Companies in Cleveland: 51,450 businesses, two health systems at the top and a deep bench of industrial headquarters

This page is for anyone looking for Cleveland companies: to hire one, work for one, research the region or sell to it. It covers the Census count for the six-county metro, the employers the City of Cleveland lists as its largest, what the region's businesses do, the 15 biggest headquarters from their filings, local sources for checking a company, and a worked example in outpatient health care.

How many businesses are in Cleveland

In bands, 42,693 establishments have 1 to 19 employees, 7,298 have 20 to 99 and 1,459 have 100 or more. County Business Patterns counts every location with a payroll, so a hospital system's clinics each count separately, and it leaves out the self-employed. The figures are for 2023.

The metro is the Census Bureau's six-county Cleveland area; Akron and Canton are separate metros.

Cleveland's largest employers

The City of Cleveland's Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for 2025 lists the largest employers headquartered in the city, ranked by full-time equivalent employees as of June 30, 2025, from Crain's Cleveland Business's Book of Lists of the largest Cuyahoga County employers:

Health care dominates: four of the ten are hospital systems, with 92,888 full-time equivalents between them. Cleveland Clinic has grown by 20,212 since 2016. Two companies make the list: Sherwin-Williams, which grew from 3,759 to 6,711 since 2016, and KeyCorp. Case Western Reserve University, ninth in 2016, has dropped off.

What Cleveland businesses do

Average pay is our calculation. Health care has the most jobs, about one in five, and manufacturing the second most, at plants averaging 42 employees. The 393 corporate and regional offices employing 35,894 people are the headquarters jobs behind the next table.

The largest companies headquartered in Cleveland

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

KeyCorp's figure is its taxable-equivalent revenue, net interest income plus noninterest income, not gross interest income. Materion ($1.79 billion), Park-Ohio ($1.60 billion) and Sotera Health ($1.16 billion) come next. Paint and coatings (Sherwin-Williams, RPM), motion control and industrial parts (Parker-Hannifin, TransDigm, Applied Industrial, Lincoln Electric, Nordson) and steel (Cleveland-Cliffs) make up most of the list.

Two names often listed as Cleveland companies are missing. Eaton's 10-K gives Dublin, Ireland as its principal executive office, though it reported $27.45 billion in 2025, and Victory Capital's latest 10-K gives San Antonio, Texas. Companies in Akron and elsewhere in Northeast Ohio fall outside the six-county metro.

Finding and checking a Cleveland company

To vet a supplier, confirm the entity is active with the Ohio Secretary of State, check any state license its trade needs, and for health care vendors ask about the credentialing the health systems require before they let a vendor on site.

Prospecting Cleveland's outpatient market

With two health systems employing 79,354 full-time equivalents between them, much of Cleveland's health care buying is centralized. The independent outpatient centers around them are a different market, small enough to decide locally.

Illustrative example. The company, rates and results are fictional; the counts are from County Business Patterns.

Lakeshore Medical Courier (lakeshorecourier.example) runs scheduled specimen, supply and records pickups for clinics.

1. Outpatient care centers (NAICS 6214) in Cuyahoga County with 10 to 99 employees: 62 + 37 + 12 = 111.
2. Lake County adds 16 + 6 + 3 = 25, for 136 centers. (Lorain's 50-to-99 count isn't published by the Census Bureau, so it's left out.)
3. It assumes 40% are independent or physician-owned rather than run by a health system: about 54 centers that choose their own courier.
4. Signing 10 of them on daily routes fills one more van.

It targets practice administrators and operations managers, and times outreach to new center openings and lab contract changes. Separating the independent centers from health-system sites, and finding the administrator at each, is the research Bebop does for each account.

Subject: Same-day specimen pickups for [Center]

Hi [first name],

Outpatient centers your size around Cleveland often lose a day on results because the last lab pickup comes before the last patient leaves.

We run scheduled and on-call medical courier routes across Cuyahoga and Lake counties, with chain-of-custody tracking for every specimen. Could I send a route proposal with a late-afternoon pickup for [address]?

[Your name], Lakeshore Medical Courier

Next step: go deeper on the region's plants with manufacturing companies in Cleveland.