Economic studies for Ada County, built on the county's own numbers

What the numbers show

Ada County runs on roughly 282,000 covered jobs across about 24,540 establishments, at an average annual wage near $65,300, the highest in this part of Idaho and a sign of how much of the state's professional, technical, and management work has settled in Boise. Health care leads the headcount at close to 43,000 jobs, followed by retail, hospitality, and administrative services, the broad base of a fast-growing metro. Employment rose about 2.7 percent over the year. The concentrations tell you where the growth is going: construction runs at about 1.4 times the national rate, wholesale trade and administrative services at roughly 1.3 times, the fingerprint of a valley building housing, warehouses, and offices as fast as it can staff them.

The Ada County economy

Ada County is the economic center of Idaho. Boise, the state capital, anchors a metro that carries state government, a large health care system, and a technology base led by Micron Technology, whose semiconductor operations have pulled suppliers, contractors, and skilled labor into the valley for decades. Around that core sits the ordinary machinery of a growing region: retail, hospitality, professional services, and a construction sector working at well above the national rate to keep up with population growth.

A new chip-plant supplier, a downtown Boise mixed-use tower, a data center in Kuna, or a subdivision on the valley's edge all turn on the same questions: what the project genuinely adds to the county, how much of it would have happened anyway as the region grows, and whether it pencils under Ada County's real land, labor, and infrastructure costs.

A project we could put through the engine here

The live subject a study here has to reckon with is Micron Technology's expansion of its Boise campus, a multibillion-dollar buildout of leading-edge memory manufacturing supported in part by federal CHIPS Act funding, with new fabrication plants under construction and the company projecting many thousands of jobs across construction and operations. The construction spending, the direct hiring, and the supplier and housing demand that follow are all real economic effects the county and its partners will want measured honestly, separating the durable operating economy from the one-time construction spike and separating genuinely new activity from growth the valley would have seen regardless. That is exactly the kind of question the engine is built to answer.

Public-data path: regional input-output multipliers, free-data regionalized or drawn from a purchased BEA RIMS II order where a project supplies one, BLS QCEW and Census LODES for the local labor base, Census building-permit and population data for the region's growth, and public CHIPS Act and company filings where a semiconductor project puts real capital and payroll numbers on the record.

What we do for Ada County

We produce the study first: economic impact (what a project brings to Ada County, in jobs, output, and tax revenue, with local leakage handled honestly), feasibility and viability (whether it should move forward, measured with the finance a lender runs), and fiscal impact for public budgets and grant applications. Every engagement returns a full report, a one-page brief, a reviewer pack, and a decision package.

And if a study is already in hand, we review it: we inventory its quotable claims, attach the evidence, and tell you plainly what survives review before you quote it or fund against it. More on reading a study before you rely on it.

Local, and grounded in the record

National firms fly in, bill the travel, and price a county like Ada out of the analysis it needs. We work across the interior West, we can be on-site, and we build every study on the county's measured federal record, the same BLS and Census data behind the numbers above, so the result traces to a public source and survives scrutiny.

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