Choose DuPage cluster study: health care and logistics to drive DuPage County job growth; retail, information projected to decline

DuPage County economic development committee members heard a presentation June 17 from Choose DuPage on a new industry cluster analysis projecting that health care and transportation and warehousing will remain the county’s leading job-growth drivers through 2034 while retail trade, information and several professional and financial services sectors are expected to decline.

The presentation, delivered by Greg Bridal of Choose DuPage, summarized five years of employment and location-quotient data and a 2024–2034 forecast. Bridal said the study shows “health care is the only sector whose LQ increased above 1. This suggests that the industry has grown significantly and is now a key driver for the regional economy.”

The nut graf: the study is intended to help county and municipal leaders target attraction and retention efforts where the data show strength and to prepare for fiscal and planning implications where sectors are shrinking.

The report sorts industries into four categories—emerging, leading, declining and maturing—and highlights that arts, entertainment and recreation and construction have shown positive employment growth but are not yet regionally concentrated. The presentation identified health care, transportation and warehousing, wholesale trade, utilities and manufacturing as DuPage’s current main economic drivers and forecast those clusters will continue leading through 2034.

Bridal and the accompanying video also flagged sectors projected to shrink: the information sector is shown in the analysis as the largest projected employment decline (about 23 percent), retail trade is projected to drop about 10 percent, education about 7 percent, and finance and insurance about 7 percent over the next decade. Professional and scientific services and certain administrative and management sectors showed historical job losses and were identified as at risk of maturing.

Bridal summarized the county’s strengths for logistics and data-intensive firms, citing investments in the Tollway and O’Hare Airport and the Elgin-O’Hare corridor. He also warned that data centers may be reaching local limits: “We are now telling data center operators who call my office literally every day looking for 10 acres, 20 acres of land. It’s a 5 year wait for energy to power a data center in DuPage County right now,” he said, describing constraints of land and electric capacity.

Committee members asked how the health care concentration affects municipal tax bases, noting many health providers are nonprofit and exempt from property tax. Bridal said municipalities may still benefit from high-paying jobs and relatively low demands on some local services: “doctors, nurses, medical specialties ... it’s typically high paying, and it’s not a big impact on the community for services,” he said.

Choose DuPage staff said the full cluster report and supporting data are available via a QR code and on choosedupage.com and offered to share the analysis with municipal meetings. The presentation team also described a municipal analytics program and noted a per‑municipality participation ask (the transcript records $5,000) for program membership and data access.

Ending: Bridal closed by urging municipal leaders to factor these long-term trends into planning and economic development strategies; committee members thanked the presenters and asked staff to circulate the full report to interested municipalities.