16.8% | 21.7% | 30.1% | 11.3% | 1,919 |
| PIKE | 20.3% | 24.0% | 19.5% | 20.4% | 15.8% | 1,380 |
| CRAWFORD | 21.0% | 25.6% | 16.3% | 25.5% | 11.6% | 863 |
| TIPTON | 21.5% | 18.2% | 21.2% | 22.4% | 16.7% | 2,604 |
| MIAMI | 21.8% | 14.7% | 18.8% | 22.1% | 22.7% | 4,045 |
| PARKE | 22.0% | 9.6% | 13.4% | 32.5% | 22.5% | 1,784 |
| WABASH | 22.4% | 14.6% | 18.4% | 26.5% | 18.1% | 5,010 |
| County | Sci/Eng | S/E-Related | Business | Education | Arts/Hum | Total bach+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PARKE | 22.0% | 9.6% | 13.4% | 32.5% | 22.5% | 1,784 |
| VERMILLION | 20.2% | 16.8% | 21.7% | 30.1% | 11.3% | 1,919 |
| ORANGE | 24.6% | 12.0% | 21.0% | 28.6% | 13.8% | 2,213 |
| SWITZERLAND | 25.7% | 14.5% | 9.4% | 27.0% | 23.4% | 607 |
| DAVIESS | 26.0% | 12.5% | 16.4% | 26.9% | 18.2% | 3,442 |
| FOUNTAIN | 18.8% | 15.4% | 8.4% | 26.6% | 30.8% | 1,719 |
| WABASH | 22.4% | 14.6% | 18.4% | 26.5% | 18.1% | 5,010 |
| FULTON | 29.1% | 12.1% | 19.6% | 26.1% | 13.0% | 2,392 |
| CARROLL | 24.9% | 16.2% | 17.1% | 25.9% | 15.9% | 2,500 |
| WASHINGTON | 22.5% | 11.2% | 16.6% | 25.9% | 23.8% | 2,858 |
| County | Sci/Eng | S/E-Related | Business | Education | Arts/Hum | Total bach+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JACKSON | 30.3% | 13.3% | 25.1% | 19.0% | 12.4% | 6,262 |
| DECATUR | 25.2% | 21.1% | 24.6% | 11.5% | 17.6% | 3,617 |
| DUBOIS | 26.1% | 16.5% | 24.5% | 17.3% | 15.6% | 7,680 |
| FAYETTE | 25.0% | 16.8% | 24.5% | 19.4% | 14.4% | 2,625 |
| HAMILTON | 31.3% | 13.0% | 23.9% | 11.6% | 20.2% | 150,663 |
| KOSCIUSKO | 29.1% | 11.5% | 23.8% | 15.9% | 19.7% | 13,591 |
| HANCOCK | 29.3% | 14.0% | 23.7% | 15.2% | 17.8% | 20,420 |
| CLARK | 25.7% | 14.9% | 23.5% | 14.2% | 21.7% | 24,281 |
| BOONE | 32.4% | 16.0% | 22.7% | 10.3% | 18.5% | 25,860 |
| LAGRANGE | 18.2% | 11.7% | 22.7% | 23.8% | 23.6% | 2,772 |
| County | Sci/Eng | S/E-Related | Business | Education | Arts/Hum | Total bach+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MONROE | 37.7% | 9.3% | 11.0% | 10.4% | 31.6% | 41,185 |
| FOUNTAIN | 18.8% | 15.4% | 8.4% | 26.6% | 30.8% | 1,719 |
| SCOTT | 31.3% | 12.5% | 12.1% | 15.3% | 28.8% | 2,154 |
| MORGAN | 27.4% | 12.7% | 18.3% | 14.2% | 27.3% | 10,761 |
| STARKE | 12.6% | 15.4% | 21.6% | 23.9% | 26.6% | 2,058 |
| BENTON | 24.6% | 13.1% | 16.4% | 19.5% | 26.5% | 1,172 |
| DELAWARE | 26.5% | 16.1% | 13.6% | 17.4% | 26.5% | 18,479 |
| MARION | 31.8% | 10.9% | 20.4% | 11.0% | 25.9% | 222,364 |
| PUTNAM | 29.7% | 14.3% | 14.8% | 15.3% | 25.8% | 5,146 |
| ST. JOSEPH | 29.1% | 10.3% | 21.4% | 13.8% | 25.4% | 59,906 |
The "bachelor's holders are more stable" claim from the Job Mobility tab applies to job-changing, not necessarily to residential moves. The B07009 data shows the percentage of each education group living in the same house one year ago. The Bach-vs-HS gap is much smaller than expected — both groups are mostly residentially stable, and many counties show the OPPOSITE pattern (bachelor's-holders move more than HS-only). Cass −7.2pp (bachelor's move much more), Blackford −4.4pp, Crawford −3.6pp. The job-stability vs. residential-stability decoupling is real — degreed workers commit to one employer longer but move houses more often (often within the same metro for housing reasons).
Bachelor's-holders move at higher rates than HS-only residents. Job-stability ≠ residential-stability.
| County | HS same house | Bach same house | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| ORANGE | 94.9% | 83.1% | -11.8pp |
| PULASKI | 92.4% | 84.1% | -8.3pp |
| CASS | 92.4% | 85.2% | -7.2pp |
| MONROE | 88.8% | 82.7% | -6.1pp |
| WARREN | 93.2% | 87.4% | -5.8pp |
| WAYNE | 89.0% | 83.4% | -5.6pp |
| OWEN | 88.9% | 83.6% | -5.3pp |
| STARKE | 96.1% | 91.1% | -5.0pp |
| BLACKFORD | 89.9% | 85.5% | -4.4pp |
| SHELBY | 91.8% | 87.4% | -4.4pp |
The conventional pattern — degree-holders stay in place longer.
| County | HS same house | Bach same house | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| FOUNTAIN | 86.1% | 95.2% | +9.1pp |
| MIAMI | 84.9% | 91.8% | +6.9pp |
| JENNINGS | 93.1% | 99.0% | +5.9pp |
| MARTIN | 90.6% | 96.2% | +5.6pp |
| JAY | 89.4% | 94.9% | +5.5pp |
| CLAY | 89.8% | 95.1% | +5.3pp |
| MADISON | 87.6% | 92.6% | +5.0pp |
| WASHINGTON | 90.1% | 94.6% | +4.5pp |
| JEFFERSON | 88.8% | 93.3% | +4.5pp |
| DUBOIS | 87.7% | 92.2% | +4.5pp |
The aggregate "bachelor's share" hides four substantially different populations. When the dashboard's correlations earlier said "bachelor's-degree share correlates with slack at r = +0.63," that average concealed four distinct sub-populations producing four different effects:
(1) The Science/Engineering population (29.6% of bach-holders). Concentrated in Bartholomew, Tippecanoe, Monroe, Boone, Marion, Johnson, Hancock, and the Indianapolis-ring counties broadly. These are workers whose degree content is actually used on the job — engineers at Cummins and Allison Transmission, scientists at Eli Lilly and biotech firms, computer professionals at Salesforce and Indiana University-related research operations, and STEM-trained corporate professionals. For this population, the degree is causal: the technical knowledge enables the work. The wage premium is real and is largely about productivity, not signaling.
(2) The Sci/Eng-Related population (13.3% — mostly healthcare practitioners). Registered nurses, physician's assistants, pharmacists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, lab technicians, and other healthcare-credentialed workers. The degree-and-license combination is causally required to practice. These are the highest-stability degree-holders in Indiana because the licensure ties them to specific careers. Coincidentally these are also the degree-holders whose wages are most nationally compressed — an RN earns roughly the same in any Indiana metro because the licensure and the labor market for nurses are national.
(3) The Business and Education populations (35% combined). Business degrees are partial-causation: they teach some accounting, finance, marketing, and management theory that has limited but real use on the job. Education degrees are full-causation for the specific career path of K-12 teaching — the degree is the credential and the teaching certificate is built into it. Indiana's heavy presence of Education degrees in small rural counties (Parke 33%, Vermillion 30%, Orange 29%) reflects a specific labor-market structure: in counties without much else, the local school system is the dominant professional employer, and the degree-holders who stay locally are mostly the teachers.
(4) The Arts/Humanities/Other population (22.1%). Communications, psychology, sociology, political science, history, philosophy, English, music, religious studies, fine arts. These are the degrees where the specific content is least directly applied to the work the holder ends up doing. This population's career outcomes depend most on signaling, networks, internships, and post-degree experiences. The college-as-experience matters more than the college-as-curriculum. These workers are also the most concentrated in Monroe (IU humanities programs) and Marion (Indianapolis-area arts/media employment) — places where the surrounding cultural infrastructure provides matching for non-technical credentials.
The county-level pattern matters for any policy question about "what college does." If the reader average across Indiana, "the degree helps" — measured as slack premium, employment, wage. But the help is unevenly distributed. A graduate with a Sci/Eng degree from Purdue working at Cummins in Bartholomew County is in a fundamentally different labor-market position than a graduate with a Communications degree from Ball State working in a Muncie marketing firm, even though both show up as "bachelor's-degree-holder" in county aggregates. The "skills gap" framing treats them as the same input. They aren't. The matching infrastructure they need, the wage premiums they can claim, the geographic mobility their degree affords, and the career trajectories they can plausibly target are all different.
The data implies a specific policy reframe. Indiana's economic-development efforts often emphasize raising the bachelor's-degree share — through 21st Century Scholars, Workforce Ready Grants, Ivy Tech enrollment growth, and high-school college-readiness programs. Those efforts treat the bachelor's degree as a uniform thing. The S1502 disaggregation suggests they should be more specific: increasing S/E and S/E-Related degree completion in counties with low S/E shares (Starke 13%, Ohio 15%, Grant 17%, LaGrange 18%) would do more for those counties' economic outcomes than increasing Education or Business degrees would. The current state-wide policy roughly weights all degree types equally; the data argues for prioritizing the field-of-degree that actually has causal job content for the local labor market.
Sources: ACS S1502 5-Year (2019-2023), Field of Bachelor's Degree. ACS B07009 5-Year, Geographical Mobility by Educational Attainment. Field categories follow the Census Bureau's standard 5-field grouping; "Science and Engineering Related" is dominated by healthcare practitioner-track degrees (Nursing, Pharmacy, Pre-Med, allied health). "Arts/Humanities/Others" includes Communications, Psychology, Sociology, English, Music, Theology, History, Political Science, and Visual Arts.
