Top Manufacturing Counties in America: 2026 County Data Report

What Counts as a Manufacturing County?

For this page, a manufacturing county is any county with paid employer establishments reported under NAICS 31-33 in the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns program. CBP is useful because it gives county-level detail that national reports do not. It shows where factories, shops, and suppliers are actually located, not just where corporate headquarters sit.

The 2023 CBP county file includes 12,166,520 manufacturing employees, 280,403 manufacturing establishments, and $888.1B in annual payroll across counties with disclosed employment. The top 10 counties alone account for 1,381,056 manufacturing employees, while the top 100 account for 4,664,592.

That concentration matters if you sell to plants. A county with 40,000 manufacturing workers usually has a thicker base of machine shops, maintenance contractors, packaging suppliers, industrial distributors, staffing firms, control system integrators, and logistics providers than a county with a few hundred factory employees. It also tends to have local workforce programs, trade associations, and lenders that understand manufacturing cycles.

Key Findings From the County Data

The point is not that one county is better than another. It is that county-level manufacturing data helps separate three different things: headcount, shop density, and payroll intensity. A sales territory built only around state totals misses that detail. A workforce plan built only around one plant misses it too.

Top 100 Manufacturing Counties by Employment

This table ranks counties by manufacturing employment. Annual payroll is shown in thousands in the Census source file, then converted here into dollars. Average annual pay is calculated as annual payroll divided by employment. Use that pay measure carefully because CBP is an establishment dataset, not an occupation wage survey.

Source for all rows: U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 County Business Patterns county file. County names use the Census county reference file.

Counties With the Most Manufacturing Establishments

Employment rankings favor counties with large plants. Establishment rankings favor counties with many separate manufacturing locations. For industrial marketers, establishment count can be the better signal when you sell services used by many small and midsize shops, such as tooling, ERP, quality consulting, recruiting, waste handling, or local logistics.

Source for all rows: U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 County Business Patterns county file.

Top States Based on County-Level Manufacturing Employment

State totals are helpful for quick orientation, but they can hide the county clusters inside each state. California is a good example. The state total is large, yet the county table shows that Southern California, the Bay Area, and San Diego County all operate as distinct industrial markets. Texas is similar. Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin-area counties serve different buyer bases.

Source for all rows: county records in the 2023 CBP county file, aggregated by state abbreviation.

Regional Manufacturing Patterns in the Top Counties

The top county list shows several different manufacturing models. Southern California has a deep base of aerospace, fabricated metal, apparel, food, electronics, medical products, and contract manufacturing shops. The same region can support both large plants and thousands of smaller suppliers because the labor pool, freight network, ports, and customer base are close together. That is why Los Angeles County can lead the country with 292,916 manufacturing employees and 10,122 manufacturing establishments in the same Census file.

The Midwest pattern looks different. Cook County, Wayne County, Elkhart County, Kent County, Macomb County, Cuyahoga County, and Waukesha County are tied to long-standing industrial ecosystems. Automotive suppliers, machinery builders, RV manufacturers, metalworking shops, plastics processors, and food plants sit near customers and skilled trades. Those counties may not always have the highest payroll per employee, but they often have dense supplier networks that are hard to copy quickly.

Texas counties show another model. Harris County combines chemicals, energy equipment, fabricated metals, aerospace suppliers, and port-driven logistics. Dallas County and Tarrant County add electronics, transportation equipment, food, machinery, and defense-related production. In the 2023 CBP county file, those three Texas counties together report 356,686 manufacturing employees, which is more manufacturing employment than many entire states.

The Southeast appears through counties like Greenville County, Spartanburg County, Davidson County, Shelby County, Gwinnett County, Wake County, and Mecklenburg County. These markets are often shaped by automotive, aerospace, appliances, packaging, food, textiles, logistics, and newer advanced manufacturing investments. For suppliers, the attraction is not just one plant. It is the repeatable pattern of OEMs, tier suppliers, workforce programs, interstate access, and industrial parks.

What the Data Does Not Tell You

County Business Patterns is a strong starting point, but it is not the whole market. It does not identify plant names, purchase intent, open RFQs, current capacity, equipment age, or whether a company is expanding. It also does not split employment by occupation. A county with high manufacturing employment may be heavy in production workers, engineers, warehouse labor, skilled trades, or headquarters staff depending on the industry mix.

