The Only Part of the Colorado Springs Job Market Still Growing Is Health Care

Second in an ongoing series tracking the El Paso County economy from primary public records.

An earlier brief in this series leaned on Colorado Secretary of State filings and promised that the wage and industry detail would come from a different source once I had worked around its reporting gap. That source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, and this is that piece. I loaded eleven years of quarterly employment data for El Paso County into the same local database, one industry at a time, and the health care numbers were the first thing that made me stop and re-run the query to be sure I had it right.

Here is what stopped me. Between 2014 and 2023, private health care and social assistance in El Paso County grew from 28,402 jobs to 40,193, an increase of 11,791. Over the same decade, total covered employment in the county grew by 58,783. So roughly one in every five net new jobs in Colorado Springs was in health care. The sector's share of all local employment climbed from 11.4 percent to 13.1 percent, and it has not stopped climbing since.

The last two years are the tell

A single decade of growth is a nice trend line, but trends only get interesting where they break from everything around them. This one does.

Total covered employment in El Paso County was 307,454 in 2023. In 2024 it was 308,834. In 2025, through the clean quarters available so far, it is 308,806. For practical purposes the county job market has been flat for two years. Health care did not get the memo. It went from 40,193 jobs in 2023 to about 45,200 in 2025, adding roughly 5,000 positions while the overall number barely moved.

Do the subtraction and the picture sharpens. Strip health care out of the county totals and everything else combined actually lost ground over those two years. The reason the headline employment number held steady is that one sector kept hiring hard enough to cover for a broader market that had gone sideways. Health care is not just growing. Right now it is the growth.

The growth is outpatient, not the hospital

When people picture a health care boom they picture a hospital breaking ground. That is not what the data shows. The engine here is ambulatory care: doctors' offices, outpatient clinics, urgent care, diagnostic labs, home health, the whole world of medicine that happens outside an inpatient bed.

Ambulatory services alone went from 14,556 jobs in 2014 to 23,418 in 2023, an increase of 8,862. That is 75 percent of the entire sector's growth coming from one subsector. The count of health care establishments in the county tells the same story from another angle: it grew from 1,839 to 3,236 over the decade, a 76 percent jump. That is a lot of new small practices and clinics opening their doors, which is exactly the footprint you would expect from outpatient care rather than a handful of large hospital campuses.

Hospitals themselves were nearly flat for most of the decade, hovering between 3,800 and 4,400 jobs, and only broke out in 2025 with a sharp move toward 5,600. Something real is expanding on the inpatient side now, but for the ten years before that, the story was almost entirely about care moving out of the hospital and into the strip-mall clinic.

The paycheck stood still

So the jobs are real and there are a lot of them. Here is the part that complicates the good news. The average weekly wage in the sector went from 849 dollars in 2014 to 1,135 dollars in 2023, a 33.7 percent raise on paper. That works out to a jump from roughly 44,000 dollars a year to about 59,000.

Then you adjust for local inflation. The Colorado Springs consumer price index rose 32.6 percent over the same window. Line the two up and the entire nominal raise gets eaten. In real, inflation-adjusted terms, the average health care paycheck in El Paso County grew by less than one percent across ten years. The sector added a small city's worth of jobs and, per worker, the buying power of those jobs went essentially nowhere.

That combination is the thing worth sitting with. A sector can be the most reliable job creator in a region and still not be lifting the people already inside it. Volume and wages are two different questions, and in Colorado Springs health care they are pointing in two different directions.

What this does and does not say

This is a count of jobs and dollars, not a diagnosis of why. The data cannot tell you whether wages stalled because of staffing ratios, reimbursement pressure, the mix shifting toward lower-paid outpatient and social-assistance roles, or something else entirely. Those are the next queries. What the record does say plainly is that health care is carrying the local labor market right now, that the growth is coming from outpatient care rather than hospitals, and that the paychecks have not moved the way the job count has.

Data and Methodology

All figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages for El Paso County (area code 08041), loaded into a local analytical database of 91,522 county-level rows spanning 2014 through the third quarter of 2025. Employment is the average of the three monthly counts across each quarter, then averaged across the quarters in a year. "Health care" here is private-ownership NAICS sector 62, Health Care and Social Assistance; subsector figures use ambulatory (621) and hospitals (622). Total employment is all-ownership, all-industry covered employment.

One caveat drives every choice above. Colorado's QCEW file carries a documented reporting gap across the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, and those quarters are flagged in the source. To keep every number defensible, all annual figures are computed from unflagged quarters only. That is why 2024 rests on its first three quarters and 2025 on the two clean quarters available, and why the two-year comparison is framed carefully rather than as a precise year-over-year rate. Wage figures are BLS nominal average weekly wages; the inflation adjustment uses the BLS Denver-Aurora-Lakewood CPI series as the closest available regional index. Figures are reproducible from the public record and will be revisited as later quarters settle.