Idaho Feasibility Studies

The Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates count 2,029,733 Idahoans on July 1, 2025, from an estimates base of 1,839,123 on April 1, 2020 ¹³. The Department of Labor's August 2026 payroll count, seasonally adjusted, is 890,700 nonfarm jobs, which it puts 7,800 above the count a year earlier ¹⁴. The market sections below give each county its own Census and Labor Department counts, and because the department publishes employers only by headcount band, every employer size on this page is a band or a floor, never a single number.

The record that moved in 2025 and 2026 sits on the other side of a project, in what it costs to supply and to carry. Idaho administers water rights by priority date, and that date now decides whether some wells may pump ¹. Property insurers have raised homeowners premiums, narrowed where they write and in some cases left the state's market, in the Insurance Department's own account ⁴. And Idaho Power is planning for a rising summer peak while a statute of 2026 governs how the very largest new loads are served ⁶⁷.

Federal lending splits the state in two as well. SBA's Seattle District serves the ten northern counties, Boundary, Bonner, Kootenai, Shoshone, Benewah, Latah, Clearwater, Nez Perce, Lewis and Idaho, and its Boise District serves the southern counties together with part of eastern Oregon ¹⁵. Coeur d'Alene and Lewiston are on the Seattle side of that line; the Treasure Valley, Idaho Falls, Pocatello, Twin Falls and the Sun Valley area are on the Boise side.

The Department of Insurance's findings of October 2025 describe a property market that has been hardening for five years or more, in which insurers sharply raised premiums, cut back the parts of the state they would write, declined to renew policies in high-risk zones and, in some cases, left property insurance altogether ⁴. Its data call put the average annual homeowners premium at $1,308 in 2022, $1,468 in 2023 and $1,798 in 2024, as Capital Press reported the figures ⁵.

The number of homeowners policies in force was 464,364 in 2022 and 424,113 in 2023 ⁵. The department's director, Dean Cameron, told the paper that about 8,000 of the policies no longer on the books had gone to surplus lines and that the department did not know where the other 32,000 went ⁵. The department's news release of April 22, 2025, which announced the mandatory data call under Bulletin 25-02, counted 91 property insurers in Idaho in 2023, and the director estimated that roughly 22 to 25 of them had declined to renew some or all of their policies, partly because of wildfire ¹⁷.

Every one of these readings is for homes. On the commercial side no rate filing, published rate change or insurer of last resort turned up for Idaho, so for a hotel, a store or a warehouse the data call describes the market around the building rather than the policy on it.

Major disaster declaration DR-4905-ID, made on April 7, 2026 for straight-line winds of December 16 to 18, 2025, gives Public Assistance to Benewah, Bonner, Boundary, Clearwater, Idaho, Kootenai, Latah, Lewis, Nez Perce and Shoshone counties, and FEMA had obligated $285,773.55 under it as of July 11, 2026 ⁹. They are the same ten counties that SBA's Seattle District serves ¹⁵, Kootenai and Nez Perce, the counties of the Coeur d'Alene and Lewiston sections, among them. The declaration covers Public Assistance only, so SBA's disaster loans under it were open to private non-profit organizations alone, with physical damage applications due by June 10, 2026 ²⁰.

A second major disaster, DR-4917-ID, followed on June 30, 2026, covering the storms of March 11 to 15, 2026 and the winds, floods, landslides and mudslides they brought ²¹. The summer before, FEMA approved Fire Management Assistance declaration FM-5607-ID for the Sunset Fire on August 15, 2025, for a fire that ran from August 14 to September 1 ²².

Wildfire also shows up in what insurers pay. Homeowners losses paid with wildfire were $16.05 million in 2022, $18.83 million in 2023 and $24.52 million in 2024 by the data call, as Capital Press reported it ⁵; the department itself calls wildfire a small share of yearly paid losses, but a growing one ⁴. No National Risk Index ranking from FEMA was found for Idaho, and no seismic or flood exposure figure for the state as a whole.

HB 583 rewrote Idaho Code section 67-6539 with effect from July 1, 2026. No city or county may now require a licence, fee, permit, certification or registration for a short-term rental, or cap rentals or keep them apart by distance; a rental counts as a residential use, and a local rule may reach only the safety items the statute names ²⁷. Ketchum's repeal of its permit chapter, in the Sun Valley section, is that law working through one city.

HB 243, signed on March 27, 2025 and in force from July 1, 2025, made the Department of Health and Welfare the only licensing authority for child care and barred cities and counties from stricter rules ⁸. It kept staffing on a points system, with at most 12 points per staff member and a child aged 5 to 12 counted at 0.48 points, down from 0.5 ⁸. BoiseDev reported on March 17, 2025 that ratios had been added back to the bill, at equivalents of 1:6 for children under two, 1:9 from two to three, 1:13 from three to five and 1:25 from five to thirteen ³⁰. A center's staffing budget is built on those ratios, not on any stricter city rule.

