Businesses in Alabama: 105,720 workplaces, the new plant pipeline and the top headquarters

This page is for anyone who needs to find, size or vet Alabama businesses: suppliers looking for plants to sell to, job seekers, analysts and B2B sellers planning a territory. It covers how many businesses there are, where new ones are being built, the counties and sectors, the public companies headquartered in the state, and how to check any business in the state's records.

How many businesses are in Alabama

County Business Patterns (CBP), from the US Census Bureau, counts every business location with at least one paid employee. Alabama's 2023 figures, for all sectors:

In bands: 89,184 establishments with 1 to 19 employees, 13,855 with 20 to 99 and 2,681 with 100 or more. Half of all Alabama workplaces have fewer than five people.

What the count leaves out matters. It's establishments, not companies, so a bank with 60 branches counts 60 times. It excludes the self-employed and businesses with no payroll. The Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics show the wider pool forming: Alabamians filed 70,466 applications for an employer identification number to start a business in 2025, up from 41,505 in 2019. About a quarter (18,132) were "high-propensity" applications, the kind the Census Bureau expects to turn into businesses with payroll. Those totals are our sum of the monthly, not seasonally adjusted, figures.

Where new plants are going

The Alabama Department of Commerce publishes every new and expanding industry project it announces, with company, city, NAICS code, jobs and capital investment. Its 2025 report counts 234 projects, $14,631,210,684 of investment (the highest annual total in state history, it says) and 9,388 job commitments.

Bioscience leads on money because of one project: Eli Lilly's plan to spend more than $6 billion on a pharmaceutical ingredient plant in Huntsville and Limestone County, with 450 jobs, which Commerce calls the largest initial investment in Alabama history. Others named in the report include ArcelorMittal's $1.2 billion electrical steel plant in Mobile County, Georgia-Pacific's $800 million mill modernization in Monroe County and Owens Corning's $325 million shingle plant in Prattville.

By county, Limestone led on investment ($6,653,127,635 across 16 projects), followed by Mobile ($2,416,839,840) and Montgomery ($1,199,901,023). Madison led on jobs, with 2,424 from 11 projects. More than half (1,312) come from U.S. Space Command's headquarters operations; the rest are mostly defense and aerospace expansions, such as Northrop Grumman's 200-job missile systems project and a 525-job drone manufacturing expansion.

Where Alabama businesses are

Average pay is our calculation from CBP payroll. The five largest counties hold 44.7% of the state's establishments. Madison County has fewer than half of Jefferson's workplaces but the highest average pay of the eight, a sign of its engineering and defense base around Redstone Arsenal. Baldwin County, on the Gulf Coast, has many small tourism and retail businesses, at 11.2 employees per site.

What Alabama businesses do

Manufacturing has the fewest sites in this table but the most jobs, 272,338, at 65.7 employees per establishment. Vehicles drive it: 11 motor vehicle assembly establishments employ 20,041 people at an average of $95,068, and 145 parts plants employ another 32,953. The Commerce Department names four automakers with Alabama plants (Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Hyundai and Mazda Toyota) and says the state produces about a million vehicles a year. Aerospace product and parts makers add 42 establishments and 10,632 jobs, a figure the Census Bureau marks as moderately affected by the noise it adds for confidentiality.

The largest public companies headquartered in Alabama

Ranked by revenue in each company's latest 10-K, with the headquarters city from its cover page:

For the two banks, revenue is net interest income plus noninterest income from the 10-K (our calculation): $4.99 billion plus $2.54 billion for Regions. The list is short on giants because Alabama's biggest employers are mostly divisions of companies headquartered elsewhere: the automakers above, aerospace and defense primes in Huntsville, and Alabama Power, a subsidiary of Atlanta-based Southern Company. Private companies don't file 10-Ks, so they're not ranked here.

How to look up an Alabama business

Two cautions on the state record. The Secretary of State says corporations are no longer required to file an annual report with its office, so an entity listed as existing may not be trading. And the Business Entities Division says it holds about 250,000 filings, a count of documents rather than active businesses; it doesn't publish a count of active entities. To confirm a supplier, pair the entity record with a recent sign of activity (a permit, a contract award, a current website) and a trade license where one applies.

Prospecting Alabama's new and expanding plants

The Commerce report is a ready-made trigger list. A company announcing a new plant or an expansion will spend on construction, equipment, hiring, training and services over the next one to three years, and the report gives you its name, county, NAICS code and size of commitment.

Illustrative example. The company, rates and results are fictional, to show the method.

Tennessee Valley Commissioning (tvcommissioning.example) validates equipment and utilities for new manufacturing lines. It works from the 2025 report:

• Projects in Limestone and Madison counties: 16 + 11 = 27.
• It keeps only manufacturing NAICS codes (31 to 33) with a stated investment of $10 million or more: 10 (seven in Limestone, three in Madison).
• It checks each company's own news and drops any line already running, leaving, say, 7 live projects.
• Winning two would fill most of a year for a five-person team.

It contacts the plant manager or project engineering lead named in local announcements, not corporate procurement, and times its first email to the groundbreaking or the first hiring push. Sorting live projects from finished ones and finding the right engineer is the account research Bebop does for each company on the list.

Subject: Commissioning for [Company]'s [city] line

Hi [first name],

Congratulations on the [city] expansion. With [number] jobs to fill and equipment arriving, commissioning and validation usually become the critical path a few months before start of production.

We commission and validate new lines across North Alabama and can start with a one-day review of your equipment schedule. Would that be useful before the next milestone?

[Your name], Tennessee Valley Commissioning

Next step: for the state's biggest employers by sector, read manufacturing companies in Alabama.