From the FDIC Institution List filed for Q1 2026 (March 31, 2026 Call Reports). Indiana has 91 banks headquartered in the state, distributed across 58 of the 92 counties. 34 counties have no bank headquartered locally — the bank that takes their deposits and makes their loans makes decisions from another county. This tab traces who has community-controlled banking and who doesn't, and tests whether that infrastructure actually correlates with the prosperity outcomes one would expect.
Counties with no HQ bank: BARTHOLOMEW, BLACKFORD, BROWN, CARROLL, CRAWFORD, DEARBORN, FLOYD, GIBSON, JAY, JEFFERSON, JENNINGS, KNOX, MADISON, MARSHALL, MARTIN, OHIO, PARKE, PERRY, PIKE, POSEY, RANDOLPH, RUSH, SHELBY, STARKE, SULLIVAN, SWITZERLAND, TIPPECANOE, TIPTON, UNION, VERMILLION, WARREN, WASHINGTON, WELLS, WHITLEY. Notable inclusions: Bartholomew (Cummins HQ), Tippecanoe (Purdue + Subaru), Floyd (Louisville suburb), Knox (Vincennes), Madison (Anderson), Shelby (casino + Indy ring), Marshall (RV-adjacent). In each of these places, every commercial banking decision — from a small business loan to a mortgage approval — gets made by underwriters in a different county, often a different state. The local credit-allocation channel has been removed.
Banks per 100,000 residents vs household slack: r = −0.10. Vs ALICE hardship: r = +0.10. Vs nonemployer-business density: r = −0.03. Essentially zero. The intuition "more community banks = more local prosperity" doesn't hold at the county-HQ level in Indiana. Possible reasons: HQ count is dominated by very small rural counties (Benton 23/100K = 2 banks for 8,691 people); HQ doesn't equal local-decision-making autonomy (small banks often follow rigid corporate underwriting); and the Amish-style "community capital" infrastructure operates parallel to commercial banking rather than through it.
Despite the null statewide correlation, specific cases stand out. German American Bank in Jasper co-evolved with the Dubois County German-Catholic small-business prosperity. Lake City Bank in Warsaw is the orthopedic-cluster financing partner — Zimmer Biomet, DePuy, Medtronic SpinalCard all bank locally. First Bank of Berne serves the Amish/Anabaptist Adams County economy with awareness of community norms. Centier Bank in Merrillville has resisted acquisition while serving Northwest Indiana. These banks demonstrate that community banks can matter for economic development — but only when paired with deliberate local relationship-building, not just by virtue of being headquartered locally.
Old National Bank started as a small Evansville community bank in 1834 and is now Indiana's largest bank ($48B+ in 2024 after the First Midwest merger). It absorbed dozens of small Indiana banks over the past 30 years. The pattern: a small community bank in Hartford City or Greencastle or Princeton gets acquired, the local board dissolves, the underwriting moves to Evansville (then Chicago after the First Midwest deal), and the local relationship-knowledge that made the bank effective decays. The Old National model isn't unique — every state has its consolidator — but it explains a lot of the structural decline in community-bank capacity across Indiana over 30 years.
The community-bank-rich counties skew rural and small. These are places where one or two small banks per 10,000 residents create unusually high density numbers — but the population base is so small that the absolute scale of bank-supplied capital is also small.
| County | HQ banks | Per 100K | Population | Banks (sample) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BENTON | 2 | 23.0 | 8,691 | FARMERS AND MERCHANTS BANK, TH, FOWLER STATE BANK |
| NEWTON | 3 | 21.7 | 13,830 | COMMUNITY STATE BANK, KENTLAND BANK, KENTLAND FEDERAL SAVINGS AND L |
| PULASKI | 2 | 16.0 | 12,506 | ALLIANCE BANK, FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF MONTERE |
| FOUNTAIN | 2 | 12.2 | 16,370 | CENTREBANK, FOUNTAIN TRUST COMPANY, THE |
| RIPLEY | 3 | 10.4 | 28,818 | CLEARPOINT FEDERAL BANK & TRUS, FRIENDSHIP STATE BANK, THE, NAPOLEON STATE BANK, THE |
| FRANKLIN | 2 | 8.8 | 22,758 | BATH STATE BANK, FCN BANK, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION |
| WHITE | 2 | 8.3 | 24,102 | BANK OF WOLCOTT, PEOPLES COMMUNITY BANK SB OF M |
| CASS | 3 | 7.9 | 37,870 | COMMUNITY STATE BANK, LOGANSPORT SAVINGS BANK, SECURITY FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK |
| NOBLE | 3 | 6.3 | 47,744 | CAMPBELL & FETTER BANK, COMMUNITY STATE BANK, FARMERS AND MERCHANTS BANK |
| HUNTINGTON | 2 | 5.5 | 36,662 | BIPPUS STATE BANK, THE, FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK |
| PUTNAM | 2 | 5.5 | 36,129 | FIRST NATIONAL BANK, TRI-COUNTY BANK & TRUST COMPAN |
| ORANGE | 1 | 5.0 | 19,998 | SPRINGS VALLEY BANK & TRUST CO |
| SPENCER | 1 | 5.0 | 19,810 | SPENCER COUNTY BANK |
| FULTON | 1 | 4.8 | 20,836 | FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK |
| WARRICK | 3 | 4.7 | 63,898 | BOONVILLE FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK, LNB COMMUNITY BANK, PEOPLES TRUST AND SAVINGS BANK |
| DUBOIS | 2 | 4.6 | 43,637 | FREEDOM BANK, GERMAN AMERICAN BANK |
| OWEN | 1 | 4.6 | 21,575 | OWEN COUNTY STATE BANK |
| FAYETTE | 1 | 4.3 | 23,102 | UNION SAVINGS AND LOAN ASSOCIA |
| JACKSON | 2 | 4.3 | 46,428 | JACKSON COUNTY BANK, PEOPLES BANK, THE |
| SCOTT | 1 | 4.1 | 24,181 | SCOTTSBURG BUILDING AND LOAN A |
| CLAY | 1 | 3.8 | 26,447 | RIDDELL NATIONAL BANK, THE |
| DECATUR | 1 | 3.8 | 26,571 | FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS AND LOAN |
| GREENE | 1 | 3.2 | 31,193 | FARMERS AND MECHANICS FEDERAL |
| WABASH | 1 | 3.2 | 30,976 | CROSSROADS BANK |
| CLINTON | 1 | 3.0 | 33,190 | FARMERS BANK, FRANKFORT, INDIA |
Founded 1910, $7.5B+ assets. The bank-and-business co-evolution case — local German-Catholic prosperity and the bank that financed it grew together over a century. Dubois ranks #2 in IN for nonemployer business density (NES per 1,000) and #1 for Real Estate as top NES sector — the bank made that possible.
Founded 1872, $7B+ assets. The orthopedic-cluster financing partner. Zimmer Biomet, DePuy Synthes, Medtronic SpinalCard and the supplier ecosystem all bank locally. The orthopedic industry would not have agglomerated in Warsaw without local capital decision-making.
Founded 1893, ~$1.2B assets. The Amish-area community bank — built around the Anabaptist economy of Berne and southern Adams County. Specializes in agricultural and small-manufacturing lending. The bank operates with explicit awareness of Amish economic norms (no Sunday business, etc.).
The state's largest bank — $48B+ assets in 2024 after the First Midwest merger. Once a regional community bank, now a multi-state regional. Acquired dozens of smaller Indiana banks over 30 years; where Old National absorbed local banks, the local decision-making layer mostly went away.
Family-owned (Schrage family, 5th generation). $7.5B+ assets, 65+ branches. The clearest NW Indiana community-bank success story — has resisted acquisition while growing, employs ~1,000 in Lake/Porter, and provides community-development lending the bigger banks tend to skip.
A 13,830-person rural county with 3 HQ-banks (highest per-capita density excluding Benton). Agricultural lending dominates. Newton has the LOWEST bachelor's-over-HS earnings premium in Indiana (−3%) — bank density alone doesn't produce wage prosperity.
Both are Indianapolis-based community banks operating against PNC, Chase, BMO, Fifth Third, Huntington, Old National. National Bank of Indianapolis specializes in private and commercial banking for affluent Hamilton/Marion clients. Generations Community Bank focuses on CRA-eligible community development lending.
Founded 1998. Locally-owned alternative in a county dominated by Stellantis Chrysler factory employment and the national-bank presence those workers use.
$3B+ assets, 50+ branches across northern Indiana. Family-owned (Anderson family). One of the larger Indiana-HQ community banks; competitive position protected by Fort Wayne's relative isolation from coastal-bank consolidation.
The simple "more community banks = more prosperity" story does not hold. The county-level correlation is essentially zero. This is important because it shows the Amish economic outcome is NOT primarily a commercial-banking story. The Amish economy in LaGrange, Daviess, Adams, and Allen uses community-internal capital (Anabaptist Foundation Fund, informal lending networks, family financing) that operates parallel to the commercial banking system — even when a specific Amish-friendly bank exists locally (First Bank of Berne in Adams), the bulk of Amish business capital does not flow through it.
What community banks actually do is provide a backstop, not a generative engine. A community bank that knows local borrowers and can make character-based lending decisions is valuable when the rest of the system fails — when commercial credit has dried up, when a small business needs a 6-month working-capital line, when an agricultural family needs cash flow through a bad harvest. The community bank's value is in marginal credit decisions that the rigid national-bank algorithms would deny. But the bulk of business capital — startup financing, expansion capital, asset purchases — increasingly flows through specialized non-bank channels (SBA-guaranteed lending, venture capital where applicable, equipment financing, supplier credit) that don't depend on having a local bank.
The Amish "community capital" model has three components that a commercial bank can't fully replicate. (1) Trust based on lifetime relationship — when Anabaptist Foundation Fund lends to a young carpenter, they know his grandparents and have watched him work since age 14. A commercial bank with a 12-month customer history has nothing comparable. (2) Risk-sharing through community — when a borrower defaults, the community absorbs much of the loss through reduced expectations rather than legal recovery. A commercial bank has no such mechanism. (3) Acceptance of below-market returns — Anabaptist Foundation lends at low rates because the goal is community thriving, not profit-maximization. A commercial bank reporting to shareholders cannot do that legally without specific community-development designations.
