The largest employers in NYC: the City itself, then a long tail no one ranks officially

This page is for job seekers, economic development and workforce staff, journalists and B2B sellers who want to know which organizations employ the most people in New York City's five boroughs. It uses only official counts: the City's own financial report, the employers' own published figures, and federal job and business data. It doesn't rank companies by revenue; for that, see the largest companies in New York City.

Why there's no official top-employers list

Most large cities publish a "principal employers" table in their annual financial report. New York doesn't, and the City Comptroller's report for fiscal 2025 explains why: other than the City of New York, no single employer accounts for more than 2% of the city's nonfarm jobs. With employment averaging about 4.82 million in 2025, every other employer has fewer than about 96,000 people in the city. Instead, the report publishes jobs by industry, which is the more useful view of the city's labor market.

Rankings you see elsewhere usually come from business-journal surveys of metro-area headcounts. They're useful, but they mix in suburban sites and systems that report one figure for New York, New Jersey and Long Island together.

The City of New York: 287,422 full-time employees

The City's workforce, by area of responsibility, at the end of fiscal 2025 (June 30, 2025):

The total rose 1.2% from 283,971 in fiscal 2024 but is still below the 300,446 of fiscal 2020. The education system alone, with 134,242 full-time staff, would be larger than any other employer in the city.

Other large employers with published headcounts

The MTA and Health + Hospitals figures are the organizations' own; the government totals are from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), which counts jobs by place of work. Health + Hospitals is a public benefit corporation, so its staff are counted in local government in the BLS data, not in the City's 287,422.

Where New York City's jobs are

The QCEW counts every job covered by unemployment insurance. For the five boroughs in 2025:

The BLS doesn't publish Staten Island's figures for professional services or information, so those two totals are slightly low. Health care and social assistance alone is 21.5% of all jobs in the city, more than finance, professional services and information combined.

The biggest workplaces are home care agencies

The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns counts private workplaces by size. In 2023 the five boroughs had 401 establishments with 1,000 or more employees: 235 in Manhattan, 83 in Brooklyn, 53 in Queens, 25 in the Bronx and 5 on Staten Island. At least 156 of the 401 were in health care and social assistance, and most of those weren't hospitals:

Employee counts are for all establishments in each industry, from the county files added together. Brooklyn alone had 32 home health care establishments and 21 elderly and disability service establishments with 1,000 or more employees each. Home care is delivered in clients' homes, but CBP counts the aides at the agency location that employs them, which is how one office can report thousands of employees. CBP counts private employers only; government workplaces aren't in these figures.

Selling to New York's largest employers

Each type of employer buys differently:

1. The City and its agencies buy through PASSPort, the Mayor's Office of Contract Services procurement portal. Browsing opportunities is open to anyone, but responding to a solicitation needs a PASSPort account, so enroll before you need it.
2. The MTA and Health + Hospitals run their own procurement, with posted solicitations and vendor registration separate from the City's.
3. Home care agencies and hospitals are private or nonprofit and run their own purchasing. Products that help them recruit and keep aides or get billing right usually get the quickest hearing.

Illustrative example. The company, prices and results are fictional; the employer figures are from the tables above.

Kingsbridge Scheduling (kingsbridge.example) sells caregiver scheduling and electronic visit verification software, priced per active aide per month, and targets the largest home care agencies.

• Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx have 47 home health care establishments with 1,000 or more employees (32 + 11 + 4).
• If it wins five agencies averaging 2,000 aides at $6 per aide per month, that's 10,000 aides and $720,000 a year.
• The buyer is the agency's chief operating officer, with the director of patient services and the billing lead in the room, because scheduling errors become Medicaid billing errors.

Bebop can find the operations and billing leaders at home care agencies by borough and size and explain why each one fits.

Subject: Missed visits at [Agency]

Hi [first name],

With more than a thousand aides, the hardest week is usually the one where three call out on the same morning and the replacements don't show up in the visit verification data until billing finds them.

We run scheduling and visit verification for New York home care agencies of your size, with rematching that fills open shifts from your own aide pool. Would a 20-minute look at last month's missed-visit report be worth it?

[Your name], Kingsbridge Scheduling

Next step: see how the city's 235,767 business establishments break down by borough and size in businesses in New York City.