Liquor by the drink stays under a population quota: two licences for each incorporated city and one more for each 1,500 residents. SB 1120 of 2023 bars the sale, lease or transfer of any licence issued after July 1, 2023 ³¹. Licences issued before then can still be bought, with the state charging a transfer fee of 10% of the purchase price or of goodwill, whichever is greater ³². On November 24, 2025 the Idaho State Police proposed raising the state licence fee for cities of more than 3,000 people from $750 to $1,200 a year; whether the increase was adopted was not found ²³.

Residential assisted living facilities are licensed by the Department of Health and Welfare under Idaho Code section 39-3340 and IDAPA 16.03.22 ³³, and memory care is delivered inside a licensed facility rather than under a licence of its own ³⁴. The research did not establish what a Certificate of Need covers in Idaho, if anything, or the bed and unit thresholds for assisted living.

Underground fuel tanks are regulated by the Department of Environmental Quality under IDAPA 58.01.07, a state program held equal to the federal rules, with financial responsibility required of owners ³⁵; the condition of the state's petroleum cleanup fund was not found. Campground lodging owes the 2% Travel and Convention tax under the Tax Commission's rule text of 1999 ³⁶. The research turned up no licensing rule for RV parks or campgrounds, no car wash water rule and no verified 2026 minimum wage.

In its release of September 18, 2026 the Department of Labor put Idaho's seasonally adjusted nonfarm count for August at 890,700: up 2,800 from July and 7,800, or 0.9%, from a year before. The state's unemployment rate held at 3.6%, against 4.1% for the nation ¹⁴. The Joint Economic Committee's update of the same day, built on BLS data, has private payrolls 10,200 higher over the year ³⁹.

Seven sectors lost jobs over those twelve months, by the department's release: arts, entertainment and recreation, down 8.1%; federal government, down 7.0%; administrative, support and waste management, down 5.9%; state government, down 4.6%; information, down 3.3%; nondurable goods manufacturing, down 1.9%; and transportation, warehousing and utilities, down 1.2% ¹⁴. Two of the seven are government payrolls, federal and state. The release says that most major sectors added jobs, without giving counts for them, and the research found no sector-level gains in numbers.

Idaho's Labor Department publishes employer sizes only as bands. Its 2025 list of the state's largest private businesses puts St. Luke's Health System at 15,000 or more; Walmart at 7,500 to 9,999; Saint Alphonsus Health System, Battelle Energy Alliance (the Idaho National Laboratory's contractor), Micron Technology and Albertsons at 5,000 to 7,499 each; J.R. Simplot Co. at 2,500 to 4,999; and Fred Meyer (Kroger), Costco and Idaho Power at 1,000 to 2,499 each ⁴⁰.

The register's American Community Survey and BEA readings give the statewide household side:

Lewiston's is not the only Census area that crosses Idaho's border. In the delineation the register uses, Franklin County sits in the Logan, UT-ID metro, Oneida County in the Brigham City, UT-ID area, Payette County in the Ontario, OR-ID area and Teton County in the Jackson, WY-ID area ¹⁰. None of the four is a market on this page. Our Utah page reads Logan on Cache County alone, so Franklin County's figures appear on neither page.

Battelle Energy Alliance, the contractor behind the Idaho National Laboratory, is the employer this county's record turns on, and the Labor Department sizes it two ways. Its 2025 list of private businesses places Battelle in the 5,000 to 7,499 band ⁴⁰, while its State of Idaho Profile of June 2026 lists it at 5,500 or more ⁴⁸. Both are statewide headcounts, not Bonneville County counts, and they come from two publications of different dates.

The county's own profile of August 2026 lists Bonneville Joint School District, Eastern Idaho Health Services, Idaho Falls School District, Melaleuca and Walmart at 1,000 to 2,499 employees each; the City of Idaho Falls, Bonneville County and Idaho Falls Community Hospital at 500 to 999 each; and the College of Eastern Idaho at 250 to 499 ⁴⁹. Bonneville's household employment stood at 64,875 in July 2025, then 63,025 a year later. Average covered employment was 61,140 in 2024 and 63,445 in 2025 ⁴⁹.

The Census Bureau estimates 135,771 residents in Bonneville County on July 1, 2025, against an estimates base of 123,959, and permits were issued there for 1,219 housing units in 2025 ⁵⁰. The Census Bureau's Idaho Falls metro adds Butte and Jefferson counties to Bonneville ¹⁰; this section reads Bonneville alone, though Butte County is the county whose groundwater curtailment order took effect in November 2025.

