Manufacturing Jobs by Occupation: 2026 Employment and Wage Data

Manufacturing isn't one job. A modern plant needs people who assemble products, program machines, repair equipment, inspect output, plan schedules, move materials, design processes, and supervise production. The pay range is just as wide. Core roles in this report run from about $39,000 to more than $104,000 in median annual pay, based on the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics manufacturing tables and linked Occupational Outlook Handbook profiles.

This report puts 25 factory occupations on one page, then shows where the work sits across the 21 manufacturing subsectors. Employment counts cover each occupation across all industries because maintenance mechanics, engineers, welders, logisticians, and machinists also work outside NAICS 31-33. Manufacturing-specific pay and staffing cuts are available in the BLS industry occupation table.

Manufacturing jobs ranked by employment and pay

The table mixes high-volume production jobs with skilled trades, technical roles, engineers, planners, and supervisors. Employment and median pay are rounded from May 2024 national OEWS estimates and the BLS Production Occupations handbook. Education indicates the typical entry-level credential, not a rule used by every employer.

What the occupation data says about factory careers

Production work remains the volume center. Assemblers and fabricators account for about 1.8 million jobs across industries, while team assemblers alone account for about 1.1 million, according to BLS production occupation estimates. These are not interchangeable titles. Some assembly jobs involve repetitive line work. Others require blueprints, electrical connections, testing, precision fitting, or regulated documentation.

Maintenance and repair roles carry a pay premium because downtime is expensive. Industrial machinery mechanics have median pay of about $63,510, and millwrights earn about $65,170, based on the BLS career profile. Plants increasingly need mechanical knowledge alongside sensors, controls, robotics, and computerized maintenance systems.

Engineering roles sit at the top of this comparison. The BLS Industrial Engineers profile reports median pay above $100,000, and national estimates put materials and mechanical engineers in the same six-figure range. Those roles influence process design, capital equipment, quality, safety, throughput, energy use, and product performance.

Manufacturing employment by subsector

The table ranks the 21 three-digit subsectors from largest to smallest. Employment is rounded to the nearest 10,000 because government programs have different reference periods and coverage rules. The ranking is more useful than false precision when you're comparing addressable markets.

The three biggest factory workforces

Food manufacturing

Food manufacturing leads the list at roughly 1.72 million employees, based on 2023 County Business Patterns. Its scale comes from both demand and geography. Meat processing, bakeries, dairy plants, fruit and vegetable processors, and packaged-food facilities operate near farms, population centers, ports, and distribution networks. Unlike sectors concentrated in a few industrial corridors, food production reaches nearly every state.

The sector is also labor intensive. Sanitation, material handling, quality control, maintenance, packaging, refrigeration, and production supervision sit alongside line work. Employment scale makes food plants a large market for conveyors, pumps, washdown equipment, automation, safety products, packaging systems, and maintenance services. For vendors, the practical dividing line is not simply “food manufacturing.” Meat processing has different uptime and sanitation needs than a bakery or beverage filler.

Transportation equipment

Transportation equipment ranks second with about 1.64 million workers in the CBP national file. The category spans automobiles, aircraft, aerospace parts, ships, rail equipment, and other vehicles. Large final-assembly plants get most of the attention, but a huge supplier network sits underneath them. Tooling firms, metal stampers, electronics suppliers, plastics processors, machine shops, and engineering contractors all depend on transportation programs.

Employment tends to cluster around established supply chains. Automotive employment is dense in the Midwest and Southeast. Aerospace has major concentrations in Washington, California, Texas, Kansas, Connecticut, and other specialized hubs. This concentration makes account-based targeting practical. A supplier can map facilities and tiers, then build content around the exact program, certification, material, and production risk buyers care about.

Fabricated metal products

Fabricated metal products employs roughly 1.43 million people, according to County Business Patterns. It includes thousands of machine shops, sheet metal fabricators, coaters, stampers, fastener makers, structural metal firms, and specialty producers. The sector is less dominated by giant plants than transportation equipment. That makes it a particularly broad B2B market.

Many fabricated-metal establishments are owner-led or privately held. Buying authority may sit with a plant manager, operations manager, estimator, quality manager, or the owner. Vendors selling cutting tools, abrasives, inspection equipment, ERP software, material, finishing, or contract services need clear technical pages. Buyers want tolerances, machine envelopes, alloys, certifications, lead times, and examples. Generic industrial messaging gets ignored.

The million-worker technology and equipment sectors

Computer and electronic product manufacturing and machinery manufacturing each support roughly one million jobs in the Census employer data. Their totals are similar, but their workforces and purchasing cycles differ. Electronics production includes semiconductor fabs, instrument makers, communications equipment, and component plants. Machinery includes equipment for farms, mines, construction sites, factories, offices, and commercial buildings.

Computer and electronic product plants usually carry high engineering, technician, and cleanroom content. Machinery manufacturers often combine machining, welding, assembly, controls, testing, field service, and aftermarket support. Both sectors buy precision. Yet electronics suppliers tend to lead with contamination control, traceability, yield, and process stability, while machinery suppliers often lead with durability, manufacturability, delivery, and serviceability.

The BLS manufacturing occupational wage table shows why headcount alone doesn't define labor value. Engineering, software, technician, and management occupations change the pay mix inside each subsector. For workforce planning, use subsector employment to understand scale, then occupation-level data to understand the roles that are actually scarce.

Mid-sized manufacturing labor markets

Chemicals, plastics and rubber, and miscellaneous manufacturing form the next tier. Together they account for roughly 2.22 million jobs, calculated from the rounded CBP subsector totals. Chemical manufacturing includes pharmaceuticals and basic chemicals in the same three-digit group, so averages can hide major differences in capital intensity and pay. Anyone sizing that market should move down to four- or six-digit NAICS detail.

Plastics and rubber manufacturing is tied into almost every other factory supply chain. Molded parts, film, packaging, tires, seals, hoses, and engineered components feed automotive, medical, construction, consumer, and industrial markets. The workforce spans process technicians, mold setters, maintenance teams, quality staff, material handlers, engineers, and operators. Demand can move with downstream markets, which makes current QCEW quarterly data useful when static annual totals are not enough.

Miscellaneous manufacturing sounds like a leftover category, but it contains major markets. Medical equipment and supplies sit here, along with sporting goods, jewelry, office supplies, and products that don't fit elsewhere. A seller using NAICS 339 as one segment will mix regulated medical plants with very different consumer-product factories. The code works for a top-line count. It is too broad for a campaign.

Materials, components, and process industries

Electrical equipment, wood products, nonmetallic minerals, printing, primary metals, furniture, and paper each employ between roughly 350,000 and 430,000 people in the 2023 Census file. These industries rarely receive the same headlines as automotive or semiconductors, but together they represent about 2.75 million workers.

Primary metals and nonmetallic minerals are capital-heavy and uptime-sensitive. A failure at a mill, foundry, glass plant, cement operation, or kiln can stop an expensive continuous process. Suppliers win by proving reliability, response time, safety knowledge, and the ability to work in harsh environments. The employment total may look modest relative to food manufacturing, but spending per facility can be substantial.

Wood, furniture, printing, and paper face a different mix of issues. They often run converting, cutting, finishing, dust collection, material handling, and packaging operations. Paper manufacturing has fewer facilities than many light-manufacturing sectors, but mills tend to be large. Printing has many more small establishments. Establishment count and average plant size from CBP should therefore sit beside employment whenever a vendor estimates sales opportunity.

Small subsectors can still be valuable markets

Textiles, apparel, leather, and petroleum and coal products sit near the bottom by employment. Low headcount does not automatically mean low economic value. Petroleum refining is the obvious example. It has roughly 110,000 employees in the rounded CBP comparison, but its facilities are capital intensive, regulated, and built around continuous operation. A narrow supplier with the right certifications may find more value in a few refineries than in thousands of small factories.

Textile and apparel employment reflects decades of global sourcing, but domestic producers remain important in technical textiles, defense, medical products, carpet, nonwovens, and fast-turn specialty work. Leather and allied products is the smallest three-digit subsector, at roughly 30,000 employer-establishment jobs in CBP. For broad lead generation it is narrow. For a specialist equipment or material supplier, its concentrated buyer universe can be an advantage.

Wages differ because the job mix differs

A subsector's average wage is a blend of occupations, overtime, location, union coverage, and plant economics. Petroleum, chemicals, computers and electronics, and transportation equipment generally carry more engineers, technicians, skilled trades, and capital-intensive operations than apparel or furniture. To compare pay accurately, start with QCEW annual average weekly wage data, then use OEWS occupation-by-industry estimates for roles.

