What All Those Events Actually Do for Central Oregon

There is a version of this conversation that turns into a brochure, and I want to avoid it. So here is the version with numbers in it, including the ones that complicate the story.

Central Oregon runs a full year of rodeos, races, concerts and festivals. That activity does two things at once. It supports a meaningful share of the local economy, and it functions as the region's most effective recruiting tool, because a lot of people who now live here first showed up for a weekend.

The money is not small

Visitors spent $1.102 billion in Deschutes County in 2024, according to the 2024 Visitor Economic Impact Report from Visit Central Oregon, which uses the travel impact data prepared for the Oregon Tourism Commission. Across the four-county Central Oregon region, direct visitor spending reached $1.298 billion in 2025.

That spending supported 8,660 jobs in Deschutes County in 2024, and about 11,010 jobs regionally in 2025. For a wider sense of scale, the Oregon Employment Department counted 17,310 people working in leisure and hospitality in Deschutes County in 2024.

In Bend alone, travel spending came to $386.3 million in 2024, supporting about 3,500 direct travel-related jobs.

Those visitors also pay for a good deal of local government. The region collected $27.1 million in transient room tax in 2024, and the most recent fiscal year shows the trend holding:

• City of Bend: $15,166,602 in FY 2025/26, up 4.03 percent
• Deschutes County, unincorporated (which includes Sunriver and Three Rivers South): $13,373,608, up 5.19 percent
• Redmond: $1,888,481, up 5.06 percent
• Sisters: $1,174,368, up 1.80 percent
• La Pine: $193,251, down 9.25 percent

That last line is worth pausing on. La Pine's lodging tax went down while every other jurisdiction went up. South county simply does not have the lodging inventory the rest of the region does, and it shows.

Where does Bend's share go? Visit Bend receives 35.4 percent of the city's lodging tax revenue. The rest goes to the general fund and public safety. Some of the tourism share loops back into the community directly: the Bend Cultural Tourism Fund has awarded nearly $2.9 million to 60 organizations since 2013.

What individual events are worth, with a caveat

This is where I have to be careful, because the numbers people quote about specific events are mostly organizer estimates rather than independent studies. I will pass them along with that label attached.

The Old Mill District's marketing director has estimated that a sold-out show at the Hayden Homes Amphitheater generates about $2.3 million, and that the venue hires roughly 800 seasonal employees for the concert season. The Deschutes County Fair & Expo Center's director has cited over $50 million a year, though the framing suggests that covers the fairgrounds' full slate of roughly 250 events annually with year-round attendance near one million, not the five-day fair by itself. In Sisters, a figure of about $10 million gets quoted, but it covers the rodeo, the quilt show and the folk festival combined.

None of these come with published methodology. Treat them as directionally useful and not as research findings. I would rather tell you that than repeat a number as though it were gospel.

The part everyone assumes but nobody has measured

Here is the claim you hear constantly in this business: most people who buy here came as visitors first.

I went looking for the study behind that. It does not exist. I checked Visit Bend's published research, Visit Central Oregon's research library, Travel Oregon and EDCO. Nobody has surveyed Central Oregon buyers and asked how they first encountered the place. There is no conversion rate to cite.

I bring that up because you will see brokers put a percentage on it, and I do not know where they get it. What I can tell you is what I see in my own business, which is that a large share of the people I work with describe a first trip here before they describe anything else. That is an observation from one broker's client list, not data, and I will label it that way.

What we do have is migration data, and it tells the story well enough on its own.

Growth, and where it comes from

Portland State University's Population Research Center, which produces Oregon's official population estimates, put Deschutes County at 213,886 as of July 1, 2025, up 1.3 percent in a year. Bend was 107,079, up 1.46 percent, and accounted for more than half the county's total growth. Redmond came in at 37,460, Sisters at 3,834, and La Pine at 3,223. La Pine posted the fastest percentage growth of the local cities at 3.38 percent.

Zoom out and the contrast gets sharper. Census Bureau estimates released in March 2026 show Deschutes County added 14,811 residents since 2020, a 7.5 percent increase and the largest numeric growth of any county in Oregon this decade. Meanwhile the state as a whole grew 0.3 percent in the most recent year, and more than a third of Oregon counties lost population outright.

Roughly 97 percent of Deschutes County's growth this decade has come from net migration rather than from births exceeding deaths. People are choosing to come here.

Where from? The IRS migration data for tax years 2021 to 2022 shows 13,327 people moving into Deschutes County and 11,479 moving out, for net in-migration of 1,848. The largest identified origins were Multnomah County (1,004), Washington County (772), Clackamas County (592), Lane County (481), and King County, Washington (446).

That is a useful correction to a story you hear a lot around here. The biggest single source of newcomers is not California. It is the Portland metro area. People who were already in Oregon, already visiting Central Oregon on weekends, deciding to stop driving home on Sunday.

The honest other side

I am not going to write a thousand words about tourism without acknowledging the friction, because anyone who lives here already knows about it and anyone moving here deserves to.

The same visitor economy that fills the room-tax accounts also competes for housing. Oregon's 2026 Housing Needs Analysis estimates the Bend urban growth boundary needs 2,010 units annually, or 34,116 units over twenty years. It further estimates that Oregon statewide needs to build 17,300 additional homes over twenty years just to offset units lost to short-term rentals and second homes, and projects second and vacation home demand in the Central region at 3,497 units over the same period.

Those are not small numbers, and they are the reason cities here have been tightening short-term rental rules. Bend now requires 500 feet of separation between short-term rental properties in residential zones, and Sisters doubled its own buffer from 250 feet to 500 feet in 2024. If you are buying with rental income in mind, this is the single most important thing to research before you write an offer, and I will cover it property by property in the next post.

What this means if you are thinking about buying

Not a prediction about prices. I do not make those, and you should be skeptical of anyone who does.

What it means is narrower and more useful. Central Oregon has a diversified set of reasons for people to want to be here, spread across all four seasons rather than concentrated in one. The demand is not only local, it is not only tied to one industry, and the migration data suggests it has been steady rather than a spike. At the same time, the housing supply gap is real and documented, which affects both what you will pay and what your carrying costs look like.

Both of those things are true at once. Anyone telling you only one of them is selling you something.

If you want to talk through what any of this means for a specific budget and a specific part of the region, reach out. That conversation is free, and it is usually more useful than another hour on Zillow.