Did residents in Aiken, Columbia, and Edgefield County make the most money?
In 2024, Columbia County had the highest per capita personal income in the Augusta Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), and McDuffie County had the largest increase over 2023.
Personal income is defined by the Bureau of Economic Analysis as “the income received by, or on behalf of, all persons from all sources: from participation as laborers in production, from owning a home or business, from the ownership of financial assets, and from government and business in the form of transfers. It includes income from domestic sources as well as the rest of the world. It does not include realized or unrealized capital gains or losses.” To get the per capita personal income, we divide by the county population.
Residents of Columbia County had a per capita personal income of $63,204. This was the only county in the MSA that had per capita personal income above the state average. The second-highest per capita personal income was in Aiken. Burke County had the lowest.
No counties in the MSA had growth in per capita personal income that exceeded the state average for 2023-2024. The largest increase was seen in McDuffie County, and the smallest in Edgefield.
Personal income is reported for county residents and is therefore different from Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which I reported last week, which is calculated for the county where production takes place.
Given the different geographic reporting of these 2 measures, we can observe some interesting patterns, which may seem obvious to longtime residents of the CSRA. In Georgia, although Richmond County has the highest GDP, workers are residents in Columbia County, and increasingly other outlying counties. However, in South Carolina, Edgefield County is not benefiting as much as the outlying counties as in Georgia.