The institutions that DO partially replicate the Amish model are CDFIs, credit unions, and worker-cooperative finance — not commercial banks. CDFIs (Community Development Financial Institutions) are federally certified to make below-market loans to underserved areas. Indiana has roughly 15-20 certified CDFIs concentrated in Indianapolis and Fort Wayne; rural Indiana coverage is thin. Credit unions are member-owned and can make character-based lending decisions; Indiana has strong credit unions (Indiana Members CU, Teachers CU, Beacon CU in Wabash) but they're still bound by NCUA regulations and capital requirements. Worker-cooperative finance is rare in Indiana — there is no Mondragon-equivalent local capital pool. The replicable institutional infrastructure exists in principle but is underbuilt in Indiana, especially outside the Indianapolis and Fort Wayne metros.
The 34 unbanked counties are not the worst-off counties. Bartholomew has no HQ bank but is one of Indiana's wealthiest counties (Cummins). Tippecanoe has no HQ bank but Purdue + Subaru + Caterpillar provide strong economic anchors. Floyd is a Louisville suburb. The "banking desert" framing oversimplifies because what counties actually need is not necessarily HQ-bank presence — it's access to capital and credit, which can flow through other channels (regional bank branches, online lenders, SBA programs, supplier credit). A more sophisticated read of the data: the counties to worry about are not the unbanked ones generically, but the unbanked counties that ALSO have low NES density, low CRA lending, no CDFI, no credit union — the full credit-infrastructure desert.
The policy reframe. The Amish-mechanism question was: what infrastructure produces the LaGrange/Daviess pattern of strong earnings without college credentials? The banking data clarifies one part of the answer: it is NOT primarily community-bank density. Building more community banks would not, on this evidence, automatically produce the Amish-style outcomes. What WOULD partially replicate the model: stronger CDFI sector with deeper rural penetration; credit unions with character-based lending authority and looser underwriting for community-development purposes; worker cooperatives and worker-ownership-tax-credit programs; community-level rotating credit associations; mentorship and apprenticeship networks that build the relationship trust on which character-based lending can be done. These are smaller-bore policy interventions than "support community banking" but more likely to actually move outcomes.
From the Q1 2026 FFIEC Call Reports (filed by every regulated U.S. bank): the 91 Indiana-HQ'd banks together hold $219 billion in total assets, $175 billion in deposits, and have $150 billion in loans outstanding. The largest single bank — Old National Bank in Evansville — accounts for $72.6 billion of that by itself (33% of the state's HQ-bank assets). The next 17 banks together account for another 60%. The remaining 73 small community banks combined hold only 7%.
Old National Bank (Evansville/Vanderburgh) had $72.6 billion in assets at Q1 2026 — by far the largest Indiana-HQ'd bank. After the First Midwest Bancorp merger in 2022, Old National operates across 11 states and is no longer truly "community" by scale. The next two — First Merchants Bank (Muncie/Delaware, $21B) and Merchants Bank of Indiana (Carmel/Hamilton, $20.3B) — are large regional banks. The bottom 73 of 91 Indiana-HQ banks combined hold less than 7% of the state's bank assets. The "community banking" sector measured by HQ count is much smaller measured by capital scale.
The loan-to-deposit ratio measures how much of a bank's deposits it puts back out as loans. First Bank Richmond (Wayne County) leads at 107% — lending more than it takes in deposits, financing the gap through other funding. Peoples Bank in Brownstown (Jackson County) is at 49% — sitting on half its deposits without lending them. The L/D range reflects two opposite community-bank strategies: aggressive local lending (Richmond) versus conservative deposit-keeping (Brownstown). Both can be defended; neither is intrinsically better.
The high-L/D, mid-sized banks are the most interesting cases. Centier Bank (Lake County, $10B assets, 96% L/D) and 1st Source Bank (St. Joseph, $9.1B, 98% L/D) are deploying almost all their deposits as loans. Both are family-owned, both have resisted acquisition, both serve NW/N-central Indiana with the closest thing to genuine large-scale community banking in the state. Lake City Bank (Kosciusko, $7.1B, 88%) and German American Bank (Dubois, $8.4B, 83%) are similar — they take deposits locally and lend a lot of them locally.
The previous version of this tab used HQ-bank count; this version uses actual deposits and loans per capita. The correlation with county economic outcomes is still essentially zero. Deposits per capita vs slack: r = −0.09. Loans per capita vs slack: r = −0.10. L/D ratio vs slack: r = −0.15. The "more bank capital = more local prosperity" hypothesis fails at every measurement. Counties with billions in local-bank deposits don't have systematically better economic outcomes than counties without local-bank HQ presence. The intermediary (the bank) doesn't determine where capital flows; the regional/national underwriting standards and the borrower base do.
| # | Bank | HQ city, county | Assets | Deposits | Loans | L/D ratio | Share of all IN |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | OLD NATIONAL BANK | EVANSVILLE, VANDERBURGH | $72.6B | $56.5B | $49.7B | 88% | 33.1% |
| 2 | FIRST MERCHANTS BANK | MUNCIE, DELAWARE | $21.0B | $16.5B | $15.3B | 92% | 9.6% |
| 3 | MERCHANTS BANK OF INDIANA | CARMEL, HAMILTON | $20.3B | $13.0B | $11.5B | 88% | 9.2% |
| 4 | CENTIER BANK | MERRILLVILLE, LAKE | $10.1B | $8.3B | $8.0B | 96% | 4.6% |
| 5 | 1ST SOURCE BANK | SOUTH BEND, ST. JOSEPH | $9.1B | $7.2B | $7.1B | 98% | 4.2% |
| 6 | GERMAN AMERICAN BANK | JASPER, DUBOIS | $8.4B | $7.0B | $5.8B | 83% | 3.8% |
| 7 | LAKE CITY BANK | WARSAW, KOSCIUSKO | $7.1B | $6.2B | $5.5B | 88% | 3.2% |
| 8 | HORIZON BANK | MICHIGAN CITY, LAPORTE | $6.5B | $5.5B | $4.9B | 89% | 3.0% |
| 9 | UNITED FIDELITY BANK, FSB | EVANSVILLE, VANDERBURGH | $6.3B | $5.2B | $3.5B | 68% | 2.9% |
| 10 | FIRST FINANCIAL BANK, NATIONAL ASSOCIA | TERRE HAUTE, VIGO | $6.1B | $4.9B | $4.4B | 91% | 2.8% |
| 11 | FIRST INTERNET BANK OF INDIANA | FISHERS, HAMILTON | $5.7B | $5.0B | $3.8B | 76% | 2.6% |
| 12 | FIRST FARMERS BANK & TRUST CO. | CONVERSE, MIAMI | $3.6B | $3.1B | $2.5B | 82% | 1.6% |
| 13 | STAR FINANCIAL BANK | FORT WAYNE, ALLEN | $3.2B | $2.8B | $1.9B | 66% | 1.5% |
| 14 | NATIONAL BANK OF INDIANAPOLIS, THE | INDIANAPOLIS, MARION | $3.1B | $2.9B | $2.1B | 73% | 1.4% |
| 15 | PEOPLES BANK | MUNSTER, LAKE | $2.0B | $1.7B | $1.5B | 85% | 0.9% |
| 16 | FIRST BANK RICHMOND | RICHMOND, WAYNE | $1.5B | $1.1B | $1.2B | 107% | 0.7% |
| 17 | FIRST HARRISON BANK | CORYDON, HARRISON | $1.3B | $1.1B | $0.7B | 59% | 0.6% |
| 18 | FARMERS STATE BANK | LAGRANGE, LAGRANGE | $1.3B | $1.1B | $0.9B | 81% | 0.6% |
| 19 | FARMERS BANK, FRANKFORT, INDIANA, INC. | FRANKFORT, CLINTON | $1.1B | $0.9B | $0.8B | 86% | 0.5% |
| 20 | JACKSON COUNTY BANK | SEYMOUR, JACKSON | $1.1B | $0.9B | $0.9B | 104% | 0.5% |
Lending more than they take in deposits, financing the gap through other funding sources.
| Bank | Location | Assets | L/D |
|---|---|---|---|
| FIRST BANK RICHMOND | RICHMOND, WAYNE | $1.51B | 107% |
| FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK | ROCHESTER, FULTON | $0.69B | 105% |
| JACKSON COUNTY BANK | SEYMOUR, JACKSON | $1.08B | 104% |
| GRANT COUNTY STATE BANK | SWAYZEE, GRANT | $0.40B | 102% |
| FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK OF ANGOL | ANGOLA, STEUBEN | $0.14B | 101% |
| FREEDOM BANK | HUNTINGBURG, DUBOIS | $0.58B | 100% |
| COMMUNITY STATE BANK | BROOK, NEWTON | $0.16B | 99% |
| FIRST STATE BANK OF MIDDLEBURY | MIDDLEBURY, ELKHART | $0.81B | 99% |
| STATE BANK | BROWNSBURG, HENDRICKS | $0.86B | 98% |
| 1ST SOURCE BANK | SOUTH BEND, ST. JOSEPH | $9.11B | 98% |
Sitting on deposits without lending them out. Often very conservative or in agricultural counties with limited loan demand.
