Garfield County’s 2025 economic forecast is a “fairly positive story,” Nathan Perry, professor of economics at Colorado Mesa University, told a crowd of professionals at this year’s Economic Forecast, Community Update and Housing Outlook presentations, sponsored by the Glenwood Springs Chamber, on Tuesday. 

Perry presented data on the county’s population, labor market, median income, employment and more, offering an overview of past trends and providing insight into the county’s economic future. 

In short, “(Garfield County has) the same problems, everyone else has — housing, things are too expensive, consumers are pulling back,” Perry said. “But Garfield, long term, has some advantages — birth rates, migration. You’ve got those core population drivers that I think are going to push forward.”

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Population growth

During Tuesday’s presentation, Perry emphasized that Garfield County is not a retirement community.

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“Garfield actually has a much younger population than the neighboring counties” he said. “People think of the Western Slope as a retirement community, and that’s actually not the case in Garfield County. Garfield County’s demographics look like some of the other places in Colorado.”

The county almost has an even number of Generation Z and Millennials, according to Perry. Data from the 2020 Census shows that 35- to 39-year-olds were the county’s largest age group, making up almost 8% of the total population.

A younger population means a higher birth rate than death rate, which will contribute to steady population growth, Perry said.

With migration and natural growth as key drivers, the county’s population is estimated to increase from 63,668 in 2025 to 68,594 in 2030, eventually reaching 91,068 by 2050.

Market

The gross domestic product (GDP) for Garfield County grew by 5.28% in 2023, second only to Rio Blanco County among neighboring areas, including Mesa, Montrose, Routt, Delta and Moffat counties. 

“Garfield County and the energy counties have a lot of fluctuations in their GDP,” Perry said. 

“2022 was an off year for all the energy counties. But now, all the energy counties had a really great year. Why is that?,” he added. “Well, if you remember, 2021 and 2022 were really low years for energy prices, and 2023 was a big uptick in energy prices.”

He explained that GPD, which represents the value of goods and services, can be raised by increased prices. 

Real estate had the biggest impact on the increase in GDP, according to Perry, followed by healthcare, retail trade and mining. 

“Real estate is like energy. If home prices go up and you sell a lot of homes, then it’s going to push that GDP higher,” he said.

Income 

Garfield County’s median household income rose from $57,364 in 2013 to $86,566 in 2022 and $94,696 in 2023. 

“An average (income) would be higher because in these mountain towns, you have some very wealthy people,” Perry explained. “Garfield is not a small county. If you get a really wealthy person in a place like Delta County or Rio Blanco, they can drastically increase per capita income.”

“This is the median, so it’s not going to be impacted by that billionaire, which makes it even more impressive,” he added. 

While median household income increased, poverty rates also rose from 8% in 2022 to 9.1% in 2023.

“Most Western Slope poverty rates actually went up, which was a little bit concerning,” Perry said. “I think part of that had to do with a lot of the (COVID-19) programs. They have people employed and when they laid everybody off in 2020 and 2021 you could get all this money from the government, and then you saw poverty rates fall for a year or two. 

“2023 is when all of that ended and you saw poverty rates bump up a little bit,” he added.

Garfield County per capita income — total income divided by total population — has consistently increased since 2016, at $52,232 to $71,629 in 2023. 

“Obviously this doesn’t tell the income disparity problem,” Perry said, referring to the per capita income data. “It doesn’t illustrate the difference between western and eastern Garfield (County), but overall the county is looking good on per capita income.”

Employment

The rise in median household and per capita income was not driven by significant employment gains, Perry said.

“I think part of it is migration and the type of person that’s migrating to Garfield County,” Perry said. “I think that’s what’s pushing up a lot of these numbers, because there haven’t been huge employment gains.”

Employment in Garfield County declined in 2020 and, with an estimated 31,024 residents employed in 2024, still has yet to beat its 2019 value of 31,542. Around 1,300 people in Garfield County were unemployed in November.

“Most counties on the Western Slope have surpassed the 2019 level, but Garfield County has not yet,” Perry said, explaining how employment numbers dropped during COVID-19 and have been slowly increasing since.

“Employment data is by household,” he added. “It’s not by place of work. So (Garfield County) could have more jobs…but people are needing to work a second job, which would not surprise me here.”

Jobs

In 2023, there were an estimated 35,658 jobs in Garfield County.

“We do see about a 4,000 difference between the employment estimate and the jobs estimate,” Perry said. “Which means that either the employment data is not accurate, which it’s not perfect, but it’s fairly accurate, or you have 4,000 (people) that have secondary jobs, which is probably the answer.”

By sector, the largest employer in the county is the government, followed by construction and retail trade. Base industries are regional services and tourism, followed by retirees. 

From 2009 to 2019, “more income was flowing out of the county to other counties than flowing in,” Perry said. That flipped in 2020, and “now we’re seeing more income flowing into the county from other counties. That could be from commuting and for remote work,” he added.

Real estate

The median sales price for houses in Garfield County was around $600,000 in October, with the average around $900,000. 

“If you have a couple really high priced homes that can push up the average, whereas the median can’t do that,” Perry said. “In mountain towns, you always see this big discrepancy between the average and median because of that.”

There’s not a lot of real estate activity in Garfield County right now, according to Perry.

 “There’s no inventory, there’s no buying and selling. But the low inventory, I suppose you normally think, well, low inventory, that’s a seller’s market, right?” Perry said. “The problem is there’s no buyers… it’s just showing that there’s not a lot of activity.”

“Overall, I think Garfield (County) is doing okay,” Perry later added.”Not a ton of employment growth. There’s not this juggernaut economy with tons of job growth, but there are certainly not any major problems in the labor market. 

“Strong GDP…we’ve seen more diversification from Garfield, we see oil and gas picking up in addition to that,” he added. “So overall, it’s a fairly positive story.”