Biotech companies in NYC: a research giant with a small company base

This report is for job seekers, investors, partners and suppliers who want to know which biotech companies are in New York City and how big the sector really is. The Census geography is the city's five counties: Bronx, Kings (Brooklyn), New York (Manhattan), Queens and Richmond (Staten Island). Companies in Westchester, Long Island and New Jersey are outside it, and the statewide figures are covered at the end.

How many biotech companies are in NYC

County Business Patterns (CBP) 2023, Bronx, Kings, New York, Queens and Richmond counties, NAICS 541714 (biotech research and development) and 325414 (biological product manufacturing):

The Census Bureau published the citywide employee and payroll totals but flagged them as high-noise: the noise it adds to protect confidentiality moved them by 5% or more. All 136 establishments are in the R&D code; the city has no biologics manufacturing establishments in the published data. The citywide size table isn't published.

CBP counts establishments with paid employees, not companies, and leaves out founders without payroll.

Manhattan's labs, by size

The county file does publish Manhattan's size classes for the R&D code:

The Census Bureau doesn't publish the three largest classes; 2 is the total less the published cells. Manhattan's biotech establishments paid $789.0 million to 3,569 employees, an average of about $221,000 (our calculation from the county file).

What the count misses

NAICS 541714 and 325414 are the lab and biologics-plant codes. Much of NYC's drug industry sits elsewhere: company headquarters in Manhattan offices are classed by function, drug discovery labs may be coded 541715 (other life-sciences R&D), and the hospitals and medical schools that run most of the city's research are classed as hospitals or universities. A Manhattan biotech that outsources its lab work to a CRO may not appear in either code at all.

The listed biotechs headquartered in the city

SEC EDGAR lists 37 listed companies with a New York City business address in SIC 2834 (pharmaceutical preparations, 29) and 2836 (biological products, 8). Pfizer ($62,579 million of 2025 revenue) and Royalty Pharma, a royalty investor with $2,378.2 million of revenue and 100 employees, are the largest. The biotechs, from their latest 10-Ks:

Calendar 2025 unless stated; employees as of 31 December 2025 unless dated, blank where we didn't take a figure. Every company's 10-K cover gives New York, NY. TG Therapeutics still has a New York address in EDGAR, but its 10-K cover gives Morrisville, North Carolina, so it's left out.

Headcounts are small: half the companies with a stated figure have under 100 employees. Companies this size with R&D budgets of $40 million to $260 million typically buy much of their science from CROs, contract manufacturers and clinical sites, many of them outside the city.

The research engine

NIH RePORTER shows $2.72 billion of NIH awards to 101 New York City organizations in fiscal 2025 (October 2024 to September 2025), across 4,130 projects:

Companies received 69 awards worth $59.5 million, 58 of them small-business (SBIR or STTR) grants; Sparian Biosciences ($7.1 million) received the most. Many NYC biotechs are spinouts of these institutions, so their founders' grants in RePORTER are often the earliest public record of the science.

FDA's cell and tissue registry lists 11 city establishments registered for blood stem cell or peripheral blood mononuclear cell products, nearly all hospital cell therapy labs (Memorial Sloan Kettering, Mount Sinai, NYU Langone, NewYork-Presbyterian, Montefiore) plus New York Blood Center. FDA's drug establishment file lists 25 registrations in the city, 12 with manufacturing operations, including Mesoblast and Valorum Biologics in Manhattan.

Where to look for companies

1. NewYorkBIO, the state association, has a member directory and a jobs board.
2. The city's life sciences programs page (nyc.gov) lists the lab buildings and incubators where startups cluster, including the Alexandria Center for Life Science (over 1 million square feet of lab space) and BioBAT at the Brooklyn Army Terminal (500,000 square feet).
3. NIH RePORTER, searched by institution, shows which labs are winning translational grants before they spin out.

Biotech companies in New York State

The state view is much bigger. A biennial report by TEConomy for the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, published through NewYorkBIO on 28 October 2026, counts 118,906 bioscience jobs across 6,397 businesses in New York in 2025, with an average wage of $144,154, and $3.5 billion of NIH funding to the state's institutions in fiscal 2025. The largest biotech headquartered in the state is Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in Tarrytown, which reported $14,342.9 million of revenue and $5,850.2 million of R&D for 2025 in its 10-K.

Selling to NYC biotechs

Worked example: a scientific recruiting firm

Illustrative example. The firm and its fees are invented; the headcounts come from the 10-Ks above.

Ferry Street Talent (ferrystreet.example) places clinical development and CMC staff.

1. Choose the growth stage. Companies of 50 to 300 people (Syndax, Nuvation Bio, Dianthus, Lexeo, Protara) are building teams but rarely have large in-house recruiting groups.
2. Do the arithmetic. Those five reported 798 employees between them (our sum). If they add 10% in a year, that's about 80 hires; filling 8 at a 25% fee on $220,000 salaries is $440,000.
3. Use the filing. A new phase 3 start or a commercial launch in the 10-K usually means clinical operations and medical affairs hiring.

Finding the hiring manager at each company is the slow part; Bebop finds matching companies and contacts and drafts the outreach.

For the national ranking, see the largest biotech companies; for drug manufacturing across the Hudson, the New Jersey pharmaceutical market report.

Next step: compare a company-dense cluster in biotech companies in Boston.