Raleigh-Durham Feasibility Studies

Raleigh-Cary payrolls reached 788,600 in June 2026, up 20,300 from the 768,300 of June 2025 ⁴. The series is the Raleigh-Cary metro: Wake, Johnston and Franklin counties. Income reaches all seven counties: per capita personal income, a mean over residents, was $78,076 in calendar 2024, and total personal income was $170,402.9 million in calendar 2024 ¹⁷.

Two 2026 project stories sit in the record. Vulcan Elements' rare-earth magnet plant in Benson, Johnston County, was reported with $918.1 million of announced investment and 1,000 jobs, and the report does not say whether construction has begun or when hiring starts ⁷. In Durham County, Carolina Journal reported that the state's Economic Investment Committee terminated the JDIG award for a $125 million project of Jaguar Gene Therapy and Advance Medicine Partners on February 24, 2026 ⁸. Each is cited here at the stage its source reports.

Tourism is the best-published part of the Triangle economy, and Wake County publishes it. The county drew 19.1 million visitors in 2025, who spent $3.43 billion, and tourism supported 26,635 jobs ⁹. Event sales during 2025 booked 364 future events ¹⁰ that secured more than 263,000 room nights ¹⁰; the report as relayed gives no years for the events themselves.

Multifamily: Yardi's Raleigh market

Yardi Matrix put stabilized occupancy in its Raleigh multifamily market at 93.1% in March 2026, down 70 basis points, and counted an average asking rent of $1,539 in April 2026 and 2,157 units delivered between January and April 2026 ¹³. The occupancy reading is for March and the deliveries cover January to April; Yardi reports both, and neither figure says how many of the new units have leased. The 17,690 Raleigh-Cary housing units calculated from FRED's 2025 permit counts ⁵ include houses, so they show how much building the Raleigh side authorized without measuring the apartment pipeline; the research found no count of apartments under construction for the Triangle, though our agency multifamily case cites a Yardi Matrix count of units underway in Raleigh-Durham.

Hotels: Wake County's year

In 2025, Wake County's hotel occupancy was 67.7% and its average daily rate $137.55 ¹¹. Visit Raleigh reports 2025 changes of minus 2.9% for occupancy and plus 1.4% for the average daily rate, without stating the comparison base ¹¹. RevPAR for January to September 2025 was $93.10 ¹²; the full-year figure was not found. County Business Patterns counted 8,935 employees in hotels (except casino hotels) and motels across the seven counties in 2023 ¹⁸, the one lodging measure on this page that reaches Durham, Orange, Johnston and the outer counties. The hotel year on this page is Wake's alone, from Wake's tourism office; for a hotel feasibility study in any of the other six counties, the research gathered no county hotel series.

Retail: Colliers' Q2 2026 quarter

Colliers reports retail asking rent of $24.80 per sq ft NNN for Raleigh-Durham in Q2 2026, with 537,600 sq ft under construction and vacancy below 3% in the same quarter ¹⁴. For retail sites, Colliers gives these three readings for its Raleigh-Durham market rather than for any one county.

Senior housing: a partial establishment count

In the 2020 to 2024 five-year American Community Survey estimate, 297,926 residents aged 65 and over lived in the seven counties ¹⁹. County Business Patterns counted 116 establishments in 2023 in the County Business Patterns category for assisted living facilities for the elderly ¹⁸. That category only partly matches the class, so the count frames an assisted living market without listing its competitors. Beyond that establishment count, the research found no Triangle senior housing supply series.

After Tropical Depression Chantal, the SBA declared an administrative disaster for North Carolina on July 25, 2025, naming Durham and Orange counties as the primary counties ¹⁶; the Federal Register carried the notice on July 30, 2025. Physical damage loan applications were due by September 23, 2025, and economic injury applications by April 27, 2026 ¹⁶. Both counties named sit in the Durham-Chapel Hill metro, inland rather than on the coast, so a lender underwriting a new project there has reason to ask whether the site, its access road or its utility lines were affected. The hazards section of our state page sets this declaration beside the other federal declarations it records.

The agency multifamily case reports a year-over-year drop in Triangle apartment deliveries in the first quarter of 2026, and it puts its own mid-rise in a high-growth suburban submarket of the Charlotte-Raleigh growth corridor without naming the submarket. The corridor's other end, with its apartment pipeline and rent readings, is on our Charlotte page.

The pork processing case is a composite set in a rural county of the eastern North Carolina coastal plain, financed under USDA's Business and Industry guarantee, whose terms are on our USDA Rural Development practice page. Whether a Triangle parcel is rural for that program, or sits in an Opportunity Zone or HUBZone tract, is left open by the research. No published case names a site in Wake, Johnston, Franklin, Durham, Orange, Chatham or Person, and the full North Carolina case list is on the state page.