Businesses in Texas: 670,878 workplaces, 3.5 million franchise taxpayers and the biggest headquarters by metro

This page is for anyone who needs to find or size Texas businesses: buyers looking for suppliers, job seekers, analysts and B2B sellers deciding which of the state's very different metros to work. It covers the three ways to count Texas businesses, the 20 biggest headquarters by metro, the counties and sectors, the state records you can search or download, and a worked example in the Permian Basin.

Three ways to count Texas businesses

The Census figure counts locations with a payroll; the Comptroller's counts legal entities set up for the state franchise tax, including holding companies, single-owner LLCs and out-of-state companies registered in Texas, so it's five times larger. For sizing a market, use the Census figure. For building a list of names, use the Comptroller's file.

More of the Census detail for Texas:

In bands: 565,155 establishments with 1 to 19 employees, 87,664 with 20 to 99 and 18,059 with 100 or more. County Business Patterns covers all sectors, counts each location separately, excludes the self-employed and measures employment in the pay period including March 12, 2023.

The 20 biggest companies headquartered in Texas

Ranked by revenue in each company's latest 10-K, with the headquarters city from its cover page:

ExxonMobil's 2025 10-K was filed by Exxon Mobil Corporation; the listed parent now reports to the SEC as ExxonMobil Holdings Corp, incorporated in Texas. Plains GP Holdings, which consolidates Plains All American and reports the same revenue, is left out to avoid counting it twice. Valero's revenue includes excise taxes, which it reports within revenue. NRG Energy ($30.71 billion), Quanta Services ($28.48 billion) and Southwest Airlines ($28.06 billion) come next.

Seven of Houston's nine are energy companies, from producers (ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips) to refiners, pipelines and oilfield services. Dallas-Fort Worth's are spread across health care distribution, telecoms, machinery, airlines and real estate. The Dallas Regional Chamber counts 24 Fortune 500 companies in Dallas-Fort Worth alone. For each metro, see companies in Houston, Dallas and Austin.

Where Texas businesses are

Texas has 254 counties, but the five largest (Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Travis and Bexar) hold 46.6% of all establishments. Dallas County has the biggest workplaces of the ten, at 23.2 employees per establishment; fast-growing suburban counties such as Fort Bend (12.0) and Williamson (13.6) are dominated by smaller businesses.

What Texas businesses do

Average pay is our calculation from CBP payroll. Mining and oil and gas pays the most of any sector, and most of its jobs are in services rather than production: support activities for mining employ 145,078 people at 4,682 establishments, against 41,550 at 1,994 oil and gas extraction establishments.

How to look up a Texas business

The open data file is the unusual one. Filter it by NAICS code and county and you have a starting list of every registered business in a segment, which you can then check against the account status search before you contact anyone.

Prospecting the Permian Basin

Midland and Ector counties are a market of their own. In Midland County, 828 of 6,096 establishments are in mining and oilfield services, and they employ 27,933 of the county's 100,915 workers: 27.7%, against 1.6% statewide. Most of them are service contractors rather than producers.

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

Basin Fleet Safety (basinfleetsafety.example) installs in-cab cameras and driver coaching for oilfield service fleets.

• Midland County oil and gas support establishments (NAICS 213112) with 20 to 249 employees: 79 + 52 + 29 = 160.
• Ector County (Odessa) adds 41 + 23 + 19 = 83, for 243 in all.
• It assumes 70% run their own truck fleets: about 170 companies' yards.
• At a 6% conversion rate in the first year, that's about 10 fleets.

It targets the HSE manager and the fleet or operations manager, and times outreach around insurance renewals and after a recordable incident. Finding which of 243 sites run their own fleets, and who owns safety there, is the research Bebop does for each account.

Subject: Fleet incidents at [Company]'s Midland yard

Hi [first name],

Driving is still the leading cause of serious incidents for most service crews in the basin, and it's the line your insurer looks at hardest at renewal.

We install cameras and run weekly driver coaching for Permian fleets of 20 to 200 trucks, with a monthly report you can hand to your carrier. Could I show you what the first 90 days looked like for a fleet your size?

[Your name], Basin Fleet Safety

Next step: go deeper on the state's biggest sector with oil and gas companies in Texas.