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

What the numbers show

Klamath County runs on roughly 23,665 covered jobs across about 2,480 establishments, at an average annual wage near $50,500, a figure well below the national average that tells you a great deal about the kind of work the basin offers. Health care is the single largest employer, followed by retail, hospitality, education, and manufacturing, the ordinary spine of a regional hub town. The real story is in the concentration: agriculture, forestry, and fishing employ people here at more than five and a half times the national rate. That is the engine underneath everything, even though it is not the largest headcount, and it is why a project in this county lives or dies on water, land, and what can be processed close to where it is grown or cut.

The Klamath County economy

Klamath County's economy is built on the land and water of the Klamath Basin: irrigated agriculture, ranching, timber and wood products, and the fisheries and water rights that shape everything around them. Klamath Falls anchors the health care, retail, and services economy that a rural region of this size depends on, while the productive core stays in the fields, the forests, and the plants that turn raw output into something worth shipping. It is also home to the Klamath Tribes, whose enterprises and cultural economy are part of the county's future.

A new processing facility, a water-dependent agricultural venture, a tribal enterprise, or a downtown Klamath Falls redevelopment all turn on the same two questions: what it genuinely returns to the basin, and whether it pencils under the region's real conditions, including a water picture that no honest study can leave out.

A project we could put through the engine here

The live subject a study here almost has to reckon with is the restoration economy now taking shape after the 2024 removal of the four Klamath River dams, the largest dam-removal project in United States history. The construction and restoration spending, the fisheries recovery, and the tourism and recreation the reopened river could support are all real economic effects a county and its partners will want measured honestly, separating genuinely new activity from spending that would have happened anyway, and separating the one-time restoration spike from the durable economy that follows. 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, USDA NASS for the agricultural core, and the public restoration-spending figures published by the Klamath River Renewal Corporation and PacifiCorp.

What we do for Klamath County

We produce the study first: economic impact (what a project brings to Klamath 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 Klamath 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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