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

What the numbers show

Washoe County runs on roughly 238,700 covered jobs across about 16,800 establishments, at an average annual wage near $65,900, with employment up about 2.3 percent over the year. Accommodation and food service is the largest employer, near 31,000 jobs, followed by health care, retail, construction, and transportation and warehousing, each above 20,000. The concentration that sets the county apart is logistics: transportation and warehousing employs people here at about 1.8 times the national rate, and construction at about 1.7 times, the signature of a region that moves goods and keeps building. Reno and Sparks anchor a gaming, arts, and recreation economy that also runs well above the national share.

The Washoe County economy

Washoe County is the economic center of northern Nevada, built around Reno, Sparks, and the Truckee Meadows. Gaming and tourism remain a visible part of the base, and the county's growth over the past decade has come from logistics, advanced manufacturing, and data centers spreading east along the Interstate 80 corridor, together with the University of Nevada, Reno and a health care sector that serves the whole region. Transportation and warehousing and construction stand out in the data as the industries carrying the current expansion.

A new distribution center, a data center, an airport or infrastructure project, or a downtown Reno redevelopment all turn on the same two questions: what the project genuinely adds to the regional economy, and whether it pencils under the county's real labor and land conditions, in a market where much of the recent industrial growth sits just across the line in neighboring Storey County.

A project we could put through the engine here

A concrete subject for a study here is the MoreRNO capital program at Reno-Tahoe International Airport, a roughly one billion dollar effort that broke ground on its next phase in early 2026 and runs through 2029. New concourses, a ground transportation center, and airport headquarters replace terminal space dating to the early 1980s, and the construction spending, the permanent aviation and travel jobs, and the visitor activity the added capacity supports are all effects a county and its partners will want measured honestly, separating the one-time construction spike from the durable travel economy that follows, and separating genuinely new activity from spending that would have happened anyway. The data-center and logistics growth spreading across the Reno-Sparks corridor and neighboring Storey County raises the same questions for Washoe's labor base.

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, and the public capital budgets and passenger figures published by the Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority.

What we do for Washoe County

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