Lane County’s Per Capita Personal Income Increased in 2023
February 7, 2025The U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis recently released its 2023 estimates of personal income for substate areas (counties and townships).
Personal income includes all forms of income: earnings by place of work; dividends, interest, and rent; and government transfer payments (largely Social Security and Medicare). Total personal income is then divided by population to create per capita personal income (PCPI).
PCPI is one of the most commonly used measures to gauge an area’s relative economic wellbeing, but there are limitations. For instance, since it includes the entire population, areas with a high concentration of children or students can skew the results lower since there is a large portion of the population with little or no income. Conversely, areas with an older population likely have a high proportion of retired people who may have a high level of wealth but lower relative incomes. Finally, it does not account for an area’s cost of living. People in areas with a low cost of living can live comfortably on less per capita income. That being said, let’s take a look at Lane County’s PCPI.
Lane County’s 2023 nominal (not adjusted for inflation) PCPI increased $3,749 (6.5%) to reach $61,634. However, when adjusted for inflation, it increased $1,786 (3.7%). In comparison, Oregon’s nominal PCPI increased $3,731 (5.8%) to reach $67,838 while its inflation adjusted (real) PCPI rose by $1,950 (3.8%). For the U.S., nominal PCPI increased $3,566 (5.4%) to reach $69,810 while its real PCPI rose $855 (1.6%). Lane County’s 2023 increase in real PCPI followed an increase of 6.2% in 2021 and a decrease of -6.9% in 2022 due to high inflation.
Lane County’s total personal income grew by $1.4 billion, or 6.2%, to reach $23.5 billion between 2022 and 2023. When the data are adjusted for inflation, however, total personal income increased by $633 million, or 3.5%. The increase in 2023 follows an inflation-adjusted decrease of roughly -$1.5 billion (-7.4%) in 2022.
The components of personal income for Lane County show that 54 percent was from earnings; 21 percent from dividends, interest, and rent; and 18 percent from transfer payments, primarily in the form of Social Security and Medicare. Lane County has similar component portions of personal income compared with the U.S. and Oregon, although Lane County is somewhat higher in transfer payments and lower in earnings by place of work, likely indicating a somewhat higher proportion of retirees.
Relative to other areas, Lane County’s per capita personal income increased slightly to 91 percent of the statewide and 88 percent of the U.S. Lane County’s 2022 per capita personal income ranked 12th among Oregon’s 36 counties.
More information is available at the Bureau of Economic Analysis website at www.bea.gov.