Businesses in Arizona: 162,845 workplaces, two-thirds of them in Maricopa County, and the top 15 headquarters

This page is for people who need to find or size Arizona businesses: companies looking for suppliers or partners, job seekers, researchers and B2B sellers deciding how to split the state into territories. It gives the Census counts, the counties, the 15 biggest headquarters, the sectors where Arizona differs from the rest of the country and a worked example on Phoenix's large office operations.

Arizona businesses in numbers

The first seven rows are County Business Patterns (CBP) 2023, which counts each business location with a payroll, measures employment in the pay period including March 12 and leaves out the self-employed. The last two are from the Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics, our sum of the 2025 monthly figures (not seasonally adjusted). Applications were 76,637 in 2019, so the flow of new business ideas has grown 77% in six years, and about 27% of them are the kind the Census Bureau expects to hire.

In bands: 137,658 establishments with 1 to 19 employees, 20,939 with 20 to 99 and 4,248 with 100 or more. More than 55% have fewer than five employees, and real estate alone accounts for 10,281 of those: the state has 12,596 real estate establishments averaging 4.8 people each.

Maricopa County is most of the market

Average pay is our calculation from CBP payroll. Arizona has only 15 counties, and Maricopa and Pima together hold 80.6% of establishments. For most sellers that means one metro territory (Phoenix) plus a second (Tucson), with the rest of the state worked by industry rather than geography.

The 15 largest companies headquartered in Arizona

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

First Solar ($5.22 billion), Carlisle ($5.02 billion), Gen Digital, GoDaddy, Microchip Technology and Opendoor come next. Meritage's figure is its homebuilding closing revenue. Western Alliance Bancorporation, the Phoenix bank holding company, had $3.54 billion of net interest and noninterest income (our sum from its 10-K). Several of Arizona's best-known employers aren't here because they're private or owned from elsewhere, and big local operations such as TSMC's and Intel's chip plants belong to companies headquartered outside the state; see semiconductor companies in Arizona for that cluster.

What Arizona businesses do

Shares and average pay are our calculations from CBP. Against the national CBP totals, Arizona leans toward construction (7.2% of jobs against 5.5%) and finance and insurance (6.7% against 5.0%), and away from manufacturing (6.0% against 8.8%). What manufacturing it has pays well, $86,957 on average, because so much of it is semiconductors: 40 chip-making establishments employ 12,141 people at an average of $142,141. The Census Bureau marks the mining and chip employment figures as moderately affected by the noise it adds for confidentiality.

The large back-office sites

Arizona's finance and insurance sector is unusual in shape. Most of its 10,000 establishments are small agencies and branches, but 33 sites statewide have 1,000 or more employees, and in Maricopa County alone 118 finance and insurance establishments have 250 or more (52 with 250 to 499, 38 with 500 to 999 and 28 with 1,000 or more). These are the operations, servicing and contact centers that banks, card issuers and insurers run in Phoenix, Tempe and Chandler. Administrative and support services, which includes outsourced call centers, adds 29 statewide sites of 1,000 or more.

For a seller, those few hundred sites are a market of their own: each has a site leader, facilities, security, HR and IT teams with local budgets, and they hire constantly.

How to look up an Arizona business

To vet a supplier, check its entity is active with the Corporation Commission, confirm any license its trade needs (contractors, for example, are licensed separately by the state), and ask for references from Arizona customers your size.

Prospecting Phoenix's large operations centers

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

Desert Workplace Health (desertworkplacehealth.example) runs on-site and near-site clinics for employers with big single-site workforces. It starts from the Maricopa County figures:

• Finance and insurance establishments with 250 or more employees: 52 + 38 + 28 = 118.
• Administrative and support establishments with 250 or more (call centers, staffing, processing): 83 + 25 + 5 = 113.
• It assumes 30% are self-insured for health benefits and big enough to fund a clinic: about 70 sites.
• Signing five a year at an average of $400,000 in annual fees would be $2 million of new recurring revenue.

It targets the site leader and the HR or benefits director at each location, not the parent's national benefits team alone, because the case rests on local absence and turnover. Matching each Census-sized site to a named employer and the person who runs it is the research Bebop does for every account on the list.

Subject: Sick days at [Company]'s [city] site

Hi [first name],

Large service centers in the Valley tend to lose more hours to short absences and urgent-care visits than any other site in the company, and it shows up in schedule adherence.

We run on-site clinics for [industry] operations of 500 to 3,000 people, open on shift hours, and we report visits and time saved to HR each month. Would a 20-minute look at how it might work for your [city] floor be useful?

[Your name], Desert Workplace Health

Next step: for Arizona's biggest growth industry in detail, read semiconductor companies in Arizona.