Three out of every four working-age residents of Cass County, North Dakota are in the labor force, a rate of 75.8 percent that places it second among the 616 US counties with at least 100,000 people. Only Arlington County, Virginia edges it. The county anchors the Fargo metropolitan area on the Red River, and its workforce numbers are not a quirk of demographics but a defining economic feature of the upper Midwest.
The national median labor force participation rate sits at 58.4 percent. Cass County clears that mark by more than 17 points. Median household income is 75,023 dollars, the median commute is 17.5 minutes, and the share of households with broadband sits at 89.1 percent. Those figures sketch a county where work is woven into daily life, and where the friction of getting to and from a job is unusually low.
Among the 616 largest counties in the country, here are the leaders in labor force participation according to the most recent ACS release.
Cass County does not just punch above its weight on overall participation. Its female labor force participation rate of 69.2 percent is also second nationally among large counties, behind only Arlington. The national median for women is 50.4 percent.
North Dakota as a whole ranks 18 among states for median county labor force participation, at 62.4 percent. Inside the state, Cass leads every other county. Oil-patch Williams County follows at 73.0 percent and Morton County at 71.7 percent, but neither approaches the scale of Cass, which is home to 189,286 residents and 81,668 households.
The county also runs lean on commute time. The mean one-way trip to work is 17.5 minutes, ranking 7 among large US counties for shortest commute. The national median is 24.4 minutes. A short commute, paired with high participation, suggests a labor market where workers and jobs are geographically close, a structural advantage that smaller metro economies sometimes lose as they grow.
Cass County reads like a textbook on labor supply. Educational attainment is high: 43.3 percent of adults hold a bachelor's degree, well above the national county median of 21.5 percent, and 95.8 percent have a high school diploma or higher. The under-65 disability rate is 7.4 percent, below the national county median of 11.1 percent. The uninsured rate for working-age residents is 6.5 percent, also below the national county median of 9.8 percent. Healthier, better-educated, better-insured populations participate at higher rates, and Cass posts the trifecta.
The poverty rate, at 10.3 percent, sits just under the national county median, and per capita income is 44,593 dollars. Together with a young median age signal (just 12.8 percent of residents are 65 or older), the data describe a county positioned to keep its participation premium for years.
Cass is not the wealthiest county on this list. Its median household income trails Loudoun County, Virginia and Scott County, Minnesota by tens of thousands of dollars. What it offers instead is breadth: more residents working, women working at near-parity rates with men, and a commute short enough to keep two-earner households workable. In a region where smaller metros often struggle to retain young adults, the Fargo workforce is doing something the data make hard to argue with.
For policymakers and economic developers, the takeaway is unflashy. Education, health coverage, and commute infrastructure are slow-moving levers, but they are the levers that produce a county where 7 in 10 working-age women hold or seek a job. Cass County did not get to the top of the participation rankings by accident.
Data source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates