The Number · Strategy and Budget
How many manufacturing companies are in the US? 25,716 have 50 to 499 employees
Census counts 239,265 manufacturing companies in the US. Only about one in ten is mid-size, which means the list of every company that could buy from you is shorter than you think.
Of the 239,265 manufacturing companies in the US, 25,716 had 50 to 499 employees in 2022, according to the Census Bureau’s Statistics of U.S. Businesses, the latest year published. They make up 10.7% of the firms and employ 3.07 million people, a quarter of the 12.19 million people working at manufacturing firms.
If you sell to mid-size manufacturers, those 25,716 companies are your whole universe. In most niches it is a few hundred to a few thousand companies, small enough to list, research and cover by name. We recomputed the count from the Census tables and broke it out by industry and state. You can download the dataset (CSV), which carries every state and 17 selected six-digit industries.
How the number of manufacturing companies in the US splits by size
Census sorts firms by the total employment of the whole enterprise, across every location it owns. In 2022:
- 209,372 manufacturing firms had fewer than 50 employees (87.5%)
- 25,716 had 50 to 499 (10.7%)
- 4,177 had 500 or more (1.7%)
The mid-size firms average about 119 employees. More than half of them, 13,324, are at the small end with 50 to 99 people. For anyone selling software, services or capital equipment, half your “mid-market” list is companies of 50 to 99 people, where one person may own marketing, the website and the trade show booth.
Which industries have the most mid-size manufacturers
| NAICS | Industry | Firms with 50 to 499 employees | All firms | Mid-size share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 332 | Fabricated metal products | 5,121 | 49,484 | 10.3% |
| 333 | Machinery | 2,850 | 19,028 | 15.0% |
| 326 | Plastics and rubber products | 1,951 | 8,369 | 23.3% |
| 334 | Computer and electronic products | 1,515 | 9,698 | 15.6% |
| 327 | Nonmetallic mineral products | 1,126 | 8,807 | 12.8% |
| 335 | Electrical equipment and components | 746 | 4,593 | 16.2% |
| 331 | Primary metals | 716 | 2,649 | 27.0% |
| 423 | Durable goods merchant wholesalers (distributors) | 9,843 | 153,128 | 6.4% |
Source: our analysis of Census Bureau, Statistics of U.S. Businesses 2022, US and states detailed enterprise sizes. A firm with locations in more than one industry is counted in each, so industry rows add up to more than 25,716. Distributors (NAICS 423) are wholesalers, not manufacturers, and are not part of the 25,716.
Plastics is a mid-size industry. Almost a quarter of plastics and rubber firms have 50 to 499 employees, more than twice the share in fabricated metals. And metalworking is a long tail. Census counts 17,130 machine shops (NAICS 332710), and only 934 of them have 50 to 499 employees.
Going one level deeper usually gives the number you actually need. Firms with 50 to 499 employees, nationally:
- Precision turned products (332721): 493
- Sheet metal work (332322): 581
- All other plastics products (326199): 1,040
- Conveyor and conveying equipment (333922): 186
- Special die, tool, jig and fixture (333514): 161
- Industrial machinery and equipment distributors (423830): 1,362
- Industrial supplies distributors (423840): 478
- Metal service centers (423510): 568
Where the mid-size manufacturers are
By state, the largest counts of manufacturing firms with 50 to 499 employees are:
| State | Manufacturing firms with 50 to 499 employees |
|---|---|
| California | 3,065 |
| Texas | 2,083 |
| Ohio | 1,781 |
| Pennsylvania | 1,577 |
| Illinois | 1,538 |
| Michigan | 1,519 |
| Wisconsin | 1,312 |
| New York | 1,239 |
| Indiana | 1,100 |
| North Carolina | 1,067 |
A company is counted in every state where it has a location, so state counts add up to 30,945, more than the national total. Source: our analysis of Census SUSB 2022.
Census does not publish the 50 to 499 band for individual industries by state. Its state tables split detailed sizes only for manufacturing as a whole; for a single industry in a single state, the 6-digit NAICS table’s closest band is 100 to 499 employees. So the industry leaders below count firms with 100 to 499 employees, a narrower group than the rest of this piece:
| Industry | Most firms with 100 to 499 employees | Second |
|---|---|---|
| Plastics and rubber (326) | Ohio, 108 | Michigan, 102 |
| Machinery (333) | Michigan, 154 | Texas, 140 |
| Fabricated metals (332) | Texas, 263 | California, 229 |
Firms with 100 to 499 employees, not 50 to 499, because Census does not publish a 50 to 499 band by state and industry. Source: our analysis of Census SUSB 2022, US and states, 6-digit NAICS.
Ohio, Michigan and the other Great Lakes states sit near the top in every manufacturing line we checked.
What to do with the number
Size your real market before you buy a list. Pick the two or three six-digit NAICS codes your best customers sit in and find their 50 to 499 count. If your code is one of the 17 in our dataset (CSV), the count is there. If not, open the Census detailed-sizes table, find the United States rows for your code, and add the firm counts in the size rows from 50 to 74 employees through 400 to 499. If the answer is 600 firms, a purchased list of 40,000 “manufacturing contacts” is mostly people who will never buy.
Build the account list by hand. A few hundred companies is a list one marketer can research in a quarter. Census gives you the count; state manufacturers’ association directories, trade show exhibitor lists and your own CRM give you the names. Our guide to building a target account list from public data walks through those sources and how to score them.
Expect a cap, and plan for share. If there are 1,951 mid-size plastics processors in the country, your growth in that segment comes from winning a bigger share of a fixed group. So the case is for depth with named accounts over broad reach, starting with the OEM accounts you already have.
Check your territories against the map. If your reps are split evenly by region, compare their territories to the state counts; the dataset has all 50 states and the District of Columbia. A rep covering Ohio, Michigan and Indiana has about 4,400 mid-size manufacturers in territory. A rep covering the eight Mountain states, from Arizona to Montana, has about 1,840. Because a multi-state company counts once in each state, treat both as upper bounds.
These counts are for 2022 and were released April 10, 2025. Census had not published 2023 SUSB tables as of Oct. 26, 2026. Firm counts move slowly, so the shape holds, but treat any single number as plus or minus a few percent.
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