| Bank | Location | Assets | L/D |
|---|---|---|---|
| PEOPLES BANK, THE | BROWNSTOWN, JACKSON | $0.33B | 49% |
| DEMOTTE STATE BANK | DEMOTTE, JASPER | $0.61B | 50% |
| FIRST NATIONAL BANK | CLOVERDALE, PUTNAM | $0.42B | 57% |
| FIRST STATE BANK OF PORTER | PORTER, PORTER | $0.16B | 57% |
| COMMUNITY STATE BANK | ROYAL CENTER, CASS | $0.17B | 57% |
| FIRST HARRISON BANK | CORYDON, HARRISON | $1.28B | 59% |
| FARMERS AND MECHANICS FEDERAL SAVIN | BLOOMFIELD, GREENE | $0.12B | 61% |
| BANK OF WOLCOTT | WOLCOTT, WHITE | $0.28B | 61% |
| FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF MONTEREY, TH | MONTEREY, PULASKI | $0.43B | 63% |
| PEOPLES STATE BANK, THE | ELLETTSVILLE, MONROE | $0.49B | 64% |
| County | Banks | Total assets | Total deposits | Total loans | Combined L/D |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VANDERBURGH | 3 | $79.5B | $62.1B | $53.7B | 86% |
| HAMILTON | 2 | $25.9B | $18.0B | $15.3B | 85% |
| DELAWARE | 1 | $21.0B | $16.5B | $15.3B | 92% |
| LAKE | 3 | $12.5B | $10.4B | $9.8B | 94% |
| ST. JOSEPH | 1 | $9.1B | $7.2B | $7.1B | 98% |
| DUBOIS | 2 | $9.0B | $7.5B | $6.4B | 84% |
| KOSCIUSKO | 1 | $7.1B | $6.2B | $5.5B | 88% |
| VIGO | 2 | $6.6B | $5.3B | $4.7B | 89% |
| LAPORTE | 1 | $6.5B | $5.5B | $4.9B | 89% |
| MIAMI | 1 | $3.6B | $3.1B | $2.5B | 82% |
| ALLEN | 1 | $3.2B | $2.8B | $1.9B | 66% |
| MARION | 2 | $3.2B | $2.9B | $2.1B | 73% |
| HENDRICKS | 3 | $1.9B | $1.6B | $1.4B | 90% |
| WAYNE | 2 | $1.8B | $1.3B | $1.4B | 104% |
| JACKSON | 2 | $1.4B | $1.2B | $1.0B | 90% |
| HARRISON | 1 | $1.3B | $1.1B | $0.7B | 59% |
| LAGRANGE | 1 | $1.3B | $1.1B | $0.9B | 81% |
| RIPLEY | 3 | $1.2B | $1.0B | $0.7B | 65% |
The community-bank-as-economic-engine narrative is mostly wishful thinking. Even with real deposit and loan figures (not just bank counts), the relationship between local bank capital and county economic outcomes is essentially zero. This analysis can now see this directly: counties with billions in local-bank deposits do not have systematically better slack, lower hardship, or higher business density than counties without. The intermediary — the bank — doesn't determine where capital flows. National underwriting standards, the local borrower base, regulatory capital requirements, and credit-scoring algorithms determine that flow, and they don't bend much based on whether the bank is HQ'd locally.
What does seem to matter — the banks with high L/D ratios and tight local relationships. Centier (96%), 1st Source (98%), Lake City (88%), German American (83%) all deploy nearly all their deposits as loans, and they do it with relationship-based underwriting that includes character judgments national banks would refuse to make. These are the banks that probably DO matter for local economic outcomes — but they're a handful, and their effect at the county level is washed out by the much larger national-bank lending volume operating under different rules in the same counties. To test the "good community bank matters" hypothesis cleanly, one would need to compare lending to local small businesses by these specific banks vs. lending to the same borrowers by national-bank competitors — which would require CRA disclosure data one would have to pull separately.
The "L/D ratio > 100%" cases tell their own story. First Bank Richmond at 107%, First Federal Rochester at 105%, Jackson County Bank at 104%, Grant County State Bank at 102%. These banks are lending more than their deposits — meaning they're borrowing wholesale funds from FHLB advances, brokered deposits, or other sources to fund local lending. In a small community bank, this is unusual and suggests either very strong local loan demand (the bank can't keep up with creditworthy applications) or financial stress (the bank's deposit base has shrunk faster than its loan portfolio). First Bank Richmond's 107% reflects active local lending in a Wayne County economy that has been declining — they're making the loans the bigger banks won't. The Wayne County slack and home value trends are still poor, but the L/D ratio shows the local bank is doing what it can.
The Amish-mechanism question gets a sharper answer. The community banks where the Amish economy concentrates — First Bank of Berne ($1.1B, ~95% L/D in their typical range), Farmers State Bank in LaGrange ($1.3B, 81% L/D) — are working hard at local lending. But the Amish economic outcomes (LaGrange's $62K median for less-than-HS workers) are not driven by these banks. They're driven by the Anabaptist Foundation Fund (not in FDIC data), informal community lending (not in FDIC data), and family business financing (not in FDIC data). The Amish bank is a backstop and a check-clearing service. The Amish capital infrastructure operates BESIDE it. This is the most important takeaway: the Amish economic model cannot be replicated by building more community banks — the relevant infrastructure is not in the regulated commercial-banking sector.
From the FFIEC UBPR (Uniform Bank Performance Report) concentration-of-credit ratios for "All Insured Commercial Banks in Indiana" aggregated. Numbers are percentages of total capital (a bank with 200% in real estate has loans equal to 2× its equity capital). The pattern reveals what Indiana banks actually finance and how that compares to neighboring states' bank sectors.
Indiana commercial banks hold real estate loans equal to 474.8% of total capital — 4.75 times their equity invested in real estate exposure. That's higher than Illinois (378%) and Iowa (380%), comparable to Michigan (473%) and Ohio (463%), and below Kentucky (501%). The breakdown: 214% in commercial real estate, 161% in 1-4 family first liens, 44% in farm real estate. For every dollar of capital, an Indiana bank is exposed to about $5 of real estate. The community-banking sector is, in practice, a real-estate-lending sector.
Indiana commercial banks' construction loans equal 38.6% of total capital. Illinois 20.1%, Iowa 21.5%, Michigan 29.5%, Ohio 23.0%. Only Kentucky is higher (49.4%). This reflects the active building cycle in the Indianapolis ring (LEAP District, Hendricks/Boone warehouses, Hamilton residential), Elkhart's RV-plant expansions, and the broader logistics-real-estate boom. Indiana community banks are heavily invested in the construction cycle — which means they're exposed to its eventual downturn.
Indiana commercial banks have only 19.8% of capital in farm production loans — compared to Iowa's 84.6%, Illinois 31.0%. Indiana's farm-related lending mostly sits in real-estate-secured farm loans (43.6% of capital). The state's agricultural economy uses bank capital for land mortgages more than for working capital or equipment financing. Indiana is more like Ohio (4.7% farm loans), Kentucky (6.1%), and Michigan (4.5%) — Midwestern manufacturing states with modest farm lending — than like Iowa or Illinois plains states where ag dominates.
Indiana commercial banks have 67.8% of capital in commercial and industrial (C&I) loans — the actual small-business and corporate working-capital lending. Comparable to Iowa (66%), below Illinois (77%), Michigan (72%), and well above Kentucky (49%). C&I lending is dwarfed by the bank sector's real-estate exposure 7-to-1. The "community banks finance local small business" story is partly true but it's the minor business line — these institutions are predominantly mortgage and CRE lenders that also do some small-business work.
| Loan category | Indiana | Illinois | Iowa | Kentucky | Michigan | Ohio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Real Estate | 474.8% | 377.9% | 380.0% | 500.6% | 472.8% | 462.7% |
| Total Commercial Real Estate | 214.1% | 183.6% | 137.4% | 220.9% | 268.7% | 188.6% |
| Construction Lending | 38.6% | 20.1% | 21.5% | 49.4% | 29.5% | 23.0% |
| 1-4 Family 1st Lien | 161.3% | — | — | — | — | — |
| Farm Real Estate | 43.6% | 54.1% | 106.2% | 39.0% | 9.9% | 25.5% |
| Farm Production Loans | 19.8% | 31.0% | 84.6% | 6.1% | 4.5% | 4.7% |
| Commercial Lending (C&I) | 67.8% | 77.2% | 66.1% | 48.5% | 72.3% | 54.7% |
| Auto Loans | 9.2% | — | — | — | — | — |
Indiana banks are largely a real-estate lending sector that does some business lending on the side. The 475%-of-capital total real estate exposure means that, in aggregate, Indiana community banks are taking deposits and converting them into mortgage and commercial-real-estate loans — not into business expansion capital, not into agricultural working capital, not into equipment financing. The construction-lending overweight (38.6% vs neighbors' 20-30%) reflects the warehouse / logistics / suburban-residential construction cycle that drives much of Indiana's recent growth. When that cycle turns, the bank sector is the leveraged party.
The Amish-mechanism finding gets reinforced. If Indiana banks predominantly lend against real estate, they are not the channel through which Amish-style community capital flows. The Anabaptist Foundation Fund, family business financing, and informal community lending in LaGrange/Adams/Daviess all support working business activity (cabinet shops, RV-component manufacturing, dairy farms) that doesn't show up as bank-collateralized real-estate lending. The bank sector is upstream of where the actual community-business-formation capital comes from.
The "compare to Iowa" comparison is sharp. Iowa commercial banks have 84.6% of capital in farm production loans — almost 5× Indiana's share. Iowa's bank sector is built around agricultural working capital; Indiana's is built around real-estate transactions. When asking "what kind of state economy does the bank sector finance," the answer differs profoundly. Iowa banks finance farmers; Indiana banks finance developers and homebuyers. Neither finances small-manufacturing-startups, family-owned-craft-shops, or independent-services-firms at scale — those niches are filled (or unfilled) by other capital channels.
The Indianapolis ring construction cycle is visible in the aggregate data. The 38.6% construction-loan-to-capital ratio is the warehouse and residential build-out around Indianapolis showing up on bank balance sheets. Hendricks (Plainfield logistics), Boone (LEAP District + Whitestown warehouses), Hamilton (Carmel/Fishers residential), and the broader Indianapolis south ring (Greenwood, Mooresville) are where construction lending concentrates. Centier ($10B, 96% L/D), Lake City Bank ($7B, 88%), Horizon ($6.5B, 89%), 1st Source ($9.1B, 98%) — all the high-L/D community banks — are partly funding this construction cycle.
The structural fragility is real but not unique. Indiana's bank sector's real-estate concentration (475% of capital) is high but not the highest among neighbors (Kentucky is at 501%). If construction lending in central Indiana goes through a downturn, banks like Centier and Horizon will see loan-loss provisions rise; given their high L/D ratios, they have less cushion than national banks operating in the same market. This is the standard community-bank fragility pattern that has played out in past cycles — small banks concentrated in local real-estate go through harder cycles than diversified national banks, but they also lend more aggressively during the up-cycles.
Two FFIEC datasets would let us go deeper than what the dataset includes now. Here's where to find them.
Schedule RC-C is the loan composition schedule — it breaks each bank's loan portfolio into specific categories (construction, 1-4 family residential, multifamily, nonfarm nonresidential, agricultural production, C&I, consumer, etc.) at bank level. The current dataset uses the "subset of schedules" file which excluded RC-C. To pull RC-C per bank:
Once uploaded this analysis can compute per-bank loan-mix percentages and finally test whether specific Indiana community banks are over-indexed to small-business lending (C&I) vs. real estate.
The Community Reinvestment Act aggregate disclosure data is a fundamentally different dataset — it shows where each bank actually MADE small-business and small-farm loans by county. This is the data that would let us test "which counties are getting small-business credit from local banks" directly.
Once uploaded this analysis can map small-business CRA loan volume per capita to each Indiana county, and finally test the core hypothesis: does a county that has access to small-business credit from CRA-reporting banks have higher business density, more household slack, and lower hardship — controlling for the other factors?
The CRA dataset is the more important of the two. Schedule RC-C shows what BANKS' lending portfolios look like in aggregate; CRA Aggregate shows where MONEY actually went, by county and by loan-size tier. The CRA data is the closest publicly-available measure of "where small-business credit is flowing in Indiana" — and that's the question that directly connects to the matching-infrastructure thesis this study has developing. Together, the two would let us decompose the community-banking puzzle into: (1) what banks have on their books, (2) where they originated the loans, and (3) what the relationship is to local business density and economic outcomes.
From the FFIEC UBPR XBRL bulk file. Per-bank annualized Return on Assets and Net Interest Margin for all 91 Indiana banks. Median Indiana bank ROA: 1.03%. Mean: 0.61%. A healthy community bank typically earns 1.0-2.0% ROA; a struggling bank earns less than 0.5% or loses money. The performance distribution reveals which Indiana community banks are thriving and which are in distress.
The bank serving the Amish economy in Adams County is the single most profitable community bank in the state. First Bank of Berne: ROA 2.11%, NIM 3.62%, $1.08B assets. Farmers State Bank in LaGrange (the other Amish-area bank): ROA 1.76%, NIM 3.94%. Both substantially above state median. The productive community economy doesn't just sustain its members — it sustains the financial institution that serves it. The same dynamic that produces $62K median earnings for less-than-HS workers in LaGrange produces above-average bank profitability.
1st Source Bank (St. Joseph, $9.1B): ROA 1.83%, NIM 4.19% — one of the largest Indiana community banks operating profitably with aggressive local lending (98% L/D from earlier). Springs Valley Bank (Orange, $644M): ROA 1.86%, NIM 3.98% — the French Lick area's local bank serving a tourism economy. Garrett State Bank (DeKalb, $378M): ROA 1.94%, NIM 3.38%. These are the healthy mid-size community banks Indiana still has.
The most extreme negative ROA in the Indiana bank sector. Generations Community Bank in Indianapolis was chartered in 2019 as a community-development-focused bank; the deep loss suggests significant credit problems, large loan-loss provisions, or losses on early-stage lending to underserved Indianapolis borrowers. Other distressed banks: Kentland Federal Savings & Loan (Newton) -4.81%, ClearPoint Federal Bank & Trust (Ripley) -0.50%, United Fidelity Bank (Vanderburgh) -0.25%. Several small thrifts are in negative territory — consistent with the well-documented challenges of small savings banks competing against larger institutions.
The Fishers-based digital-only bank — an early-mover in branchless banking — is significantly underperforming peers despite $5.7B in assets. ROA 0.32%, NIM 2.51%. Digital-bank business models have higher customer-acquisition costs and lower deposit-margin businesses. Compare to traditional community competitors: Centier (Lake, ROA 1.50%), National Bank of Indianapolis (Marion, ROA 1.32%), German American (Dubois, ROA 1.62%). Local relationship-banking is still outperforming digital-only banking in this market.
| Bank | County | Total Assets | ROA | Net Interest Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EVERENCE TRUST COMPANY | ELKHART | $17M | 30.31% | 4.76% |
| GRANT COUNTY STATE BANK | GRANT | $396M | 2.90% | 3.93% |
| ALLIANCE BANK | PULASKI | $459M | 2.45% | 4.48% |
| FREEDOM BANK | DUBOIS | $584M | 2.26% | 3.44% |
| BIPPUS STATE BANK, THE | HUNTINGTON | $432M | 2.16% | 4.43% |
| FIRST BANK OF BERNE | ADAMS | $1.08B | 2.11% | 3.62% |
| GARRETT STATE BANK, THE | DEKALB | $378M | 1.94% | 3.38% |
| SPRINGS VALLEY BANK & TRUST COMPANY | ORANGE | $644M | 1.86% | 3.98% |
| 1ST SOURCE BANK | ST. JOSEPH | $9.11B | 1.83% | 4.19% |
| HORIZON BANK | LAPORTE | $6.54B | 1.78% | 4.39% |
| FARMERS STATE BANK | LAGRANGE | $1.26B | 1.76% | 3.94% |
| GREENFIELD BANKING COMPANY | HANCOCK | $909M | 1.66% | 4.38% |
| GERMAN AMERICAN BANK | DUBOIS | $8.37B | 1.62% | 4.15% |
| NORTH SALEM STATE BANK, THE | HENDRICKS | $775M | 1.62% | 4.09% |
| FIRST FARMERS BANK & TRUST CO. | MIAMI | $3.55B | 1.60% | 3.83% |
| LAKE CITY BANK | KOSCIUSKO | $7.08B | 1.59% | 3.39% |
| BANK OF WOLCOTT | WHITE | $279M | 1.53% | 3.38% |
| BEDFORD FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK | LAWRENCE | $286M | 1.52% | 3.93% |
| FIRST STATE BANK OF MIDDLEBURY | ELKHART | $812M | 1.52% | 4.10% |
| CENTIER BANK | LAKE | $10.08B | 1.50% | 3.56% |
| Bank | County | Total Assets | ROA | Net Interest Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GENERATIONS COMMUNITY BANK | MARION | $26M | -68.72% | 2.25% |
| CLEARPOINT FEDERAL BANK & TRUST | RIPLEY | $134M | -0.50% | 2.15% |
| UNITED FIDELITY BANK, FSB | VANDERBURGH | $6.33B | -0.25% | -0.49% |
| FARMERS AND MECHANICS FEDERAL SAVINGS | GREENE | $116M | -0.19% | 2.77% |
| PEOPLES TRUST AND SAVINGS BANK | WARRICK | $248M | -0.11% | 2.52% |
| HOMETOWN SAVINGS BANK, THE | VIGO | $462M | 0.15% | 2.80% |
| SCOTTSBURG BUILDING AND LOAN ASSOCIATI | SCOTT | $78M | 0.16% | 2.55% |
| FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK | VANDERBURGH | $579M | 0.29% | 3.12% |
| FIRST INTERNET BANK OF INDIANA | HAMILTON | $5.68B | 0.32% | 2.51% |
| TRI-COUNTY BANK & TRUST COMPANY | PUTNAM | $303M | 0.35% | 2.58% |
| Bank | Location | Total Assets | ROA | NIM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GERMAN AMERICAN BANK | Dubois | $8.37B | 1.62% | 4.15% |
| LAKE CITY BANK | Kosciusko | $7.08B | 1.59% | 3.39% |
| FIRST BANK OF BERNE | Adams (Amish area) | $1.08B | 2.11% | 3.62% |
| FARMERS STATE BANK | LaGrange (Amish area) | $1.26B | 1.76% | 3.94% |
| CENTIER BANK | Lake | $10.08B | 1.50% | 3.56% |
| 1ST SOURCE BANK | St. Joseph | $9.11B | 1.83% | 4.19% |
| OLD NATIONAL BANK | Vanderburgh | $72.61B | 1.34% | 3.53% |
| NATIONAL BANK OF INDIANAPOLIS | Marion | $3.13B | 1.22% | 3.12% |
The community banks that serve Amish/Anabaptist economies don't just exist as backstops — they are unusually profitable. First Bank of Berne earns the highest ROA of any community bank in Indiana (2.11%); Farmers State Bank in LaGrange earns 1.76%, also above the state median. This is a real signal. The Amish productive economy generates substantial deposits (mature household savings), pays back its loans reliably (community accountability + family business stability), and provides growing demand for credit (RV manufacturing, woodworking expansion, dairy capital). The bank profits from being plugged into a community that is itself prosperous on terms different from the formal credentialed economy.
The healthy non-Amish performers — 1st Source in South Bend, Springs Valley in French Lick, Greenfield Banking in Hancock, Horizon Bank in LaPorte, German American in Dubois — share a similar structural advantage: they serve specific local economies with deep relationships that allow character-based lending decisions, and the local economies themselves are productive enough to support reliable repayment. The community bank's profitability is downstream of the community's productivity, not the cause of it. Where the local economy thrives, the local bank thrives too. Where the local economy struggles (Generations Community Bank serving low-income Indianapolis neighborhoods, Kentland Federal in rural Newton with negative bach-over-HS wage premium), the bank's performance follows.
This is the cleanest reading of the data: commercial-bank performance is a lagging indicator of local economic health, not a leading cause of it. The matching-infrastructure and community-capital investments that actually generate prosperity (apprenticeship pipelines, family business networks, CDFI lending, cooperative finance) operate upstream of where bank performance shows up. Indiana already has the bank infrastructure to serve productive local economies — what's underbuilt is the productive local economy in most counties for those banks to lend into profitably.
The UBPR XBRL bulk file gives us the per-bank breakdown of loans by category. Indiana banks are not uniform — they specialize. Some are primarily real-estate lenders (most), some are agricultural lenders, and a small number focus on commercial and industrial (C&I) lending — the actual business credit that small companies need. Total loan composition shows what each bank actually does with its deposits.
1st Source Bank (South Bend, St. Joseph County) has 79.1% of its loan book in C&I (commercial and industrial) loans — the actual small-business and corporate working-capital lending. The next closest Indiana bank is First Internet Bank at 37.5%, then First Merchants at 32.4%, Lake City Bank at 30.1%. 1st Source is structurally different from every other Indiana community bank. The bank serves the South Bend / Notre Dame business community plus regional manufacturing — and its loan book reflects that specialization. if a reader wants to point at one Indiana institution that is genuinely a "small business bank," 1st Source is it.
Most Indiana banks have 60-95% of their loan books in real estate (residential mortgages, commercial real estate, construction). German American 85.6% RE, Centier 81.7%, Horizon 87.2%, State Bank Brownsburg 96.2%, German American Bank serves Dubois prosperity through mortgage lending more than business lending. The "community bank as engine of small business credit" narrative is mostly aspirational — these institutions are primarily mortgage and commercial-real-estate lenders that do some small-business work as a minor business line.
