As Teton County again ranks as the wealthiest county in the U.S., with an average annual per capita income in 2024 estimated at $532,903, a Jackson Town Council member says the rest of the state should be applauding, not bashing, its western diamond.
“It’s disheartening,” Jonathan Schechter said, after crunching the latest estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. “It feels [as if] the rest of the state isn’t celebrating our success and instead is trying to drag us down.”
The latest figures mark the 21st year in a row that Teton County has topped the list of per capita annual income. Summit County, Utah, home of Park City, had the second highest per capita income among the 3,116 counties, boroughs and parishes in the U.S.
But it was a distant second, with an average income of $280,510 per person. Teton’s figure was 90% greater than Summit County’s, Schechter wrote in his Cothrive newsletter, a product of his nonprofit Charture Institute.
An economic consultant, Schechter is tuned into Wyoming politics because of his elected position. He’s watched politicians in Cheyenne try to dismantle his community’s order by attacking affordable housing programs and undermining local zoning authority and control, among other things.
“The state could learn a lot from us,” he told WyoFile, because growing pains, and potential solutions to them, often start in Teton County. But, like California, “not until after they’ve been ridiculed and scorned.”
Mean vs. median
Teton County’s half-million-plus figure overshadows the median figure that better represents the income of an “average” resident in Teton county. That median — half above, half below — for 2024 is likely somewhere between $90,000 and $140,000 according to Schechter and WyoFile calculations from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data.
“The people who could really figure this stuff out don’t,” Schecter said of the median income figure. He weathers criticism when he writes about the average, or mean, per capita income.
“Averages are skewed by the really rich people living here,” one gadfly told him. Yet Schechter continues to drill into the data, pointing out where Teton County money comes from and the effect overwhelming wealth has on a community.
Seventy-seven percent of Teton County residents’ incomes comes from investments — tops in the nation. Turning to wages – not investments — the largest source was from “location-neutral” industries.
The state could learn a lot from us.
Jonathan Schechter
Those fields include keyboard warriors in finance and professional services, he says. They can work from anywhere.
Wages — not investments — accounted for 21% of Teton residents’ total income in 2024, he wrote. That puts the county third from the bottom of all U.S. counties when ranking the percentage of income earned from wages, he wrote.
Yet in Teton County, the per capita wage — not investment income — was $111,642. That’s 10th in the nation and on par with pay in Silicon Valley, he wrote.
The staggering numbers mean Teton County, home to 4% of the state’s population, accounts for one quarter of state residents’ total income and half of its residents’ investment income.
“Over the past few decades,” he wrote, “Wyoming has enacted a series of laws which, combined, have made the state arguably the most wealth-friendly in the nation. Despite the fact that these laws apply equally in each of the state’s 23 counties, Teton County stands alone in the wealth of its residents.”
Which is why the rest of the state should hail, not stone, County 22.
Pay attention, Wyoming
“I think there are lots of opportunities that Teton County would be able to share and would like to share with the rest of the state,” Schechter said. “How many affordable housing efforts are there in Wyoming?” he asked, pointing to a program that bloomed first in Jackson Hole.
The lodging tax, too, had its origins in Teton County and now is widely employed across the state, he said.
“We could be making a huge contribution to the state financially with things like a real estate transfer tax,” he said. Real estate to Teton County is like hydrocarbons — coal, oil and natural gas — to the rest of the state, he said.
Cheyenne, however, has stiffly resisted that real estate tax idea.
Wyoming should also pay attention to Jackson Hole because it has become a gateway drug of sorts to the rest of the state, Schechter said.
People land in Teton County, poke around a bit “and find out it’s a cool state,” he said, with a bit of a Jackson Hole diaspora spreading out across Wyoming.
“For both good and ill,” Schechter wrote in Cothrive, “the changes washing over Jackson Hole are spilling over Teton Pass and running down the Snake River Canyon, arguably hitting our neighbors harder than us.”
For example, Lincoln County saw per capita income between 2018 and 2024 grow by 77%. That made Lincoln County’s annual per capita income the 26th fastest growing among the 3,116 counties in the U.S.
That influx of wealth into neighboring Lincoln County has brought corresponding impacts on land and real estate values and prices, if not on the income of the “average” resident there. He illustrates the relationship using Teton County figures.
“There’s a remarkably tight correlation between Jackson Hole’s housing prices and its [per capita income],” he wrote. Today’s gut-check: The average price of a home in Teton County is more than $5 million, according to the Cothrive newsletter.