Manufacturing Job Growth by State: 2026 Data Report

What the Manufacturing Job Growth Data Shows

The headline is not that manufacturing is growing everywhere. It isn't. The BLS QCEW annual file shows a mixed map. Large Sun Belt states added jobs, several Midwestern production states lost jobs, and a few smaller states posted positive percentage growth from a smaller base.

Texas ranked first for absolute job growth with +18,271 private manufacturing jobs. Florida ranked second with +6,555. Alabama ranked third with +4,223. Those three states are very different manufacturing markets, which is why the table includes both job change and location quotient.

A state can add a lot of jobs because it is large. It can also have a high manufacturing concentration even when total employment is smaller. Indiana had the highest manufacturing employment location quotient at 2.00, followed by Wisconsin at 1.92 and Iowa at 1.73. BLS defines a location quotient as an area concentration measure compared with the national concentration, explained in its QCEW location quotient guide.

Manufacturing Job Growth by State, Full Ranking

The table ranks states by one-year percentage change in private manufacturing employment. Job change is the absolute year-over-year change in annual average employment. Establishments, payroll, average annual pay, and location quotient come from the same BLS QCEW 2024 annual single file.

Fastest-Growing Manufacturing States

Percentage growth highlights momentum. It can surface states that are not the largest manufacturing employers but are gaining ground. The top 10 states by manufacturing job growth rate are below, with every value sourced to the BLS QCEW annual file.

Absolute growth tells a different story. Texas was the clear leader by job count, adding more manufacturing jobs than the next two states combined. Florida's growth matters because it paired +6,555 jobs with 26,843 establishments, which points to both plant-level demand and a broad supplier base.

States with the Largest Manufacturing Job Losses

A loss in annual average employment does not always mean a state's industrial base is weak. It can reflect cyclical demand, automaker schedules, interest-rate-sensitive sectors, defense timing, inventory corrections, or plant-specific changes. Still, the scale matters if you sell into manufacturing or plan hiring.

California had the largest absolute decrease at -81,996 private manufacturing jobs. Michigan followed with -12,474, then Illinois with -9,900. All three remain large manufacturing states, so a decline can still leave a deep buyer universe.

Manufacturing Concentration by State

Manufacturing location quotient is useful because it controls for the size of a state's overall employment base. A location quotient above 1.00 means manufacturing employment is more concentrated than the national average. A location quotient below 1.00 means it is less concentrated. BLS explains the calculation in its QCEW location quotient guide.

Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, and Alabama led by concentration. That matters for manufacturers and vendors because dense manufacturing states tend to have deeper labor pools, more specialized suppliers, more experienced local service firms, and more peer companies that understand industrial buying.

Highest-Pay Manufacturing States

Average annual pay is not the same as hourly wage for a specific role. It is total annual wages divided by annual average covered employment in the BLS QCEW file. That makes it a useful market signal. Higher pay often reflects more advanced manufacturing mix, more engineering-heavy employers, higher cost of living, union contracts, overtime, or more capital-intensive sectors.

Washington ranked first by average annual pay at $122,468. California ranked second at $105,649. Connecticut ranked third at $100,701.

How to Use This Data for Manufacturing Lead Generation

For industrial marketing, the best state is not always the fastest-growing state. It depends on what you sell. A machine tool distributor may care about concentration and establishment count. A recruiting firm may care about employment growth and average pay. A specialty supplier may care about the number of plants in a narrow geographic radius.

If you sell broad industrial services, start with the largest manufacturing employers. California, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois have the deepest employment bases in the BLS state file. If you sell into dense industrial clusters, compare location quotient against establishment count. Indiana and Wisconsin are highly concentrated, while Texas and Florida have lower concentration but large and growing total markets.

For sales territory planning, pair this table with customer fit. Growth can create new capacity needs, but shrinking markets can still have active maintenance, automation, quality, safety, and compliance budgets. A state with fewer jobs but higher average annual pay may also include more technical facilities, more regulated production, or more expensive labor markets where automation and process improvement have a clear business case.

Largest Manufacturing States by Employment

Manufacturing job growth by state is easiest to misread when you only look at percentages. A small state can grow fast from a small base, while a large state can lose workers and still remain one of the biggest industrial markets in the country. That is why this report keeps employment scale next to job growth.

California had 1,247,594 private manufacturing jobs in the BLS QCEW annual file. Texas had 973,674. Ohio had 682,242. Those three states alone account for a large share of private manufacturing employment in this 50-state table.

For lead generation, large states are usually better for broad campaigns because the market is deep enough to support multiple niches. A shop selling maintenance services, safety products, ERP implementation, inspection equipment, staffing, or industrial marketing can build a long account list in California, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Indiana.

Regional Patterns Behind the State Rankings

The strongest growth story in this dataset is the Sun Belt. Texas, Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Nevada, and South Carolina all appear in the upper part of the state ranking. Their growth rates are not identical, but the pattern matters for companies selling to new plants, expanding facilities, industrial contractors, logistics providers, workforce firms, and economic development teams.

The Midwest still carries the densest manufacturing base. Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky all had location quotients above 1.50, except Kentucky at 1.58. That means manufacturing makes up a bigger share of total employment in those states than it does nationally. For a manufacturer, that can mean deeper supplier networks, experienced plant labor, and more local buyers who already understand industrial operations.