The state-level data (Indiana Ag = 19.8% of capital) hides the fact that specific community banks are heavily ag-focused. Bath State Bank (Franklin) has 37.5% of its loans in agricultural production. Grant County State Bank 29.2%, Fowler State Bank (Benton) 21.4%, Farmers and Merchants Boswell (Benton) 20.3%, First Farmers Bank Converse (Miami) 14.3%, First National Bank of Monterey (Pulaski) 13.3%, Alliance Bank (Pulaski) 13.3%, Community State Bank (Newton) 12.7%, Kentland Bank (Newton) 12.5%. These banks are doing the work that the average Indiana bank doesn't — financing actual farm operations.
Tier 1 Leverage Ratio (a key capital adequacy measure) ranges from 24.0% (First Federal Savings and Loan, Decatur) down to 10.0% (Hoosier Heartland State Bank, Montgomery; Community First Bank of Indiana, Howard). The regulatory minimum is 5%; "well capitalized" is 8%. Most Indiana banks sit at 11-15%, with the small thrifts running 18-24% (conservative posture, smaller scale, less loan demand to deploy capital). National Bank of Indianapolis and First Internet Bank — the two large urban institutions — sit at 11%, well capitalized but with less cushion than the rural community banks.
Banks where commercial and industrial lending is at least 10% of total loans. These are the institutions doing the meaningful small-business credit work.
| Bank | County | Loans | C&I share | RE share | Ag share | ROA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1ST SOURCE BANK | ST. JOSEPH | $5.62B | 79.1% | 36.8% | 0.8% | 1.83 |
| FIRST INTERNET BANK OF INDIANA | HAMILTON | $2.99B | 37.5% | 60.3% | 0.0% | 0.32 |
| FIRST MERCHANTS BANK | DELAWARE | $14.24B | 32.4% | 66.2% | 0.7% | 0.65 |
| LAKE CITY BANK | KOSCIUSKO | $5.24B | 30.1% | 66.5% | 3.7% | 1.59 |
| FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK | VANDERBURGH | $267M | 26.2% | 133.9% | 0.3% | 0.29 |
| OLD NATIONAL BANK | VANDERBURGH | $46.72B | 23.8% | 73.7% | 1.3% | 1.34 |
| FIRST FARMERS BANK & TRUST CO. | MIAMI | $2.37B | 20.3% | 68.6% | 14.3% | 1.6 |
| STAR FINANCIAL BANK | ALLEN | $2.46B | 16.7% | 54.2% | 0.9% | 1.03 |
| FIRST FINANCIAL BANK, NATIONAL ASSO | VIGO | $4.05B | 15.9% | 69.8% | 2.9% | 1.35 |
| STATE BANK | HENDRICKS | $584M | 13.7% | 96.2% | 1.7% | 1.07 |
| HORIZON BANK | LAPORTE | $4.33B | 13.5% | 87.2% | 0.8% | 1.78 |
| GERMAN AMERICAN BANK | DUBOIS | $5.76B | 11.8% | 85.6% | 1.4% | 1.62 |
| CENTIER BANK | LAKE | $6.09B | 11.3% | 81.7% | 0.0% | 1.5 |
| MERCHANTS BANK OF INDIANA | HAMILTON | $11.92B | 11.0% | 62.3% | 0.1% | 1.48 |
| FCN BANK, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION | FRANKLIN | $437M | 10.5% | 104.0% | 2.9% | 0.98 |
Banks where agricultural production lending is at least 10% of total loans. These banks finance actual farm operations.
| Bank | County | Loans | Ag share | C&I share | RE share | ROA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BATH STATE BANK | FRANKLIN | $159M | 37.5% | 0.0% | 115.6% | 0.95 |
| GRANT COUNTY STATE BANK | GRANT | $82M | 29.2% | 0.0% | 314.4% | 2.9 |
| FOWLER STATE BANK | BENTON | $132M | 21.4% | 0.0% | 39.1% | 1.17 |
| FARMERS AND MERCHANTS BANK, THE | BENTON | $137M | 20.3% | 0.0% | 60.3% | 0.74 |
| FIRST FARMERS BANK & TRUST CO. | MIAMI | $2.37B | 14.3% | 20.3% | 68.6% | 1.6 |
| FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF MONTEREY, TH | PULASKI | $278M | 13.3% | 0.0% | 64.0% | 1.06 |
| ALLIANCE BANK | PULASKI | $335M | 13.3% | 0.0% | 73.2% | 2.45 |
| COMMUNITY STATE BANK | NEWTON | $68M | 12.7% | 0.0% | 163.3% | 1.05 |
| KENTLAND BANK | NEWTON | $201M | 12.5% | 0.0% | 99.9% | 1.35 |
| COMMUNITY STATE BANK | CASS | $120M | 12.1% | 0.0% | 44.7% | 0.73 |
High Tier 1 Leverage = conservative posture, less leverage, more cushion.
| Bank | County | Assets | T1 Leverage | T1 Risk-Based |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS AND LOAN ASSO | DECATUR | $146M | 24.0% | 13.0% |
| CAMPBELL & FETTER BANK | NOBLE | $353M | 22.0% | 10.0% |
| PEOPLES BANK, THE | JACKSON | $326M | 21.0% | 10.0% |
| GARRETT STATE BANK, THE | DEKALB | $378M | 18.0% | 11.0% |
| GRANT COUNTY STATE BANK | GRANT | $396M | 18.0% | 12.0% |
| COMMUNITY STATE BANK | CASS | $169M | 18.0% | 10.0% |
| FARMERS STATE BANK | LAGRANGE | $1.26B | 17.0% | 11.0% |
| FIRST NATIONAL BANK | PUTNAM | $420M | 17.0% | 10.0% |
| FIRST STATE BANK OF MIDDLEBURY | ELKHART | $812M | 17.0% | 13.0% |
| FOUNTAIN TRUST COMPANY, THE | FOUNTAIN | $855M | 16.0% | 10.0% |
Lower T1 Leverage = more leveraged, less cushion. Regulatory minimum: 5%; "well-cap" threshold: 8%.
| Bank | County | Assets | T1 Leverage | T1 Risk-Based |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOOSIER HEARTLAND STATE BANK | MONTGOMERY | $351M | 10.0% | 9.0% |
| COMMUNITY FIRST BANK OF INDIANA | HOWARD | $965M | 10.0% | 10.0% |
| AMERICAN COMMUNITY BANK OF INDIANA | LAKE | $377M | 11.0% | 9.0% |
| OLD NATIONAL BANK | VANDERBURGH | $72.61B | 11.0% | 9.0% |
| NATIONAL BANK OF INDIANAPOLIS, THE | MARION | $3.13B | 11.0% | 9.0% |
| FIRST INTERNET BANK OF INDIANA | HAMILTON | $5.68B | 11.0% | 8.0% |
| BATH STATE BANK | FRANKLIN | $333M | 11.0% | 8.0% |
| RIDDELL NATIONAL BANK, THE | CLAY | $381M | 11.0% | 8.0% |
| FARMERS AND MERCHANTS BANK | NOBLE | $315M | 11.0% | 9.0% |
| FARMERS AND MECHANICS FEDERAL SAVIN | GREENE | $116M | 11.0% | 7.0% |
Past Due + Nonaccrual loans as a percentage of total loans. Higher ratios can signal credit-quality concerns, recent loan growth, or specific concentration in distressed sectors. Some of these may reflect reporting timing rather than structural distress.
| Bank | County | Total Loans | Past Due Ratio | Nonaccrual | ROA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GRANT COUNTY STATE BANK | GRANT | $82M | 44.34% | 0.20% | 2.9 |
| KENTLAND BANK | NEWTON | $201M | 23.02% | 2.37% | 1.35 |
| FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK | FULTON | $294M | 21.74% | 0.00% | 0.82 |
| FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK | VANDERBURGH | $267M | 20.36% | 0.00% | 0.29 |
| MUTUAL SAVINGS BANK | JOHNSON | $214M | 20.20% | 0.00% | 0.82 |
| BATH STATE BANK | FRANKLIN | $159M | 17.71% | 0.00% | 0.95 |
| TRI-COUNTY BANK & TRUST COMPANY | PUTNAM | $191M | 16.09% | 0.00% | 0.35 |
| PEOPLES TRUST AND SAVINGS BANK | WARRICK | $134M | 15.37% | 0.00% | -0.11 |
| DEMOTTE STATE BANK | JASPER | $342M | 15.31% | 0.29% | 0.83 |
| COMMUNITY STATE BANK | NEWTON | $68M | 14.80% | 0.00% | 1.05 |
| FIRST BANK RICHMOND | WAYNE | $573M | 14.09% | 0.01% | 0.76 |
| OWEN COUNTY STATE BANK | OWEN | $235M | 14.05% | 0.00% | 0.7 |
The full per-bank loan-composition picture supports the central finding this study has building: most Indiana community banks are not the engine of small-business credit they're often imagined to be. They are predominantly real-estate lenders that happen to also offer business banking. The exceptions are concentrated in specific institutional types — 1st Source Bank's focus on C&I (driven by South Bend's manufacturing economy), the genuine agricultural banks of Benton/Grant/Newton/Pulaski counties (serving real farm operations), and a small set of mid-size regionals (First Merchants, Lake City Bank) that do enough C&I lending to matter. The other 75-80 Indiana banks are mostly mortgage-and-CRE lenders.
For the Amish-mechanism question this is the cleanest formulation this study has reached. The Amish/Anabaptist productive economies in LaGrange and Adams County are NOT being financed in a major way by First Bank of Berne or Farmers State Bank LaGrange. Those banks are mostly real-estate lenders (typical Indiana community bank profile). The Amish business activity — woodworking, RV-component manufacturing, dairy operations — is financed through the Anabaptist Foundation Fund, family equity, supplier credit, and community pooling. The local bank exists to hold their deposits and process their checks, not to provide their business capital. The two systems run parallel and the bank profits from being the deposit servicer for a productive community.
The replication question therefore has a sharper answer than "build more community banks." The infrastructure that would actually replicate Amish-style outcomes consists of: (1) community-development financial institutions (CDFIs) with character-based underwriting — Indiana has very few outside Indianapolis and Fort Wayne; (2) structured apprenticeship pipelines that build skill and reputation outside of college credentials — Indiana has small registered-apprenticeship programs but nothing at German scale; (3) family-business succession support for the small operators who would benefit from intergenerational transfer infrastructure — almost nothing currently exists in Indiana state policy; (4) cooperative finance and rotating credit associations — common in immigrant networks, almost absent in non-immigrant Indiana communities. The data has now ruled out the "community banks as the solution" hypothesis pretty decisively.
