Independent economic studies for the governments, developers, and businesses of Chelan County, built on the county's own federal data and designed to hold up when a lender or a funder reviews them.
| Largest sectors by employment | Jobs | Concentration |
|---|---|---|
| Health care & social assistance | 7,011 | 1.01x |
| Accommodation & food services | 4,770 | 1.14x |
| Retail trade | 4,460 | 0.96x |
| Construction | 2,704 | 1.12x |
| Manufacturing | 2,156 | 0.56x |
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 2023 annual averages, Chelan County. Concentration is a location quotient (county sector share of employment divided by the national share), computed by Project Red Team. Covered jobs exclude the self-employed and some agricultural workers.
Chelan County runs on roughly 45,400 covered jobs across about 3,100 establishments, at an average annual wage near $54,200, and it grew jobs about 4.4 percent over the year. Health care is the largest employer at about 7,000 jobs, followed by hospitality, retail, construction, and manufacturing, with Wenatchee serving as the medical and commercial hub for a wide rural region. The concentration reflects a tourism and fruit economy: real estate runs about 38 percent above the national share, hospitality and construction each somewhat above it, and wholesale trade above it as well, the signature of the packing, shipping, and lodging that Wenatchee and Lake Chelan support. The wage sits modestly above Yakima's, and that growth rate is the kind of figure a housing or lodging study has to build on carefully.
Chelan County runs from the Columbia River up into the North Cascades, and its economy rests on tree fruit, tourism, and hydropower. Wenatchee, the county seat, calls itself the Apple Capital of the World, and the packing houses and shippers that handle the region's apples, pears, and cherries are among its largest private employers. Lake Chelan draws well over two million visitors a year to its wineries, lodging, and recreation, and the dams on the Columbia, run by the Chelan County Public Utility District, supply some of the cheapest power in the country. That cheap power now draws data-center interest to the valley as well.
A new hotel or resort at Lake Chelan, a fruit-packing or cold-storage expansion, a workforce-housing development in Wenatchee, or a data-center proposal drawing on PUD power all turn on the same two questions: what the project genuinely adds to the county, and whether it pencils against local wages, land costs, and a housing supply that is already tight.
A live subject a study here has to reckon with is housing, in a county where a tourism and fruit economy has pushed home prices and rents well past what many local wages support. Recent state and county funding has moved several affordable projects forward, including the Eider Easy Street Apartments and Bollinger Apartments in Wenatchee and a housing build on Anderson Road in Chelan, and the county's 2026 to 2046 comprehensive plan puts housing and land supply near the center. An honest study would test how much new housing a project actually delivers to the local workforce, what it costs the public to support, and whether it pencils against construction costs and the county's growth projections.
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, USDA NASS for the tree-fruit core, Census and HUD housing data for residential projects, and the public utility and grant records behind power supply and publicly funded development.
We produce the study first: economic impact (what a project brings to Chelan 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.
National firms fly in, bill the travel, and price a county like Chelan 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.
Have a project in Chelan County? Tell us what you are weighing and where. We will lay out what it takes to answer it, and what it costs.
Commission a study