Rating

Regional Defense, Aerospace & Space Hub

Scale56-100

Higher values are better.

About This Ranking

Goal

Highlight places whose surrounding labor market has a deeper, more specialized, broader, and better-paid Defense, Aerospace & Space Hub employer ecosystem.

Sources

Data behind the rating

4 sources

2025 Final BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages

2025 final annual averages; available August 28, 2026

Data: County annual-average covered employment, establishment, and wage records for explicitly configured NAICS industries and ownership sectors, aggregated to regional labor markets.
What it tells us: Measures covered workplace-sector scale, specialization, establishment breadth, and nominal pay; it does not measure individual occupations or current vacancies.

BLS May 2025 Area Definitions

May 2025 definitions

Data: County assignments for the metropolitan and nonmetropolitan OEWS reporting areas used as the shared regional unit for both score families.
What it tells us: Connects a place to regional workplace evidence. A regional score does not establish that jobs or employers are inside the municipal boundary.

USAspending contract awards

Federal fiscal years 2023-2025

Data: Department of Defense and NASA contract obligations by place of performance, plus effective recipient breadth within each labor market.
What it tells us: Adds a capped defense/aerospace ecosystem signal; obligations are not interpreted as a direct job count.

Census LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES8)

Newest available WAC file by state: 2016-2023

Data: Workplace job counts at Census-block resolution, aggregated to a small grid and used only for a mild within-market access deduction.
What it tells us: Approximates how close a named place is to the relevant job concentrations in its assigned labor market; it is not a route-based commute-time estimate.

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Ranked by Regional Defense, Aerospace & Space Hub.

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