Companies in San Francisco: the headquarters, the city's own business register and 33,378 workplaces

This page is for anyone looking for companies in San Francisco: job seekers, founders looking for partners, researchers and B2B sellers working the city's tech and finance accounts. It lists the biggest headquarters from their filings, shows the full market from Census data, explains the city's own business register, and ends with a worked example in the city's largest specialty.

The biggest companies headquartered in San Francisco

The 15 largest SEC-registered public companies whose latest 10-K gives a San Francisco principal executive office, by revenue in that filing:

Wells Fargo's figure is total revenue net of interest expense. Pinterest ($4.22 billion), Instacart's parent Maplebear ($3.74 billion), SoFi ($3.61 billion of net revenue) and Sunrun ($2.96 billion) come next. Together the top 15 reported $310.87 billion.

The companies split into three groups. Finance and payments (Wells Fargo, Visa, Affirm). Platforms and software (Uber, Salesforce, DoorDash, Airbnb, Autodesk, Atlassian, Lyft, Twilio). And older consumer brands (Gap, Williams-Sonoma, Levi Strauss). Most of their employees work elsewhere: Uber, for one, reports that about 20,300 of its 34,000 are outside the US.

Lists of "San Francisco companies" often include names whose filings now say otherwise. PG&E's 10-K gives Oakland, and McKesson, Chevron and Charles Schwab moved their headquarters to Texas, where they appear on our businesses in Texas page. Large private companies don't file 10-Ks, so they aren't ranked here.

How many businesses are in San Francisco

The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) treats San Francisco as a single county, coextensive with the city:

In bands: 28,277 establishments with 1 to 19 employees, 3,949 with 20 to 99 and 1,152 with 100 or more. CBP counts locations with paid employees across all sectors, excludes the self-employed and government, and measures employment in the pay period including March 12, 2023. Across the US, CBP average pay is $68,342 (our calculation from the state files); San Francisco's is 2.2 times that, which changes the math on anything sold per employee.

What San Francisco businesses do

Average pay and employees per site are our calculations from CBP payroll and counts. The information sector, which includes software publishers and data processing and hosting, has only 1,945 establishments but 127,842 jobs. Software publishers alone had 805 establishments, 54,393 employees and an average pay of $240,617. Finance pays the most per head, at $248,878.

San Francisco's own business register

Businesses operating in San Francisco register with the Office of the Treasurer and Tax Collector, which publishes the register on DataSF as Registered Business Locations. Each row is one location of a registered business, with ownership name, trading name, address, start date, neighborhood, supervisor district and, since a July 2026 change following Proposition M, the business's self-reported NAICS code. On 29 October 2026 it held 102,632 locations in San Francisco with no end date and not administratively closed.

That's three times the Census count because the register includes businesses with no employees, sole proprietors and some that have stopped trading without closing their registration. It's the best free starting list in the city: filter by NAICS code and neighborhood, then check each business before you contact it.

For statewide context, see businesses in California; for the tech sector in depth, tech companies in San Francisco.

Prospecting San Francisco software companies

San Francisco's mid-size software companies sell to larger businesses, and those buyers ask for security evidence before they sign: questionnaires, penetration tests and audit reports. Companies of 20 to 249 people often have no one whose full-time job is to produce it.

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

Fog City Assurance (fogcityassurance.example) gets software companies ready for their first SOC 2 audit.

• Software publishers in San Francisco with 20 to 249 employees: 76 + 59 + 60 = 195.
• Data processing and hosting establishments add 45 + 26 + 31 = 102, and computer systems design firms 119 + 49 + 54 = 222, for 519 in all.
• It assumes half sell to enterprises and don't yet have a report: about 260 companies.
• Winning 6% in a year would mean about 15 engagements.

It targets the head of engineering or the first security hire, and times outreach to a funding round or a first large enterprise deal, which is when the questionnaire arrives. Spotting those moments across 260 companies takes research on each; Bebop can find them and explain why each one fits.

Subject: The security questionnaire from [enterprise customer]

Hi [first name],

Congratulations on [funding round / the deal with enterprise customer]. That's usually when the 300-question security review shows up, followed by a request for a SOC 2 report you don't have yet.

We get companies your size audit-ready in about 12 weeks, writing the policies and setting up the evidence collection so your engineers stay on the roadmap. Could I send the plan we'd use for a team of [headcount]?

[Your name], Fog City Assurance

Next step: see how to research accounts like these in how to find decision makers.