Companies in Baltimore: the hospital and university employers, 12 public headquarters and 68,827 businesses

This page is for people looking for companies in Baltimore: job seekers, suppliers, researchers, companies weighing a move and B2B sellers working the region. It covers the city's largest employers first, then the public companies headquartered across the metro, the Census count of every business by county, size and sector, and the state and local records for checking one. Baltimore City is its own county-level jurisdiction, separate from Baltimore County, which makes the city unusually easy to measure.

Baltimore's largest employers: hospitals and universities

The City of Baltimore's Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for fiscal 2025 lists principal employers in two groups. Government counts are for the first quarter of 2025; the private ranking comes from the Maryland Department of Commerce's Brief Economic Facts for Baltimore City (2023 to 2024 figures):

The ten private employers have 90,980 employees, 27.2% of city employment, and with government 50.4%. Eight of the ten are hospitals, health systems or universities; the report lists the University System of Maryland among them although it's a public system. Since 2016, Mercy's count has more than doubled, Johns Hopkins University's has fallen by 6,400 and Amazon has arrived, while St. Agnes HealthCare dropped out of the top ten.

Public companies headquartered in the Baltimore area

Twelve SEC-registered companies with more than $300 million of revenue give a principal executive office in the metro on the cover of their latest 10-K:

Revenue is as reported. Together they reported $56.66 billion, and Constellation 45% of it; its 10-K gives 1310 Point Street as its head office. Five are in the city itself, three in Hunt Valley in Baltimore County, two in Columbia in Howard County and two in Anne Arundel County. Medifast's revenue has fallen from $1.07 billion in 2023, and Under Armour reported 14,100 teammates worldwide at the end of its year to March 2026.

How many businesses are in Baltimore

The metro's establishments paid $85,671,778,000 in 2023, an average of $70,187 a year, and are 0.82% of the 8,361,342 in the US. Baltimore City has fewer businesses than Baltimore County or Anne Arundel but bigger ones: 24.4 employees per establishment, against 17.7 for the metro, and average pay of $77,696.

In bands: 57,582 establishments with 1 to 19 employees, 9,367 with 20 to 99 and 1,878 with 100 or more. County Business Patterns (CBP) counts locations with paid employees, not companies, excludes the self-employed and leaves out most government employers, which is why the state's 39,186 city jobs don't appear in it.

What Baltimore businesses do

Average pay divides CBP payroll by employees (our calculation). Two industries inside these sectors explain a lot: the metro's 25 general hospitals employ 66,104 people at an average of $87,133, and 2,511 computer systems design firms employ 39,237 at $125,952, among the highest-paid industries in the region. Private colleges and universities add 39,427 employees at 27 establishments.

Finding and checking a Baltimore company

For a contractor, check both the entity's standing in Business Express and its trade license. For larger employers, the state's county lists are useful for finding sites the city report doesn't cover, such as the big employers in Baltimore County and Anne Arundel.

Prospecting Baltimore's hospitals

The city's largest private buyers are health systems, and five of them (Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland Medical System, Mercy, MedStar and LifeBridge) account for 53,315 of the 90,980 private jobs on the city's list. They buy through system supply chain teams and value analysis committees, so a product usually needs a clinical champion at one hospital before it reaches a system contract.

Illustrative example. The company, prices and results are fictional; the hospital counts are from the Census data above.

Patapsco Instrument Tracking (patapscotrack.example) sells software that tracks surgical instrument trays through sterile processing.

• General hospitals in the metro: 25, of which 21 have 1,000 or more employees and 3 have 500 to 999.
• It targets the 24 with 500 or more, assuming each runs its own sterile processing department.
• At $75,000 a hospital a year, three hospitals would be $225,000; one system-wide contract could bring several more.
• It contacts the sterile processing manager and the perioperative services director, and times outreach to survey preparation and to new operating room openings.

Mapping which hospitals belong to which system, and who runs sterile processing at each, is the slow part; Bebop does that research for every account on the list.

Subject: Missing instruments in [Hospital]'s OR trays

Hi [first name],

When a tray reaches the OR short an instrument, the case waits and someone in sterile processing spends the next hour finding out where it went.

We track every tray and instrument from decontamination to the OR, and we're running at hospitals with 20 to 40 operating rooms. Could I show you what the first quarter looked like at a hospital your size, ahead of your next survey?

[Your name], Patapsco Instrument Tracking

Next step: build the target list with the list of hospitals in the US.