The largest employers in Portland, Oregon: the region's top 30 and the chip and health clusters behind them

This page is for job seekers, economic developers, reporters and B2B sellers who want to know who employs the most people in Portland, Oregon and its metro area across the Columbia River in Clark County, Washington. It uses the region's own published lists, explains what each counts and leaves out, and adds federal job counts.

Portland's largest employers: the regional list

Greater Portland Inc. (GPI), the economic development partnership for the Portland-Vancouver region, publishes a list of the region's major employers, compiled by its staff in March 2026. The top 30 by regional employees:

"Headquartered here" follows GPI's own marking. GPI's full list runs to 100 employers, down to about 500 regional employees, and includes ASML and Tokyo Electron America (1,200 each), Tektronix, HP and TSMC Washington (1,000 each), NW Natural (950), nLight (650), ZoomInfo (557) and KinderCare (500).

How to read the list

GPI is open about the limits, and they matter if you quote it:

1. It's a traded-sector list. It leaves out school systems, most retailers and federal, state and local governments, so the region's school districts, counties and cities don't appear. Public universities and the Bonneville Power Administration do.
2. The counts are estimates from mixed sources. GPI compiled them from the Portland Business Journal, The Oregonian and other news outlets, CoStar, LinkedIn, local governments, company websites, Gazelle.ai and its own research, and says they may come from different dates and may include employees outside the region.
3. "Regionwide" employers are spread out. Providence, Amazon and Wells Fargo are counted across many sites rather than one campus.

What the list shows

Two clusters dominate. GPI classes 17 employers in its top 100 as health care, with 83,864 regional employees between them, led by OHSU, Providence, Legacy, Kaiser Permanente and PeaceHealth. Sixteen are in computers and electronics, with 34,093, and Intel alone accounts for 17,600 of those. The rest include chip equipment makers such as Lam Research, ASML and Tokyo Electron, chipmakers such as TSMC Washington, ON Semiconductor and Microchip, and test and design firms such as Tektronix and Siemens EDA; nine of the 16 are in Washington County.

The federal data shows the same geography. In the Census Bureau's 2023 County Business Patterns, the metro had 62 business establishments with 1,000 or more employees: 26 in Multnomah County, 24 in Washington County, 7 in Clark County and 4 in Clackamas County. Washington County's manufacturing sector alone had 701 establishments with 46,457 employees, five of them with 1,000 or more.

Nike, the region's best-known headquarters, is seventh. Its 10-K says about 10,600 people work at its headquarters site near Beaverton, close to GPI's 10,500, out of about 73,000 worldwide. For the companies ranked by revenue, see the largest companies in Portland.

Clark County's largest employers

The Columbia River Economic Development Council (CREDC), the economic development group for Clark County, Washington, publishes its own top employers list from a 2024 document. Unlike GPI's, it includes school districts and local governments:

The two lists disagree in places because they're from different years: CREDC's 2024 document counts 1,374 ZoomInfo employees in Clark County, while GPI's 2026 list counts 557, and ZoomInfo's 10-K reports a cut of about 6% of its workforce in 2025.

Government's share

Government is the piece GPI leaves out. In the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the seven-county metro averaged 1,208,981 covered jobs in 2025:

Local government, which includes public school districts, employs more people in the metro than the top five employers on GPI's list combined.

Selling to Portland's largest employers

Illustrative example. The seller and its figures are fictional; the employer figures are from GPI's list.

Tualatin Talent (tualatintalent.example) recruits technicians and engineers for semiconductor fabs and toolmakers and wants the chip employers on GPI's list.

• GPI's computers and electronics category has 16 employers with 34,093 regional employees.
• If annual turnover in technical roles is about 10%, that's roughly 3,400 hires a year across the 16.
• Filling 1% of them, 34 placements, at a 20% fee on an $85,000 salary earns about $578,000 a year.
• It starts with the talent acquisition leads at the equipment makers (Lam Research, ASML, Tokyo Electron) before approaching Intel.

Bebop can find the recruiting and engineering leaders at each of the 16 and draft outreach that reflects what each is hiring for now.

Subject: Field service engineers for [Company]'s Hillsboro team

Hi [first name],

I saw [Company] has [number] open field service and process roles around Hillsboro. Most toolmakers we work with are competing with the same handful of fabs for the same people.

We place equipment technicians and engineers in Washington County, with candidates who already hold cleanroom experience, and we only charge on start. Would three anonymized profiles for your current openings be useful this week?

[Your name], Tualatin Talent

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