Education and health services led Lafayette-area job growth in 2024
HUD’s January 2025 analysis shows a regional economy in which education and health services added 1,700 jobs as gains elsewhere slowed.
Published
Event date: 2024 (year)
Education and health services supplied the strongest job growth in the Lafayette metropolitan area during 2024, according to HUD’s housing-market analysis dated January 1, 2025. The sector added 1,700 jobs even as the region’s overall employment gain slowed.
HUD’s report, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, puts the sector’s 2024 average at 36,800 jobs. That was about 18 percent of all nonfarm payroll jobs in the area. Education and health services had overtaken wholesale and retail trade as the largest sector in 2023, the report says. HUD analysis, pages 4–5.
The geography matters here: HUD’s Lafayette area includes Acadia, Iberia, Lafayette, St. Martin and Vermilion parishes. These are combined regional totals, not counts for Lafayette city or Vermilion Parish alone.
The same HUD analysis records 205,700 nonfarm payroll jobs across that area in 2024, up 1,300 from 2023. Education and health services therefore added more jobs than the region gained overall. Losses elsewhere offset part of the increase: HUD’s table lists an 800-job decline in leisure and hospitality, 200 fewer government jobs and 100 fewer jobs in financial activities. Figures are annual averages, rounded to hundreds.
HUD links the health-sector gains partly to an expansion at Ochsner Lafayette General Orthopedic Hospital. Its January 2025 report also identifies education and health services as the region’s fastest-growing employment sector since 2011.
Oil-related work remained part of the economy. HUD reports that mining, logging and construction—which includes oil extraction—accounted for 10 percent of regional payrolls in 2024, compared with approximately 16 percent during 2010–2014. That combined category is broader than oil alone, and the report also describes energy ties within manufacturing.
Taken together, HUD’s 2024 figures show a regional job market with substantial employment outside extraction. They describe an economy already in place before the 2026 spaceport announcement; they do not measure jobs created by that project.
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