Businesses in Missouri: 151,475 workplaces and the 26 biggest public headquarters, metro by metro

This page is for anyone who needs to find or size businesses across Missouri: suppliers and partners, job seekers, analysts and B2B sellers deciding how to split the state between St. Louis, Kansas City and everywhere else. It covers how many businesses there are and where, the largest public headquarters, where the biggest workplaces are, the state's business records, and a worked example for selling to hospitals.

How many businesses are in Missouri

The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) counts locations with paid employees. For Missouri in 2023:

In bands: 128,017 establishments (84.5%) have 1 to 19 employees, 19,749 have 20 to 99 and 3,709 have 100 or more. CBP counts each location separately, leaves out the self-employed and government, and measures employment in the pay period including March 12, 2023.

St. Louis city is an independent city, separate from St. Louis County, and its workplaces are the largest of the eight in the table, at 23.1 employees each. Average pay is our calculation from CBP payroll.

The biggest companies headquartered in Missouri

Ranked by revenue in each company's latest annual report on Form 10-K, with the head office from its cover page:

For UMB, Commerce and Central Bancompany, revenue is net interest income plus noninterest income; Stifel reports net revenues after interest expense ($6.35 billion before it). The largest workforces are at O'Reilly (92,923 team members in January 2026), Centene (about 61,100) and Post Holdings (13,180). Evergy's 10-K lists head offices in both Kansas City and Topeka for its operating companies; the parent's is Kansas City.

By region, the 16 St. Louis-area companies reported $295.13 billion, the six in the Kansas City area $18.13 billion and the four outstate companies $25.73 billion. Outstate Missouri punches above its weight: O'Reilly runs its parts network from Springfield, Jack Henry builds banking software in Monett, EquipmentShare rents construction equipment from Columbia, and Central Bancompany banks from Jefferson City.

Bunge Global would rank second with $70.33 billion of 2025 revenue. Its 10-K gives Chesterfield as its corporate headquarters, co-located with its North American operations, but it's a Swiss company and gives Geneva as its registered and principal executive office, so it isn't ranked. For the metro lists, see the largest companies in St. Louis and companies in Kansas City.

Where the biggest workplaces are

Missouri doesn't publish a ranked statewide employer list we could open, and the regional lists for St. Louis and Kansas City are covered on their own pages. CBP shows where the 165 private workplaces with 1,000 or more employees are:

Another 21 large establishments are recorded statewide rather than in one county. Hospitals account for 44 of the 165: Missouri's 181 hospital establishments employ 147,020 people, a figure the Census Bureau flags as moderately affected by its confidentiality noise. In Springfield, the Ozarks Regional Economic Partnership's major employers page names CoxHealth, Mercy Springfield Communities, O'Reilly Automotive, Bass Pro Shops, Jack Henry, Prime Inc. and Missouri State University among the region's largest, without headcounts.

What Missouri businesses do

The management-of-companies line is the headquarters economy in Census form: 1,356 corporate and regional head offices employing 86,543 people at average pay of $123,094, 12 of them with 1,000 or more staff. Finance and insurance has 19 workplaces of 1,000 or more and pays $100,161 on average, the result of Centene, RGA, Stifel and the Kansas City banks. For plants and fleets, see manufacturing companies in Missouri and trucking companies in Missouri.

How to look up a Missouri business

Missouri cities and counties issue their own business licenses, so check with the city where the business operates as well as the state.

Prospecting Missouri's hospitals

Hospitals are Missouri's largest group of big workplaces outside St. Louis and Kansas City as well as inside them, and they buy clinical services through value analysis committees and department heads rather than one central buyer.

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

Gateway Sterile Services (gatewaysterile.example) audits and trains hospital sterile processing departments and wants Missouri hospitals with 250 or more employees.

• Hospital establishments with 250 to 499 employees: 35; 500 to 999: 19; 1,000 or more: 44. That's 98 hospitals.
• Many belong to the same systems, so it plans on about 35 system-level decisions plus local sign-off at each site.
• Eight hospital contracts a year at $45,000 each would be $360,000.

It targets the director of perioperative services and the sterile processing manager, and times outreach to the months after an accreditation survey or an infection-control finding. Mapping which of 98 hospitals belong to which system, and who runs sterile processing at each, is the research Bebop does for each account.

Subject: Instrument reprocessing at [Hospital]

Hi [first name],

Surgical delays from missing or incomplete instrument trays usually trace back to a few steps in sterile processing, and they're fixable without new equipment.

We audit and train sterile processing teams at hospitals across Missouri, on site and around your OR schedule. Could I send the audit checklist we use, so you can see where [Hospital] stands before your next survey?

[Your name], Gateway Sterile Services

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