The West Coast is more complicated. California remained the largest private manufacturing employer in the country, but the state also posted the largest one-year job loss in this dataset. Washington ranked highest for average annual manufacturing pay, which points to a different market profile than low-cost production states. For sales teams, the right move is to split the region by buyer type instead of treating it as one manufacturing market.

The Northeast has fewer giant manufacturing states, but Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island show why concentration and pay matter. These states can be attractive for companies selling into aerospace, medical devices, defense suppliers, electronics, precision machining, and other technical manufacturing categories where account value matters more than raw plant count.

What Counts as a Good Manufacturing Market?

There is no single best state for every manufacturer, supplier, or sales team. A good market depends on what you sell, who buys it, how far your team can travel, and whether your offer is tied to plant growth, maintenance, labor, compliance, or capital spending.

Use job growth when your offer is tied to expansion. New workers often mean more supervisors, more equipment, more training, more safety needs, more HR work, more onboarding, and more plant-floor communication. Use establishment count when your offer is broad and local. A high number of establishments gives you more accounts to contact, even if the average plant is smaller.

Use average annual pay when your offer is tied to high-value labor, technical production, automation, engineering, quality, or compliance. Higher pay does not guarantee better buyers, but it can indicate more complex production or more expensive labor. Those are two situations where better systems, better lead generation, and better vendor selection often get attention.

Use location quotient when you need industry density. A high location quotient means manufacturing is more central to the local economy. That can help with referrals, trade association activity, workforce partnerships, distribution coverage, and local SEO. A low location quotient does not mean a weak market if the state has a large population and a large absolute number of plants.

Sales Territory Takeaways

If you are building a manufacturing sales territory from scratch, start with three cuts of the data. First, sort by employment to find large markets. Second, sort by job growth to find expansion markets. Third, sort by location quotient to find dense industrial states. The overlap between those three lists is where you usually find the strongest first-pass territory candidates.

Texas is the obvious expansion target because it ranks near the top for total employment and first for job gains. Indiana is the concentration target because manufacturing is unusually dense there. California is the scale target because it still has the largest employment base, even with a one-year decline. Florida is the broad-growth target because it added jobs and has a large number of establishments.

For niche suppliers, the next step is to layer NAICS-specific or product-specific data over this state table. A company selling to food plants should not use the same ranking as a company selling to semiconductor suppliers. This page gives the state-level manufacturing map. Your account list should narrow that map by subsector, plant size, certification, equipment type, and buying trigger.

FAQ

Related Manufacturing Labor Terms

Readers often use several phrases for this same research problem: manufacturing employment by state, manufacturing workers by state, number of jobs in manufacturing, manufacturing firms by state, and U.S. manufacturing job growth. This page focuses on the state-level employment side, not goods exports, manufactured goods shipments, GDP, manufacturing job openings, labor force participation, or manufactured goods output.

Sector mix still matters. A state with more food processing plants will look different from a state heavy in aerospace, machinery, electronics, chemicals, pharmaceutical production, or transportation equipment. For that reason, treat this state ranking as the first filter. The second filter should be industry fit, plant count, company size, buyer role, and the specific manufacturing process your product or service supports.

The United States for manufacturing is not one uniform market. Searchers may ask about million manufacturing jobs, 3 million manufacturing workers, American manufacturing, or the manufacturing workforce in broader national contexts, but this report keeps the unit of analysis to one state at a time. This page reports manufacturing wages as average annual pay from QCEW, not average hourly earnings from a monthly payroll data series. It also uses 2024 annual data with 2023 comparison fields, not 2022 economic census tables.

This is not a pre-pandemic versus pandemic recovery report, a Q1 update, a metropolitan areas ranking, or a net job forecast. It is also not the BLS establishment survey. It is a state-by-state annual QCEW report, so the numbers are best used for market sizing, territory planning, state employment comparisons, and a practical economic analysis of top states.

If your project needs foreign direct investment, value-added output, Census Bureau establishment tables, labor force participation rate, participation rate by age, manufactured goods exports, or CES data, pair this resource with those separate datasets. This report stays focused on private manufacturing employment and pay from QCEW. It does not rank each state's manufacturing R&D spending, MSAs, service industry employment, production and nonsupervisory workers, unfilled jobs, computer and electronic product mix, or overtime hours against the overall U.S. economy.

Methodology

This page uses private ownership manufacturing sector data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics QCEW 2024 annual single file. Manufacturing is identified with QCEW industry code 1013, private ownership is own code 5, size code is 0, and annual records use quarter A. Statewide areas use state FIPS codes ending in 000. BLS compares 2024 annual records with 2023 annual records in the over-the-year fields, which is why the job changes in this report are one-year changes rather than a 2025 forecast.

QCEW is different from Current Employment Statistics. CES is the monthly survey many readers see in employment headlines, including seasonally adjusted nonfarm payroll figures. QCEW is built from unemployment insurance records and is better for detailed geography, industry, and ownership cuts. This report uses QCEW because we need state-level private manufacturing workers, establishments, pay, and location quotient in one dataset.

Job percentage change, job count change, establishment change, pay change, average annual pay, average weekly wage, payroll, and location quotient are reported directly from the BLS annual file. We sorted the main table by one-year percentage change in annual average employment. BLS publishes the underlying files and documentation through its QCEW downloadable data page and its QCEW data guide.

The page includes 402 data points across state rankings, growth tables, job loss tables, concentration rankings, and pay rankings. We updated the report on July 6, 2026. If BLS revises annual files, the numbers should be checked against the latest file before citing in formal research.

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