Companies in Orlando: the theme park employers, the timeshare headquarters and 77,951 businesses

This page is for people looking for companies in Orlando: job seekers, vendors to the resorts and hospitals, companies scouting Central Florida and B2B sellers building a territory. It groups the region's top employers by industry, lists the public companies headquartered in the metro with figures from their 10-Ks, counts every business by county, size and sector from the Census Bureau, and ends with how to check a company and prospect the market. The Census figures cover the Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford metro: Orange, Seminole, Osceola and Lake counties.

Orlando's top employers, by industry

The Orlando Economic Partnership, the region's economic development organization, publishes a Top 50 Employers list, last updated in October 2026. It covers the same four counties, excludes local government, nonprofit and retail operations, and builds its estimates from company contacts, PitchBook, the Orlando Business Journal, the Orlando Sentinel and its own research. Grouped by the activity the Partnership assigns:

The sums are ours, from the list's 292,992 jobs. Some figures may include workers in neighboring Brevard and Volusia counties, the Partnership notes. Leisure and hospitality is nearly half the total, and the second tier is health care, led by two systems with 70,600 people between them. Beyond those two groups the list gets small quickly: only four employers outside them (UCF, Lockheed Martin, Valencia College and Siemens Energy) have more than 3,000 people.

Where the jobs are differs by county. Orange County has the parks, the hospitals, UCF and the defense contractors. Seminole County's employers on the list are mostly offices: JPMorgan Chase, Deloitte Consulting and Liberty Mutual in Heathrow, and Bank of America, Verizon, Mitsubishi Power Americas and Addition Financial in Lake Mary. Osceola's include McLane's Kissimmee distribution operation and Jr. Davis Construction.

Public companies headquartered in Orlando

Eleven SEC-registered companies with more than $100 million of revenue give a principal executive office in the metro on the cover of their latest 10-K:

Revenue is as reported. Darden owned and operated 2,202 restaurants at the end of May 2026. The three timeshare companies reported $14.10 billion between them and employ more than 60,000 people worldwide: Hilton Grand Vacations more than 22,300, Marriott Vacations about 21,100 and Travel + Leisure 19,300. United Parks had about 3,300 full-time and 12,900 part-time and seasonal employees. The two REITs are tiny employers by comparison: Xenia had 42 employees and NNN 85.

The biggest names on the employer list don't appear here because their parents are elsewhere or don't file with the SEC: the Walt Disney Company's 10-K gives Burbank, California as its head office, Universal Orlando Resort is part of Comcast's theme parks segment, and the AdventHealth and Orlando Health systems don't file 10-Ks.

How many businesses are in Orlando

In bands: 67,699 establishments with 1 to 19 employees, 8,463 with 20 to 99 and 1,789 with 100 or more. The metro paid $68,944,914,000 in 2023, an average of $55,921 a year, and its establishments average 15.8 employees; they are 0.93% of the 8,361,342 in the US. County Business Patterns (CBP) counts each business location with a payroll separately, so a chain with 30 Orlando restaurants counts 30 times, and it leaves out owners who work alone.

What Orlando businesses do

Average pay is our calculation from CBP payroll; the health care totals carry the Census Bureau's moderate-noise flag. The 26 amusement and theme parks (NAICS 713110) employ 57,473 people at an average of $30,535, and the 515 hotels and motels employ 54,605. Arts, entertainment and recreation averages 51.6 employees per establishment, three times the metro average, because a few parks are so large.

Checking an Orlando company

Florida's DBPR search is particularly useful here because it has a hotels and restaurants search and publishes food and lodging inspections, so you can confirm that a hotel or restaurant you're about to deal with is licensed and see its inspection record. For any contractor, check the license there as well as the company's status with the Division of Corporations.

Prospecting Orlando's hotels and resorts

Orlando's hospitality buyers come in two sizes. The parks and the largest resorts buy centrally, often through a corporate parent elsewhere; the hotels below them, many run by management companies, give property-level leaders real budgets for engineering, food and beverage and housekeeping.

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

Sunrail Chiller Services (sunrailchiller.example) retrofits cooling plants in large hotels to cut energy use.

• Hotels and motels in the metro with 250 or more employees: 13 + 20 + 14 = 47.
• It assumes 60% still run chillers more than 15 years old: about 28 prospects.
• Four retrofits a year at an average of $350,000 would be $1.4 million of annual revenue.
• It targets the director of engineering and the general manager, and times outreach to budget season in late summer and to the slower weeks after peak periods, when work can be scheduled.

Knowing which of 47 hotels are owned by a REIT, run by a management company or operated by a brand changes who signs; Bebop researches each property and finds the right contacts.

Subject: Cooling costs at [Resort] this summer

Hi [first name],

For most resorts your size, the chiller plant is the biggest single line on the summer electric bill, and the oldest equipment uses the most.

We retrofit hotel cooling plants in phases, so guest rooms never go without air conditioning, and we share the before-and-after meter readings. Could I send you the results from a 500-room property in Orange County?

[Your name], Sunrail Chiller Services

Next step: compare the region with the rest of the state in the largest employers in Florida.