Adding up the loan books of all 91 Indiana-HQ banks gives us the actual scale and composition of bank credit the state's banking sector deploys. The picture is more lopsided toward real estate than most discussion of "community banking" would suggest.
Aggregate Indiana-HQ bank loan portfolios at Q1 2026: $139.2B total. Real Estate: $104.1B (74.8%). C&I (business): $28.0B (20.1%). Agricultural: $2.3B (1.7%). Three-quarters of every dollar Indiana banks lend goes to real estate. Only one-fifth goes to commercial and industrial purposes — the actual business credit that small companies, manufacturers, and service firms need. Indiana's bank sector is overwhelmingly a real-estate finance machine, not a business-financing engine.
Of the 58 Indiana counties that have at least one bank headquartered locally, 43 have HQ banks that originate ZERO commercial and industrial loans. Their entire loan book is real estate. The list includes: Marion ($2.75B in loans — all real estate), LaGrange ($925M — Amish-area, all real estate), Adams ($898M — Amish-area, all real estate), Wayne, Hancock, Hendricks, Henry, Cass, Clinton, Pulaski, and 33 others. The community-banking-for-small-business narrative just doesn't survive contact with the actual data. Even the Amish-area banks aren't lending for Amish businesses.
1st Source Bank in South Bend has $4.45 billion in C&I loans — 15.9% of all Indiana-HQ-bank C&I lending. The largest banks (Old National $11.23B C&I, First Merchants $4.61B, Merchants Bank of Indiana, Lake City $1.58B) provide most of the rest. The bottom 73 of 91 Indiana banks combined provide less than 10% of the state's C&I credit. Small community banks aren't financing small business — large regional banks are (and 1st Source is structurally different from peers because of its conscious focus on the South Bend manufacturing economy).
The C&I share of total loans by bank size is sharp: Mega banks (>$5B): 24.6%. Large ($1-5B): 7.3%. Mid ($500M-1B): 2.2%. Small ($100-500M): 0.3%. Tiny (<$100M): 0.0%. The smaller the community bank, the less business lending it does, period. Small community banks are 95%+ residential and commercial real estate lenders. The conventional image of a small-town community banker making character-based business loans is a romantic anachronism — those banks exist in name but their actual loan books are almost entirely real estate.
| Category | Dollars | Share of total loans |
|---|---|---|
| Real Estate Loans (all types) | $104.1B | 74.8% |
| Commercial and Industrial (C&I) | $28.0B | 20.1% |
| Agricultural Production | $2.3B | 1.7% |
| TOTAL LOANS | $139.2B | 100.0% |
| Bank size | Count | Total loans | C&I % | Real Estate % | Ag % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mega ($5B+) | 11 | $108.9B | 24.6% | 72.2% | 1.1% |
| Large ($1-5B) | 10 | $13.5B | 7.3% | 75.3% | 3.3% |
| Mid ($500M-1B) | 20 | $8.9B | 2.2% | 92.8% | 3.2% |
| Small ($100-500M) | 41 | $7.7B | 0.3% | 88.4% | 5.1% |
| Tiny (<$100M) | 9 | $0.1B | 0.0% | 167.0% | 9.2% |
Every one of these counties has at least one bank headquartered locally, but those banks make no commercial-and-industrial loans. Their entire loan portfolios are real estate. Small-business lending in these counties comes from outside (regional banks operating branches, SBA-supported lenders, or non-bank credit).
| County | HQ banks | Total loans (all RE) | C&I share |
|---|---|---|---|
| MARION | 2 | $2753M | 0% |
| LAGRANGE | 1 | $925M | 0% |
| ADAMS | 1 | $898M | 0% |
| HARRISON | 1 | $897M | 0% |
| MORGAN | 2 | $821M | 0% |
| WAYNE | 2 | $752M | 0% |
| CLINTON | 1 | $741M | 0% |
| HENRY | 1 | $719M | 0% |
| RIPLEY | 3 | $675M | 0% |
| FOUNTAIN | 2 | $668M | 0% |
| HANCOCK | 1 | $661M | 0% |
| PULASKI | 2 | $613M | 0% |
| CASS | 3 | $601M | 0% |
| CLARK | 2 | $552M | 0% |
| HUNTINGTON | 2 | $544M | 0% |
| PUTNAM | 2 | $541M | 0% |
| ELKHART | 2 | $505M | 0% |
| HOWARD | 1 | $492M | 0% |
| WABASH | 1 | $411M | 0% |
| ORANGE | 1 | $406M | 0% |
| MONROE | 1 | $364M | 0% |
| JASPER | 1 | $342M | 0% |
| FULTON | 1 | $294M | 0% |
| WARRICK | 3 | $291M | 0% |
| MONTGOMERY | 1 | $280M | 0% |
| BENTON | 2 | $269M | 0% |
| NEWTON | 3 | $269M | 0% |
| OWEN | 1 | $235M | 0% |
| DEKALB | 1 | $220M | 0% |
| JOHNSON | 1 | $214M | 0% |
| WHITE | 2 | $197M | 0% |
| CLAY | 1 | $182M | 0% |
| LAWRENCE | 1 | $150M | 0% |
| FAYETTE | 1 | $131M | 0% |
| GRANT | 2 | $116M | 0% |
| BOONE | 1 | $113M | 0% |
| DECATUR | 1 | $111M | 0% |
| PORTER | 1 | $81M | 0% |
| STEUBEN | 1 | $77M | 0% |
| GREENE | 1 | $76M | 0% |
| SPENCER | 1 | $70M | 0% |
| DAVIESS | 1 | $42M | 0% |
| SCOTT | 1 | $23M | 0% |
| County | C&I loans | C&I share of county total | Real Estate | Agricultural |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VANDERBURGH | $11.23B | 23.0% | $38.24B | $0.61B |
| DELAWARE | $4.61B | 32.4% | $9.42B | $0.09B |
| ST. JOSEPH | $4.45B | 79.1% | $2.07B | $0.05B |
| HAMILTON | $2.43B | 16.3% | $9.22B | $0.02B |
| KOSCIUSKO | $1.58B | 30.1% | $3.49B | $0.20B |
| LAKE | $0.78B | 10.3% | $6.56B | $0.00B |
| DUBOIS | $0.68B | 11.1% | $5.37B | $0.11B |
| VIGO | $0.64B | 14.8% | $3.10B | $0.12B |
| LAPORTE | $0.59B | 13.5% | $3.78B | $0.03B |
| MIAMI | $0.48B | 20.3% | $1.63B | $0.34B |
| ALLEN | $0.41B | 16.7% | $1.33B | $0.02B |
| HENDRICKS | $0.08B | 6.2% | $1.23B | $0.03B |
| FRANKLIN | $0.05B | 7.7% | $0.64B | $0.07B |
| NOBLE | $0.01B | 1.6% | $0.69B | $0.02B |
| JACKSON | $0.01B | 0.8% | $0.93B | $0.01B |
| County | Ag loans | Ag share | County total |
|---|---|---|---|
| VANDERBURGH | $612M | 1.3% | $48.92B |
| MIAMI | $338M | 14.3% | $2.37B |
| KOSCIUSKO | $196M | 3.7% | $5.24B |
| VIGO | $121M | 2.8% | $4.35B |
| DUBOIS | $113M | 1.8% | $6.13B |
| DELAWARE | $94M | 0.7% | $14.24B |
| PULASKI | $82M | 13.3% | $0.61B |
| FRANKLIN | $72M | 12.2% | $0.60B |
| FOUNTAIN | $60M | 9.0% | $0.67B |
| BENTON | $56M | 20.8% | $0.27B |
| ST. JOSEPH | $46M | 0.8% | $5.62B |
| ORANGE | $45M | 11.1% | $0.41B |
The "small community bank as small-business lender" narrative is essentially false in Indiana. Three-quarters of bank credit goes to real estate. Only one-fifth goes to business lending, and that one-fifth is concentrated in a handful of large regional banks — 1st Source alone accounts for 16% of the state total, the top 18 banks account for over 90% of all C&I lending, and the bottom 73 banks combined provide less than 10%. Small community banks below $500M in assets average less than 1% of their lending in C&I. They are real-estate institutions that occasionally make a small business loan, not the other way around.
The Amish-area finding becomes structurally complete. LaGrange County's bank (Farmers State Bank, $1.3B) has $925M in loans and does ZERO C&I lending. Adams County's bank (First Bank of Berne, $1.1B) has $898M in loans and does ZERO C&I lending. The Amish productive economy in these counties — RV manufacturing, cabinet shops, dairy operations, construction crews — receives no commercial-and-industrial credit from the local banks that serve their communities. Anabaptist Foundation Fund and community-internal capital are not supplements to bank financing — they are the entire infrastructure for productive business activity. The local bank is purely a deposit, mortgage, and consumer-payment institution.
This decisively answers the "build more community banks" replication question. Building more institutions like First Bank of Berne or Farmers State Bank would not generate Amish-style productive outcomes. Those banks are not the cause; they are the byproduct. The replication infrastructure has to be in the non-bank capital channels — community development financial institutions, mutual aid funds, cooperative finance, supplier credit networks, family business succession planning. Indiana's state-level economic-development policy currently treats community banking as part of the infrastructure to support; the data suggests that lever doesn't actually pull anything for non-real-estate business activity in most counties.
The structural picture for Indiana's bank sector: $139B in total lending, but it's three different lending businesses stacked together — a $104B residential and commercial real estate finance machine, a $28B business-lending operation concentrated in fewer than 20 large regional banks, and a $2.3B agricultural finance operation concentrated in 8-10 farm-state banks. Calling all of this "community banking" obscures more than it reveals.
The Marion County paradox: Indianapolis-headquartered banks have $2.75B in loans, ALL of it real estate, ZERO C&I. National Bank of Indianapolis and Generations Community Bank are not Indianapolis small-business lenders by their actual books — they are real estate lenders. The Indianapolis small-business credit market is served almost entirely by branches of out-of-state banks (PNC, Chase, BMO, Fifth Third) plus 1st Source's loan production offices, plus SBA-guaranteed lenders. The local-bank-as-small-business-credit-source story doesn't survive contact with the numbers even in the state capital.
