Manufacturers in Florida: thousands of small shops, a few very large plants

This report is for buyers sourcing a Florida machine shop or contract manufacturer, for researchers and job seekers, and for B2B sellers deciding which of the state's manufacturers are worth a call. It gives the federal count, where the plants are and what they make, the public companies based here, the regional groups that know the private ones, and how to vet and prospect them.

How many manufacturers Florida has

The US Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) counts every manufacturing location with paid employees (NAICS 31 to 33):

Ranking the Census state file ourselves, Florida is twelfth by manufacturing employees, and manufacturing is 3.6% of the jobs CBP counts in the state, against 8.8% across the US. Only Hawaii and the District of Columbia have a smaller share.

Other counts run higher. FloridaMakes, the state's Manufacturing Extension Partnership center, says Florida "has over 26,000 manufacturers", without naming a source, and commercial databases list more still. The gap is mostly definition. CBP counts establishments: physical locations with a payroll, so a company with plants in Tampa and Ocala counts twice, its head office is classified as a management office, and owner-only shops with no employees aren't counted at all. Employment is for the week of March 12, 2023.

A state of small shops

Grouped: 11,355 plants with 1 to 19 employees (79%), 2,225 with 20 to 99 and 761 with 100 or more. FloridaMakes puts the share with 20 or fewer employees at 80%, which matches. Buyers have plenty of small job shops, cabinet makers and print shops to choose from; sellers should expect most accounts to be owner-run.

Where Florida's plants are

County figures are from the CBP county file, which adds up to three fewer establishments than the state total; per-plant and pay figures are our calculation. Southeast Florida (Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach) has 33% of the state's plants but they're small. Orange and Brevard counties have fewer, larger and better-paid plants: Orange's 27 transportation equipment plants employ 8,500 people and Brevard's 56 computer and electronics plants 5,592, and the two counties hold 19 aerospace product plants between them. Pinellas and Hillsborough around Tampa Bay are the other dense cluster, with 70 electronics plants in Pinellas alone.

What Florida makes

Transportation equipment has the most jobs. The detailed codes show why: 220 boat builders employ 12,173 people, and four guided missile and space vehicle propulsion plants employ 7,609. Miscellaneous manufacturing, Florida's second-largest group by plant count, is mostly medical and dental: 424 dental laboratories and 75 surgical and medical instrument plants (7,275 employees) sit in it, alongside 463 sign makers.

Public manufacturers headquartered in Florida

SEC EDGAR lists 121 companies with a listed ticker, a manufacturing SIC code (2000 to 3999) and a Florida business address. The largest by revenue, each checked against the address of principal executive offices and the income statement in its latest annual report on Form 10-K:

We left out Icahn Enterprises (Sunny Isles Beach), which EDGAR codes as a refiner but whose 10-K describes "a diversified holding company", and Immersion (Aventura), which reports $1.71 billion of its $1.73 billion revenue from Barnes & Noble Education, a bookstore operator it consolidates. Revenue is company-wide, and many of these companies' plants are outside Florida.

Private manufacturers by name

Florida's state labor statistics site blocked our automated request, so the named private employers here come from one published county list. The Business Development Board of Palm Beach County's 2025 to 2026 Top Employers profile, with figures provided by the employers in January 2025, lists Pratt & Whitney (about 2,000 employees, West Palm Beach), Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky (1,052), Johnson Controls (741), L3Harris (500), Power Systems Mfg. (480, turbine parts, Jupiter) and ZimVie (400, dental implants) among its goods producers.

For the rest of the state, the regional manufacturers associations in the FloridaMakes network are the best starting point:

How to vet a Florida manufacturer

1. Search capabilities first. Connex Florida, run by FloridaMakes, is free to Florida manufacturers and searchable by certifications, equipment, materials, NAICS and SIC codes and small business designations.
2. Confirm the legal entity in the Florida Division of Corporations (Sunbiz) records, and that the name on the quote matches the registered company.
3. Read the safety record. Florida has no OSHA state plan, so private plants fall under federal OSHA, and its Establishment Search lists inspections and citations by company name, state and ZIP code. Check the address, because similar names are common.
4. Ask for the certificate your work needs (ISO 9001, AS9100 for aerospace, ISO 13485 for medical devices) and confirm it with the issuing registrar.

Selling to Florida manufacturers

The large plants are few and concentrated, so you can name most of them county by county. The small ones are the volume, and they buy when something changes: a new contract, a machine purchase, a bigger building, a first quality or engineering hire. Defense suppliers around Orlando and the Space Coast add a compliance angle, because prime contractors push cybersecurity and quality requirements down to subcontractors.

Worked example: an ERP consultancy for small plants

Illustrative example. The firm, rates and conversion assumptions are invented; the counts are Census data.

Palmetto Ledger Systems (palmettoledger.example) moves job shops from spreadsheets onto manufacturing ERP. Its sweet spot is plants with 10 to 49 employees in metalworking, machinery, plastics and miscellaneous manufacturing.

• Florida plants with 10 to 49 employees: 1,851 + 1,565 = 3,416.
• Fabricated metal, machinery, miscellaneous and plastics and rubber make up 2,093 + 871 + 1,726 + 469 = 5,159 of 14,341 plants (36%), so about 1,230 fit on size and subsector.
• Starting with Pinellas and Hillsborough (1,908 plants, 13% of the state) gives about 160 accounts within an hour's drive.
• If one in ten agrees to a discovery call and one in five of those buys, that's about three projects from the first territory.

The hard part is knowing which of the 160 just won work they can't schedule on spreadsheets. Bebop can search for "Tampa Bay machine shops and fabricators with 10 to 49 employees that are hiring a production planner" and write a playbook for each.

Subject: Scheduling at [Company] since [the new contract / the move]

Hi [first name],

Congratulations on [the new contract / the expansion in Largo]. Shops your size usually hit the same wall at this point: the schedule lives in one person's spreadsheet, and quoting slows down when that person is on the floor.

We set up manufacturing ERP for Tampa Bay shops with 10 to 50 people, in about eight weeks. Would a short call to compare notes on your quoting and scheduling be useful?

[Your name], Palmetto Ledger Systems

For the full picture of Florida businesses outside manufacturing, see companies in Florida; for space and aviation specifically, see aerospace companies in Florida.

Next step: for how plants buy and who signs, read the manufacturing industry guide.