Idaho Falls has its own electric utility, Idaho Falls Power, which lists a peaking plant under construction on its resource planning page ⁵¹, and its costs are in the record. At the Utility Board meeting of May 6, 2026, city staff put the cost of burying a 46 kV line at about $4M a mile and a 161 kV line at about $7M a mile, against about $1M a mile to build overhead, and the board took up a proposed street-lighting fee to be billed through the electric utility without raising electric rates ⁵². Bonneville County's road page lists the widening of 49th North between Ammon Road and 45th East, due to be finished in fall 2026 ⁵³.

No hotel, apartment, storage or other supply count was found for the county, and the federal travel table gives it no rate of its own: GSA's standard lodging allowance of $110 applies for fiscal 2025 ⁵⁴. Bonneville County is in SBA's Boise District ¹⁵, and two of the Idaho certified development companies Capital Matrix names, East-Central Idaho Development Co. and Eastern Idaho Development Corp., carry the region in their names ⁴⁴.

Four employers share the top band in Twin Falls County's August 2026 profile, at 1,000 to 2,499 each: Saint Luke's, Chobani, Twin Falls School District and the College of Southern Idaho. Lamb Weston follows at 500 to 999, and Walmart, Amalgamated Sugar, the City of Twin Falls, Twin Falls County and Jayco at 250 to 499 each ⁵⁸. The same profile has 46,319 residents in household employment in July 2025 and 45,631 a year later ⁵⁸.

The Census Bureau puts the county at 97,539 residents on its July 1, 2025 estimate date and counts 527 units permitted during 2025 ⁵⁹; the research found no 2020 base or five-year change for it. The Census Bureau's Twin Falls metro pairs the county with Jerome County ¹⁰, which this section does not read.

Corridors, supply by asset class and local rules were not found here either. GSA has no county rate for Twin Falls, so its standard $110 applies for fiscal 2025 ⁵⁴; SBA's Boise District covers the county ¹⁵.

Kootenai County's Census estimate for July 1, 2025 is 191,864, against 171,366 at the April 2020 base, and the county's permits for 2025 covered 1,705 housing units ⁶⁵. The Census Bureau's Coeur d'Alene metro is this one county ¹⁰. Its household employment stood at 87,605 in July 2025 and at 85,198 in July 2026, and its unemployment rate was 4.3% in July 2026, by the Labor Department's August 2026 profile ⁶⁶.

Kootenai Health is the county's medical anchor, listed at 3,000 or more on the department's statewide profile of June 2026 ⁴⁸. The county profile of August 2026 places Coeur d'Alene School District, Walmart and North Shore Motor Hotel at 1,000 to 2,499 each, and Kootenai County, Silverwood, Coeur d'Alene Casino, Post Falls School District, North Idaho College and Lakeland Joint School District at 500 to 999 each ⁶⁶.

Three hotels make up the pipeline the research found. The Spokane Journal of Business reported on March 26, 2026 that the AC Hotel by Marriott, of 126 rooms and $25 million, and the Sherman Tower, of 139 rooms and $48 million, were under construction for opening in 2027 ²⁶. The Coeur d'Alene Press reported on February 26, 2026 that a Hilton dual-brand hotel of 173 rooms and $18.5 million had gone to the city's design review commission ²⁵. The two papers place the sites on Sherman Avenue downtown, on West Appleway Avenue and Lee Court near I-90, and on Northwest Boulevard ²⁶²⁵. No occupancy or rate series was found, and GSA's travel table gives Kootenai County $142 to $217 for fiscal 2025 ⁵⁴.

SBA loans here go through the Seattle District. The Coeur d'Alene Press reported the district's fiscal 2025 lending as a record on December 30, 2025; those district totals mix Washington and north Idaho and are not printed here as Idaho figures. The paper's county line is Idaho's own: Kootenai County drew 76 loans for $40,410,200 in fiscal 2025, the most of any north Idaho county by its account, after 84 loans for $37,535,300 in fiscal 2024 ²⁴.

The supply record for Idaho is held market by market. Cushman & Wakefield's Boise readings for apartments, industrial space, retail and offices are on the Treasure Valley page; the Coeur d'Alene section lists the three hotel projects reported there; and Ketchum's local option tax receipts, in the Sun Valley section, stand in for lodging demand. No statewide supply count for any asset class was found, licensed child care places included; the nearest the research comes is a senator's floor statement about enrollment, which this page does not use.

The federal travel table is a lodging reference that reaches several markets. GSA's fiscal 2025 rates give Ada County $167 to $191, Kootenai County $142 to $217 and Blaine County $181 to $300, and leave Bonneville, Twin Falls, Bannock and Nez Perce counties on the standard rate ⁵⁴. Those are allowances for government travellers, so they say what GSA will pay for a room, not what a hotel earns.