Income growth in Collin County

by Bill Baumbach of The Collin County Observer

During the last few days, the media has been full of local economic news - some good, most not good.

While large companies are laying off workers, real estate foreclosures are booming, and home building is dead, a report released today shows encouraging growth in Collin County.

KRLD Radio is reporting that a newly released report from the US Commerce Department states that "total income growth" in Collin County rose faster than any other large county in the nation - a whopping 12.4%, over twice the national average of 5.5%.

Total income is the sum of all the income in the county, so it is highly dependent on job growth as well as average individual incomes.

The report ranked the largest 164 counties. Of those, New York County (Manhattan) was the largest with $294.6 billion in total income. Collin County is much smaller, and ranked 90th in size, with a total income of $18.6 billion.

In "Average wages per job", Collin County ranked 5th in Texas with an average annual wage of $51,726 up a healthy 5% from 2006's $49,229 average. The panhandle's Carson County ranked 1st with an average wage of $62,249. Somervell, Harris and Dallas counties also had higher average wages than Collin. The lowest in the state was $20,394 in tiny Menard County in West Texas.

In total jobs, Collin County ranked 7th with 300,354 jobs up 7.4% from 2006 , and behind Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar, Travis and El Paso counties.

The county's unemployment rate rose 0.3% last month to 5.3%. That remains lower than the 5.6% for the rest of Texas, and much lower than the national 6.7% rate.

If you're one of those who likes to crunch lots of numbers, the data behind the report is at the BEA's "Local Area Personal Income" website.