By, Corey R. Wiktor,
Executive Director County of Cattaraugus IDA
How Well Do You Know Cattaraugus County’s Economy? A Closer Look at Our GDP — and How We Measure Up
Ask most people here what their county is “worth,” and you’ll get a shrug. We know Ellicottville for skiing, Olean for Cutco, Salamanca for the casino and the State Park. But few of us ask what Cattaraugus County actually produces in a year, or how that stacks up against places our size. The answers might surprise you and they’re worth being proud of.
The Big Number
Every year the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis calculates Gross Domestic Product the value of goods and services produced for every county. In 2024, Cattaraugus County’s economy was valued at roughly $3.6 billion, up from about $2.9 billion in 2020 — nearly 25 percent growth in four years per BEA data via the St. Louis Fed.
Private trackers put 2024 output at almost $3.9 billion, per MMCG Analytics. Meanwhile, per-capita personal income rose to $51,316, up from $44,505 in 2020, per BEA figures.
Our population sits at about 75,475 — the 35th most populous of New York’s 62 counties, per the U.S. Census Bureau. We’re small but small doesn’t mean insignificant, and that’s the point of this column.
How We Stack Up
One honest benchmark: Cayuga County, near Auburn, has a population within a few hundred people of ours, but its 2024 GDP came in around $4.1 billion — about 6 percent higher — with health care as its largest sector, per Economic Atlas/BEA data. That tells us our economy isn’t undersized for our population; there’s just room to grow. Nationally, real GDP grew in 2,273 U.S. counties in 2024 and fell in 809, per the BEA’s 2024 county release; against that backdrop, our steady climb looks like deliberate work, not luck.
Here’s a comparison that makes you look twice: Andorra, the small European country tucked in the Pyrenees between France and Spain, has a population of about 82,900 and a GDP of roughly $4.5 billion, per World Bank data — remarkably close to our own numbers. Two places, an ocean apart, with almost the same population and almost the same economic output.
Checking BEA county-level GDP figures against population for all 62 New York counties shows that not a single county with more residents than Cattaraugus produces less economic output than we do.
Nobody bigger than us is doing less than us — that’s what a diversified, actively managed economy looks like on paper.
A Genuinely Diverse Economy
What makes those numbers possible isn’t one dominant industry — it’s a mix, and that mix protects us when any single sector hits a rough patch.
Manufacturing remains a backbone. Cutco Corporation, headquartered in Olean, is the largest kitchen cutlery maker in the U.S. and Canada. Great Lakes Cheese is completing a plant spanning Farmersville/Franklinville with a capital investment approaching a billion dollars, one of the largest private investments in county history.
Fitzpatrick & Weller remains a major hardwood employer, and 2025 brought Daich Coatings’ first U.S. site to Cattaraugus plus an Edelweiss Dairy expansion, both aided by the CCIDA.
Tourism Punches well above its Weight
Visitors spent $431.3 million here in 2024 — 52 percent of all spending across the Chautauqua-Allegheny region supporting roughly 5,000 local jobs and $52 million in tax revenue. Holiday Valley draws more than 500,000 visitors annually and employs about 700 people at peak; HoliMont employs 262.
Add the Seneca Allegany Casino & Hotel and Allegany State Park, and tourism becomes a genuine pillar year-round.
Health Care Rounds Out the Picture
Olean General Hospital employs roughly 850 people and Olean Medical Group another 200, while the Seneca Nation of Indians, St. Bonaventure University, county government, and BOCES fill out the list of top employers, per county listings.
None of that variety happened by chance. Behind almost every project named above sits the same economic development team, working year after year to bring the deals to the table.
Since 2020, CCIDA-assisted projects have created over 1,000 new jobs and retained 3,997 more, and the last five years show that work accelerating year after year. It started with roughly $120 mil-lion in capital investment in 2020, even amid the pandemic, then picked up steam in 2021 with Great Lakes Cheese’s $730 million facility.
Seventeen projects worth more than $117 million followed in 2022, and at least ten more worth over $160 million in 2023. Then 2024 set a new bar entirely: more than 20 projects totaling $168,874,935, an unprecedented single-year figure. And 2025 opened a new chapter altogether, adding 15-plus projects worth upwards of $30 million in direct investment.
Add it up, and CCIDA-assisted projects have driven nearly $1.5 billion into the county over that five-year stretch alone.
The Workforce Behind the Numbers
None of this happens without people to do the work. Cattaraugus County’s labor force runs about 32,000 to 33,000 workers, with unemployment most recently at 4.3 percent in July 2026, per the New York State Department of Labor.
That workforce has shrunk for decades alongside the population — the county’s 2022 Economic Strategic Plan is blunt about “decades of a shrinking population and labor force with very little income growth,” while flagging metal and machinery manufacturing as our strongest traded industry, per the Strategic Plan.
The County Isn’t Sitting Still
The One Stop Career Center in Olean and the Cattaraugus-Allegany Workforce NY system connect job seekers and employers free of charge. BOCES runs adult career and technical education year-round, and SUNY Jamestown Community College’s local campus, home to the Manufacturing Technology Institute, launched two free advanced manufacturing programs in fall 2025, funded by the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation, per JCC’s announcement.
Pair that with the work of the Olean Business Development Corp., Southern Tier West, SBDC, and the County’s ED&P Dept., and the county has a real shot at turning a shrinking labor pool into a more skilled, better-paid one.
Something to Be Proud Of
None of this means Cattaraugus County is without real challenges — a shrinking population, an aging workforce, constant competition with larger, better-resourced counties. But the data tells a clear story: a county producing real, growing value on a genuinely diversified base of manufacturing, tourism, health care, and commerce, backed by deliberate investment and workforce training.
The next time someone assumes a rural Western New York county doesn’t carry much economic weight, you’ll have the numbers to set them straight. Cattaraugus County isn’t just holding its own — it’s growing, diversifying, training its own workforce, and quietly punching in a weight class that includes entire countries.
That’s a story worth knowing, and worth being proud of.
Corey R. Wiktor, Executive Director County of Cattaraugus IDA
Office: (716) 699-2005, Cell: (716) 491-3988