Population growth

Between 2010 and 2020 Querétaro's population went from 1,827,937 to 2,368,467. That is 29.57% growth in ten years, an average annual rate of 2.7%, more than double the national average of 1.2%. Over that period only Quintana Roo grew faster.

Where the growth comes from

Not chiefly from births. The average number of live-born children per woman in Querétaro fell from 2.6 in 2000 to 1.9 in 2020 — below replacement. The population grows through internal migration, and internal migration follows industrial employment.

This has a direct implication for anyone evaluating a site: labour availability in the corridor is not a property of the territory, it is a result of prior investment decisions. People came because plants came. If the pace of investment changes, the migration flow changes with it, on a lag of several years.

The quiet ageing

Median age in Querétaro rose from 21 to 29 in two decades. It remains a young population in comparative terms, but the direction of change matters more than the level: eight years of median age across twenty calendar years is fast movement.

For an operation planning over ten or fifteen years, the question is not how many working-age people there are today. It is how many there will be when the plant is at full rate, and how contested they will be. In a corridor with five assemblers and several hundred suppliers, turnover and wage pressure are real operating problems, not hypotheses.

The constraint almost nobody adds up

Here is the point that rarely appears in a promotional deck.

Roughly 80% of Guanajuato's surface and groundwater goes to agriculture. Human consumption takes a smaller share. But that share grows with population, and it grows on aquifers that no longer have any margin.

Of Guanajuato's twenty aquifers, nineteen are in deficit. Only Xichú–Atarjea is in balance. Eighteen are in a condition of overexploitation. That is the starting point, before adding the residents who will arrive with the next wave of investment.

So population growth works in two opposing directions for an industrial occupier. On the favourable side, it widens the labour base and the local market. On the unfavourable side, it competes for the same water the plant needs — and it competes with legal priority: human consumption ranks above industrial use.

What to ask

• Availability of labour with the specific trade the process requires, not total economically active population
• What turnover neighbouring plants in the same sector report
• How municipal water demand is growing at the utility serving the park
• Whether the municipality has water reserved for industrial development, and in what instrument that is recorded

The last question is what separates an industrial park that can receive a plant from one that can only sell it land.