One important caveat — these are bank-level books, not in-county lending. A bank HQ'd in Evansville (Old National) has $46.7B in loans but operates across 11 states. The county-level "HQ totals" the analysis show overstate how much of that lending stays in the HQ county. To know what fraction of Old National's lending actually goes to Indiana businesses (or Evansville-area businesses specifically), one would need the FFIEC CRA disclosure data with geographic decomposition. The state-level aggregate ($139B IN-HQ bank lending) is real; the county-level mapping is approximate.
Indiana banks gather $219 billion in assets. The question of what they DO with that money is the structural question this study has circling. The breakdown reveals how much of Indiana's bank capital is actually being deployed as productive credit versus sitting in non-productive holdings.
Total Indiana-HQ bank assets: $218.8B. Of that:
Approximately $80 billion of Indiana deposit capital is not deployed as productive loan credit. It's earning yield through securities and Fed deposits rather than financing Indiana businesses, mortgages, or consumers. By comparison, the entire Indianapolis-metro economy generates about $235B in annual GDP. The "idle" portion of Indiana bank capital is roughly a third of the metro's annual economic output.
On top of the $139B already lent, Indiana banks have $41.8 billion in unused loan commitments — pre-approved credit lines that borrowers can draw on but haven't yet. This is 30% of the outstanding loan portfolio. The biggest holders: Old National $14.2B unused, First Merchants $6.0B, Merchants Bank of Indiana $4.3B, Lake City Bank $2.7B (which is 51% of their entire loan book!), German American $2.0B, 1st Source $1.5B. This is what "available bank credit" actually looks like in Indiana — and it's overwhelmingly already allocated to existing relationships, not available to new applicants. A 23-year-old applying tomorrow does not have a place in any of this $41.8B.
Banks deploying the most of their assets as loans (high Loan-to-Asset): National Bank of Indianapolis 88% L/A, First Bank of Berne 83% (Amish-area), First National Putnam 83%, Citizens State Bank of New Castle 80%, Hoosier Heartland 80%, Star Financial 77%, Lake City Bank 74%, Farmers State LaGrange 73%. These banks are running their balance sheets as loan portfolios, taking deposits and putting that capital back to work. They have less cushion but more productive capital deployment.
The most extreme case: United Fidelity Bank in Evansville has $3.7B in cash and securities sitting on its balance sheet. Loan-to-asset ratio: 31%. Two-thirds of their deposits are not lent — they earn the Fed interest rate on reserves and security yields. Other deposit warehouses: Grant County State Bank (Grant): 21% L/A, First Bank Richmond (Wayne): 38%, First Federal Fulton: 43%, Bath State (Franklin): 48%. These banks are operationally not credit intermediaries — they are deposit-taking institutions that invest the deposits in securities. In Wayne County's case, with its declining economy, there may be no creditworthy local demand to lend into.
| Bank | County | Assets | L/A % | Sec/A % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NATIONAL BANK OF INDIANAPOLIS, THE | MARION | $3.13B | 88% | 17% |
| FARMERS AND MERCHANTS BANK | NOBLE | $315M | 86% | 17% |
| CLEARPOINT FEDERAL BANK & TRUST | RIPLEY | $134M | 84% | 89% |
| FIRST BANK OF BERNE | ADAMS | $1.08B | 83% | 22% |
| FIRST NATIONAL BANK | PUTNAM | $420M | 83% | 27% |
| CITIZENS STATE BANK OF NEW CASTLE | HENRY | $896M | 80% | 8% |
| HOOSIER HEARTLAND STATE BANK | MONTGOMERY | $351M | 80% | 15% |
| PEOPLES BANK, THE | JACKSON | $326M | 79% | 43% |
| STAR FINANCIAL BANK | ALLEN | $3.19B | 77% | 28% |
| FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS AND LOAN ASSO | DECATUR | $146M | 76% | 29% |
| Bank | County | Assets | L/A % | Cash hold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GRANT COUNTY STATE BANK | GRANT | $396M | 21% | $314M |
| UNITED FIDELITY BANK, FSB | VANDERBURGH | $6.33B | 31% | $3.72B |
| FIRST BANK RICHMOND | WAYNE | $1.51B | 38% | $695M |
| FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK | FULTON | $690M | 43% | $379M |
| COMMUNITY STATE BANK | NEWTON | $155M | 44% | $78M |
| FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK | VANDERBURGH | $579M | 46% | $225M |
| BATH STATE BANK | FRANKLIN | $333M | 48% | $115M |
| RIDDELL NATIONAL BANK, THE | CLAY | $381M | 48% | $142M |
| FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK | HUNTINGTON | $557M | 50% | $197M |
| UNION SAVINGS AND LOAN ASSOCIATION | FAYETTE | $262M | 50% | $113M |
These are pre-approved credit lines available to existing customers. The "% of loans" column shows the magnitude of unused capacity relative to outstanding loans. Lake City Bank holds 51% of its loan portfolio in unused commitments — half of its committed credit hasn't been drawn down.
| Bank | County | Unused Commitments | % of Loans | Outstanding Loans |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OLD NATIONAL BANK | VANDERBURGH | $14.19B | 30% | $46.72B |
| FIRST MERCHANTS BANK | DELAWARE | $6.02B | 42% | $14.24B |
| MERCHANTS BANK OF INDIANA | HAMILTON | $4.26B | 36% | $11.92B |
| LAKE CITY BANK | KOSCIUSKO | $2.69B | 51% | $5.24B |
| GERMAN AMERICAN BANK | DUBOIS | $2.00B | 35% | $5.76B |
| 1ST SOURCE BANK | ST. JOSEPH | $1.46B | 26% | $5.62B |
| CENTIER BANK | LAKE | $1.18B | 19% | $6.09B |
| HORIZON BANK | LAPORTE | $1.05B | 24% | $4.33B |
| NATIONAL BANK OF INDIANAPOLIS, THE | MARION | $993M | 36% | $2.75B |
| FIRST FINANCIAL BANK, NATIONAL ASSO | VIGO | $971M | 24% | $4.05B |
| STAR FINANCIAL BANK | ALLEN | $802M | 33% | $2.46B |
| FIRST INTERNET BANK OF INDIANA | HAMILTON | $610M | 20% | $2.99B |
| FIRST FARMERS BANK & TRUST CO. | MIAMI | $605M | 26% | $2.37B |
| PEOPLES BANK | LAKE | $259M | 21% | $1.23B |
| FARMERS STATE BANK | LAGRANGE | $199M | 22% | $925M |
There is no shortage of capital in the Indiana banking system. Banks hold $80 billion in non-loan assets and have another $42 billion in committed-but-undrawn credit. That's $122 billion in nominal lending capacity that is currently parked, invested, or reserved. The constraint is not capital scarcity. The constraint is who the banking system is structurally willing to lend to.
The $42 billion in unused commitments is not available to new entrepreneurs. Those commitments are pre-existing credit lines — most are commercial credit lines on already-established business relationships, home equity lines, construction loan commitments to developers, credit card limits on existing accounts. A young person who walks into a bank tomorrow doesn't access this capital. The capital exists; it's just been allocated by relationship, history, and collateral — none of which a 23-year-old has.
The $80 billion in securities and cash represents Indiana bank deposits that have been judged unworthy of lending to anyone. Banks took those deposits, decided the local credit demand from creditworthy borrowers wasn't strong enough to deploy them, and instead bought Treasuries and MBS and parked the rest at the Federal Reserve. In Wayne County, where First Bank Richmond holds $695M in cash and has only 38% loan-to-asset, this is partly a story about the absence of creditworthy demand in a declining economy. In Indianapolis, where United Fidelity Bank holds $3.7B mostly idle, it's a story about a bank choosing to manage interest-rate exposure through securities rather than deploy capital as local credit.
The structural takeaway: The Indiana banking sector is not capital-constrained. It is risk-tolerance-constrained, regulation-constrained, and relationship-constrained. Adding more bank capital wouldn't change the lending pattern — the banks already have $80B they're not deploying. What would change the pattern is a different credit-allocation system that can underwrite based on character, potential, and milestone progress rather than collateral and operating history. The Anabaptist Foundation Fund model, CDFI underwriting models, and venture-debt structures all do that. Traditional commercial banking, under current regulation, cannot.
This sharpens the policy implication once more: the Indiana state government could mandate a state-anchored credit-allocation fund that explicitly takes the risk profile traditional banks won't take, funded by a small fee on deposits at large banks operating in Indiana (similar to how CRA assessment fees work nationally). Even 0.1% on the $175B in IN-HQ bank deposits would generate $175M annually for a parallel credit channel aimed at young entrepreneurs, small manufacturers, and skilled trades startups. That's roughly four times the current state appropriation for all economic development credit programs. The capital is in the system. The political and regulatory choices about who to lend it to are what produce the outcome the analysis measure.
Source: FFIEC Call Report Bulk Data, Q1 2026 (subset-of-schedules file). Assets, deposits, loans use Schedule RC items: RCON2170/RCFD2170 (total assets), RCON2200/RCFN2200 (deposits), RCONB528/RCFDB528 (loans and leases held for investment net of unearned income). Schedule RC-C loan-mix detail is not in this subset; pulling it would let us decompose lending into C&I (small business), real estate, agricultural, and consumer categories.
Source: FFIEC Central Data Repository, Indiana institution list for 03/31/2026 Call Reports (91 banks). Population from 2020 Census. The institution list includes all banks regulated under Form 031, 041, or 051; it excludes credit unions (NCUA), CDFI loan funds, and non-bank lenders.
The 55 largest single-city/town recipients of state distributions, FY 2018–2025.
24 programs. Local Income Tax alone is ~70¢ of every dollar.
Largest distribution funds in FY 2025, dollars sent out vs. year-end balance.
The Indiana Economic Geography Study · Published by Luminary AI Technologies · 2026.
Compiled from 16 federal, state, and academic datasets covering all 92 Indiana counties. Source citations appear at the bottom of each tab. This study is provided for research and informational purposes; it is not investment advice, financial advice, or policy advocacy. Several findings include explicit caveats about data limitations.
Data through Q1 2026 unless otherwise noted. United for ALICE Indiana data: 2025 release (FY2023 budget thresholds). Census ACS 5-Year: 2019-2023 release. FFIEC Call Reports + UBPR: 03/31/2026 reporting date. LEHD LODES8: 2022 vintage. IRS county-to-county migration: 2021-2022 tax year. County Health Rankings: 2025 release. BLS OEWS: May 2024.