Companies in Memphis: FedEx's hometown, its top employers and 26,131 businesses in three states

This page is for people looking for companies in Memphis: job seekers, shippers and suppliers, companies thinking of moving a distribution center here, and B2B sellers sizing the market. It starts with who employs the most people, then the public companies headquartered in the metro, the freight economy in the Census data, the business count across the metro's three states, and the records for checking a company. The Census figures cover the Memphis, TN-MS-AR metro: five Mississippi counties, three Tennessee counties and Crittenden County, Arkansas.

Memphis's largest employers

The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TNECD), the state's economic development agency, publishes a profile of each county with its top employers. For Shelby County, last updated 8 July 2026:

The figures are estimates, many of them rounded, and the profile doesn't say when each was collected. Three of the ten are health systems or hospitals, three are governments or school systems, one is a university and two are logistics companies. Smith & Nephew, the medical device maker, fits what EDGE, the city and county's economic development agency, calls a center of excellence for medical device manufacturing. FedEx and its 30,000 aren't the whole freight story: the Census count below shows tens of thousands more at warehouses, trucking firms and distribution centers, many of them on the Mississippi side.

Public companies headquartered in Memphis

Nine SEC-registered companies give a principal executive office in the metro on the cover of their latest 10-K:

Revenue is as reported. First Horizon's is net interest income ($2.62 billion) plus noninterest income ($0.80 billion). FedEx completed the spin-off of FedEx Freight on 1 June 2026, so Freight's revenue for the year to May 2026 is also inside FedEx's figure; without it, the nine reported about $153.9 billion. FedEx's headcount is for its Federal Express segment, which runs the express and ground networks. International Paper's sales rose from $15.84 billion in 2024 after it completed the acquisition of DS Smith, and AutoZone's latest 10-K, for the year to 29 August 2026, was filed on 26 October.

America's distribution center, in numbers

Average pay is our calculation from County Business Patterns (CBP) payroll. Transportation and warehousing sites average 47.4 employees, more than twice the metro average. Within it, 260 warehousing and storage establishments employ 27,780 people, and 62 of them have 100 or more employees (39 with 100 to 249, 13 with 250 to 499, 5 with 500 to 999 and 5 with 1,000 or more). The 323 courier and express delivery establishments, FedEx's industry, have an employee total the Census Bureau flags as high-noise, so it isn't reported here. The 464 management-of-companies establishments, the head and regional offices, pay $112,630 on average.

How many businesses are in Memphis

In bands: 20,985 establishments with 1 to 19 employees, 4,224 with 20 to 99 and 922 with 100 or more. Shelby County has 74.1% of the establishments and 79.4% of the jobs; Benton County, Mississippi, the ninth county, has 64 establishments. CBP counts locations with paid employees, not companies, excludes the self-employed and measures employment in the pay period including March 12, 2023. For the trucking side of the market, see trucking companies in Memphis.

Checking a Memphis company

The EDGE database is the unusual one. A company that receives a PILOT or another local incentive is usually building, expanding or relocating, so the database doubles as a list of businesses about to spend.

Prospecting Memphis companies

Memphis rewards sellers who understand freight. The large buyers are FedEx, the distribution centers in Shelby and DeSoto counties, the health systems on the employer list and the corporate offices of the nine public companies. Distribution centers buy on throughput and labor: anything that moves more cartons per hour or cuts overtime gets a hearing, especially before peak season.

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

Bluff City Dock (bluffcitydock.example) sells dock appointment scheduling software to warehouses.

• Warehousing and storage establishments with 100 or more employees in the metro: 62.
• It adds wholesale distribution sites with their own docks, assuming 40 more qualify: about 100 targets.
• At $24,000 a site a year and a 10% win rate in the first year, that's 10 sites and $240,000 of annual revenue.
• It targets the general manager and the transportation or inbound manager at each site, and starts in late spring, when operators plan for the fourth-quarter peak.

The hard part is working out which of those sites run their own dock schedule and which follow a customer's or a parent company's system; Bebop researches each account and explains why it fits.

Subject: Trailer wait times at [Site]

Hi [first name],

Before peak, most Memphis distribution centers we talk to have the same problem: carriers arrive in clusters, doors sit idle in the afternoon, and detention charges pile up.

We schedule dock appointments from your inbound forecast and give carriers a self-service booking link, and we're running at sites with 100 to 500 people. Could I show you what that did to wait times at a site your size before this year's peak?

[Your name], Bluff City Dock

Next step: see how the biggest company in town is organized in FedEx employees.