Companies in Huntsville: Redstone Arsenal, the defense contractors and 10,924 businesses

This page is for people looking for companies in Huntsville, Alabama: engineers and job seekers, small businesses looking for prime contractors to team with, suppliers, and B2B sellers sizing the market. It starts with the Chamber's ranking of the largest employers, then the contractor economy in the Census data, the public companies based here, the business count, and where to check a company. The Census figures cover the Huntsville metro: Madison and Limestone counties.

Huntsville's leading employers

The Huntsville/Madison County Chamber publishes a Leading Employers list for Huntsville and Madison County, most recently in July 2026:

Crestwood Medical Center (1,501), Redstone Federal Credit Union (1,309), Alabama A&M University (1,139) and Amazon and Sanmina (1,100 each) come next. The 12 employers after Redstone total 43,850 people, fewer than the arsenal alone.

The longer list shows how the contractor market is built. Seventeen of the 50 are research and development firms, from national companies (Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Leidos, SAIC, Lockheed Martin, KBR, Raytheon, Parsons) to smaller firms such as i3, Astrion, COLSA, Torch Technologies, Intuitive Research and Technology and MTSI, each with 500 to 1,000 local employees. The Chamber's separate industrial list puts Mazda Toyota first among private employers.

An engineering market, in numbers

Average pay is our calculation from County Business Patterns (CBP) payroll; computer systems design, aerospace and health care carry the Census Bureau's moderate-noise flag. Professional services employ 22.6% of the metro's private workforce. Engineering firms average 60.9 employees and R&D labs 81.1, far above the 20.1 for all businesses. Manufacturing is smaller but large-scale: 378 establishments averaging 80.9 employees. CBP doesn't count federal employees, so Redstone's own workforce isn't in these figures.

Public companies headquartered in Huntsville

Two SEC-registered companies with revenue in a 10-K give a principal executive office in the metro:

Revenue is as reported. ADTRAN's 10-K counts 3,338 employees, 2,176 of them in international subsidiaries; the Chamber's list counts 674 at ADTRAN in Huntsville. Octave Intelligence, a software company separated from Hexagon, gives Madison as its address and registered its shares with the SEC in 2026; it has filed 10-Qs but no 10-K yet, and the Chamber counts 755 employees. The big contractors on the employer list are headquartered elsewhere.

How many businesses are in Huntsville

In bands: 8,985 establishments with 1 to 19 employees, 1,576 with 20 to 99 and 363 with 100 or more. Madison County has 9,295 establishments and 191,024 employees; Limestone County has 1,629 and 28,343. CBP tallies workplaces rather than firms, so a contractor with offices in Cummings Research Park and at the arsenal gate counts twice; owner-only businesses aren't counted. For the aerospace side in more depth, see aerospace companies in Huntsville.

Checking a Huntsville company

For a defense contractor, USAspending is the most useful check: search by recipient or by place of performance in Madison County to see which agencies it works for and how its awards have changed.

Prospecting Huntsville contractors

Huntsville's buyers are contractors to the government, and their budgets follow the programs they win. The national primes buy through corporate procurement; the Huntsville-grown firms with 100 to 1,000 local employees often decide locally, and they hire constantly.

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

Monte Sano Talent (montesanotalent.example) recruits engineers who already hold security clearances.

• Engineering, computer systems design and R&D establishments with 20 to 249 employees: (52 + 20 + 26) + (36 + 15 + 23) + (20 + 14 + 19) = 225.
• It assumes half regularly hire cleared staff: about 112 prospects.
• At a fee of 25% on a $120,000 salary, 40 placements a year would be $1.2 million.
• It contacts engineering managers and talent acquisition leads, and times outreach to new contract awards, which show up on USAspending before the hiring starts.

Matching 225 firms to the programs they've just won, and to the people hiring for them, is the slow part; Bebop researches each account and finds the contacts.

Subject: Cleared engineers for [program or contract]

Hi [first name],

Congratulations on the [contract] award. Most firms your size we work with in Cummings Research Park lose months finding engineers who already hold the clearance the work needs.

We recruit only cleared systems, software and test engineers in North Alabama, and we can usually send three screened candidates within two weeks. Would that help with the [program] ramp-up?

[Your name], Monte Sano Talent

Next step: see the national picture in the largest defense contractors.