CBP also reports employer establishments, not every facility a manufacturer might operate. Some businesses have multiple locations under one ownership structure, and disclosure rules can suppress certain values to protect confidential company data. That is why this page treats the Census numbers as directional market data, not a complete account list. For company targeting, pair CBP with plant directories, NAICS-based business lists, local economic development announcements, trade association membership, and your CRM history.

Timing matters too. The source file is 2023 data published by the Census Bureau, while this report is built for 2026 planning. Plant openings, closures, reshoring announcements, layoffs, and acquisitions can change a local market after the reporting year. Before making a major sales territory or site selection decision, check recent state labor releases, local news, and company announcements. For macro context, compare county data with national manufacturing sector trends from BLS Current Employment Statistics and production trends from the Federal Reserve G.17 release.

How to Use County Manufacturing Data

County data is practical because most manufacturing sales and workforce problems are local. Freight lanes, available machinists, technical schools, power costs, supplier capacity, and plant maintenance contractors are not evenly distributed across a state. A statewide marketing plan can look right on paper and still miss the counties where buyers are concentrated.

If you sell capital equipment, start with employment and payroll. Large employment counties usually have bigger production footprints, more maintenance activity, and more management layers involved in equipment decisions. If you sell shop services, establishment count may matter more because it tells you how many separate locations could become accounts. If you recruit for manufacturers, compare county employment with wage data from BLS employment programs and local job posting volume.

A county with high payroll per employee can indicate advanced manufacturing, headquarters-heavy operations, expensive technical talent, or simply a different industry mix. Do not treat it as a direct wage offer. For occupation wages, use BLS OEWS. For output and value added, use BEA GDP by industry. For national production cycles, pair county data with the Federal Reserve's Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization release.

Why This Data Is Link-Worthy

Most manufacturing reports stop at the national or state level. That is useful, but county-level numbers are what site selectors, local economic developers, regional suppliers, and industrial recruiters need when they are deciding where to spend time. A manufacturer in Elkhart County does not experience the same labor market as a manufacturer in Marion County. A supplier selling to aerospace in Los Angeles County does not face the same account universe as a supplier selling to food processors in Fresno County.

The National Association of Manufacturers publishes national manufacturing facts that are helpful for the big picture. County Business Patterns adds the local layer. The combination lets you talk about manufacturing with both scale and specificity. That is what journalists, economic developers, trade associations, and B2B marketers usually need when they cite data.

For lead generation, this is also a useful segmentation tool. You can prioritize counties with high employment for enterprise accounts, counties with many establishments for broad outreach, and counties with high payroll for technical products that require skilled labor or advanced production. The data will not close deals for you, but it can stop you from wasting campaigns on weak markets.

Methodology

We downloaded the 2023 County Business Patterns county dataset from the Census Bureau and filtered it to the manufacturing row, NAICS 31-33. The file reports county-level establishments, employment during the week including March 12, first quarter payroll, and annual payroll. CBP covers employer businesses with paid employees and excludes most self-employed workers, private households, railroad employees, agricultural production, and several government categories. The Census record layouts explain each field.

Payroll fields in the source file are reported in thousands of dollars. We converted annual payroll to dollars for display. Average annual pay is calculated as annual payroll divided by employment. State totals in this page are simple sums of county rows, not separate state-file downloads. Because some CBP values can be suppressed for disclosure protection, county-level totals may not match every national release exactly.

County names come from the Census national county reference file. Rankings are based on disclosed 2023 data, then published here for 2026 planning. Use the source links when citing a specific number.

A note on terminology: this report uses Census CBP, not BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, often called QCEW data. QCEW is the better source for employment and wages, annual average employment, average employment, total employment, and employment by ownership. CBP is better for county-level establishment counts by industry. If you need data from the U.S. labor system on manufacturing jobs, use both sources together. The 10 largest counties in this CBP table are an estimate of local manufacturing market size, not an annual average QCEW count. For geographic comparisons across metropolitan statistical areas, use the right geography for your question, then check whether the manufacturing subsector mix in Illinois, Texas, California, or any other state changes the result.