This distinction matters in recruiting. A machinist wage benchmark for all manufacturing may be useless if the local competitors are aerospace plants. The same is true for industrial maintenance, quality engineering, welding, and production supervision. Employers should benchmark the occupation, industry, and geography together. Workers should do the same when comparing offers.

Monthly earnings and hours series from the BLS manufacturing industry profile add another layer. They can show changes before annual datasets are released. They also help separate a falling headcount from a shorter workweek. A plant can reduce overtime without cutting the same number of jobs.

Employment is not the same as output

High employment can indicate a large market, but it does not measure production value or productivity. Food manufacturing uses a lot of labor and has plants across the country. Refining uses less labor but enormous amounts of capital. Semiconductor fabs may have fewer production workers than a similarly sized food complex while generating much more output per employee.

The BLS labor productivity tables compare output, hours, and unit labor costs. Use those measures when the question is efficiency or economic contribution. Use CBP or QCEW when the question is employer footprint, jobs, payroll, or market size. Mixing the measures leads to bad conclusions.

How suppliers can use the employment data

Start with fit, not rank. The largest subsector isn't automatically the best prospect pool. A washdown conveyor company may care deeply about food plants. A metrology lab may find better opportunities in aerospace, medical devices, machinery, and precision metalworking. An industrial cybersecurity firm may prioritize large, connected facilities across chemicals, transportation, and electronics.

Next, move below the three-digit code. NAICS 336 combines motor vehicles, aerospace, ships, rail, and other transportation equipment. Those buyers have different standards and vendor lists. NAICS 325 combines pharmaceuticals, coatings, agricultural chemicals, soaps, and basic chemicals. A useful sales list normally needs four- to six-digit industry codes, facility size, geography, and a trigger such as expansion, hiring, equipment installation, or a new program.

Employment can help estimate account complexity. Small facilities often have short reporting lines and fewer dedicated specialists. Large plants may have separate teams for engineering, maintenance, EHS, quality, procurement, IT, and operations. Your website should give each member of that buying group evidence they can use internally.

How employers can use the report

For employers, the ranking provides a first look at competing labor markets. A machinery plant isn't only competing with other machinery plants. It may compete for machinists with fabricated-metal shops, for controls engineers with electrical equipment companies, and for maintenance technicians with food processors. Cross-sector competition is strongest in industrial regions where several subsectors overlap.

Track monthly movement through CES, quarterly local changes through QCEW, and openings and separations through the BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. No single release answers every workforce question. Together they show stock, flow, pay, hours, and hiring pressure.

Data notes and limitations

County Business Patterns covers establishments with paid employees. It excludes most government employees, railroad employees, agricultural production workers, and self-employed people. One company can operate several establishments. The Census Bureau documents coverage, suppression, payroll, and employment definitions in its CBP methodology.

QCEW is based primarily on unemployment insurance records and covers more than 95 percent of U.S. jobs. CES is a monthly survey designed for speed. Estimates can differ because the programs use different samples, timing, revisions, and coverage. Values on this page are deliberately rounded. Readers needing a contract, investment, site-selection, or compensation decision should download the underlying files and select the exact year, ownership, geography, and NAICS level required.

Frequently asked questions

Which manufacturing industry employs the most people?

Food manufacturing is the largest three-digit manufacturing subsector, at roughly 1.72 million employer-establishment workers in the 2023 CBP comparison. Transportation equipment and fabricated metal products follow.

How many manufacturing subsectors are there?

There are 21 three-digit subsectors inside manufacturing codes 31 through 33, based on the North American Industry Classification System.

What is the best source for current manufacturing jobs?

Use CES for fast monthly national trends. Use QCEW for detailed geography and industry counts, with a longer release lag. Use CBP when establishment counts and business-size detail matter.

Cite this page

Suggested citation:

Manufacturing Lead Generation. “Manufacturing Jobs by Occupation: 2026 Employment and Wage Data.” Updated July 22, 2026. https://manufacturingleadgeneration.com/manufacturing-jobs-by-occupation/

Sources

Every numerical claim is linked to the originating government dataset or program: