Idaho’s economy has outgrown the national one for most of a decade. The Bureau of Economic Analysis puts the state’s real GDP at $101.6 billion in 2025 in chained 2017 dollars, up from $81.1 billion in 2019 — a rise of 25.2%, fourth among the fifty states and the District of Columbia, against 15.1% for the country. Employment tracked it: the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 886,800 nonfarm jobs in Idaho in July 2026 against 696,900 ten Julys earlier. This page is the economy; the people arriving to fill those jobs are covered in where Idaho’s new residents come from.
Which industries grew
BEA reports state output by industry in current dollars, which include price changes as well as volume. On that measure, between 2019 and 2025:
| Industry | 2019 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| All industries | $84.4bn | $135.6bn | +61% |
| Construction | $4.7bn | $9.2bn | +97% |
| Professional, scientific and technical services | $4.8bn | $9.1bn | +90% |
| Real estate, rental and leasing | $11.3bn | $20.9bn | +85% |
| Wholesale trade | $5.6bn | $9.7bn | +73% |
| Finance and insurance | $3.9bn | $6.6bn | +71% |
| Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting | $3.7bn | $5.0bn | +33% |
| Manufacturing | $9.0bn | $11.4bn | +27% |
Source: the BEA’s annual state GDP files, updated 9 April 2026. Construction and real estate lead the table, which is what a decade of net in-migration looks like in an output account. Professional and technical services nearly doubled. Agriculture grew more slowly in percentage terms but still accounted for $5.0 billion of output in 2025, 3.7% of the state’s total, and manufacturing for $11.4 billion, or 8.4%.
The labour market
Idaho’s unemployment rate was 3.4% in July 2026, against 4.4% nationally on the same unadjusted basis. The Idaho Department of Labor’s own seasonally adjusted series has the state at 3.6% in July 2026, down from 3.7% in June. The state’s employment count was 962,626 that month.
Growth has not been even across the run. Idaho’s real GDP rose 4.5% in 2024, fourth among the states, then 2.0% in 2025 — twentieth, and a shade under the national 2.1%. The long-run gap is wide; the most recent year is not.
The semiconductor build-out
Micron Technology is building memory fabrication plants in Boise, and the company’s own releases carry the figures. In June 2025 Micron announced a further $30 billion beyond its prior plans, including a second leading-edge memory fab in Boise, giving “two leading-edge high-volume fabs in Idaho”. The first is under construction with DRAM output scheduled to begin in 2027. Micron’s Idaho expansion page puts the job total at “over 17,000 new jobs” and cites up to $6.4 billion in CHIPS Act funding across its Idaho, New York and Virginia sites.
That build-out is concentrated in one metro rather than spread across the state, and its local effects — permits, payrolls, airport traffic — are set out in why the Boise area is growing.
What the numbers do not settle
Faster output growth and a low unemployment rate describe the demand side. They say nothing on their own about what a given job pays relative to what a house costs in the same place, which is a separate calculation with its own figures — see what Boise costs against the national average. Idaho’s population and its rank among the states are on whether Idaho is the fastest-growing state.