Manufacturers in Houston: the plants behind the energy economy, counted and named

This report is for buyers looking for a Houston fabricator, machine shop or contract manufacturer, job seekers and researchers sizing the industry, and B2B sellers whose customers are Houston plants. It sets two official counts side by side, shows what the plants make and where they are, names the public manufacturers based here from their own filings, and ends with a prospecting plan.

Two official counts of Houston manufacturing

The US Census Bureau and the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) both count manufacturing establishments, and they don't agree, because they measure different years from different records.

Use the Census figures to compare Houston with other places, because every county, metro and state in County Business Patterns (CBP) is counted the same way. Use the TWC figures, which the Greater Houston Partnership publishes in Houston Facts 2026, for the most recent picture. The Partnership also reports that the region produced $126.8 billion of manufacturing output in 2024, more than any other US metro, citing the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The rest of this report uses the Census data for the Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands metro (CBSA 26420), all of manufacturing (NAICS 31 to 33).

Ranking the Census metro file ourselves, Houston is fourth among US metros for manufacturing establishments, behind Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, and sixth for manufacturing employees. Manufacturing is 7.2% of the metro's private-sector jobs in CBP.

What Houston plants make

Average pay is our calculation, payroll divided by employees. Fabricated metal and machinery together are 37% of the metro's plants and 36% of its manufacturing jobs. Chemicals and petroleum products have only 540 plants between them but 47,459 employees, 23% of the total, and the highest pay.

The oilfield equipment and process plant clusters

The detailed industry codes show how much of Houston's metalworking is tied to energy:

Two very different customers sit in that table. The oilfield equipment makers and the machine shops behind them are mid-sized and cyclical, paced by drilling and completion activity. The refineries and petrochemical plants are few and huge (a Houston refinery averages 457 employees) and run on long maintenance cycles. Houston Facts 2026 reports that the metro holds 41.1% of US base petrochemical capacity and 14.0% of US refining capacity, from IHS Markit and the US Energy Information Administration.

Where in the metro

County figures come from the CBP county file and add up to 9 fewer establishments than the metro total. Harris County dominates, but the coastal counties (Brazoria and Chambers) have the biggest plants because that's where the chemical complexes sit. Montgomery County, north toward The Woodlands, is mostly small shops.

Plant size

Grouped: 3,945 plants with 1 to 19 employees, 1,348 with 20 to 99 and 446 with 100 or more. CBP counts establishments with paid employees, not companies: a fabricator with yards in Pasadena and Conroe counts twice, a company's head office is classified as a management office rather than a plant, and owner-only shops are left out.

Public manufacturers headquartered in the Houston area

SEC EDGAR lists 60 companies with a listed ticker, a manufacturing SIC code (2000 to 3999) and a business address in the metro. The ten 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:

EDGAR codes ConocoPhillips as a petroleum refiner, but its 10-K describes it as "an independent E&P company headquartered in Houston", so we've left it out. Revenue is company-wide; most of these companies' plants and jobs are spread well beyond Texas. For private manufacturers, use the directories below.

Finding and vetting a Houston manufacturer

1. Start with the trade groups. The Greater Houston Manufacturers Association runs a Fabrication to Finish Directory and helps OEMs find suppliers; the Texas Association of Manufacturers is the statewide advocacy group for more than 500 member companies.
2. For oilfield products, check the license. The API Composite List is the American Petroleum Institute's directory of API Monogram licensees and registered quality systems (API Spec Q1, ISO 9001), searchable by company and specification, with city, status and products. Only active licensees may use the API Monogram.
3. Confirm the entity. The Texas Comptroller's Franchise Tax Account Status Search looks up a company by name, taxpayer number or Secretary of State file number.
4. Read the safety record. OSHA's Establishment Search lists federal inspections and citations by establishment name, state and ZIP code. Check the address, because different companies can have similar names.
5. Get help with improvement, not names, from TMAC, the NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership center for Texas, based in Fort Worth.

Prospecting Houston manufacturers

Timing differs by cluster. Oilfield equipment makers buy when drilling activity and backlogs rise, and cut fast when they fall. Process plants plan maintenance and turnarounds months ahead, so the vendor list is often set well before the work starts. For a broader view of the region's companies, see companies in Houston; for the drilling and production side, see oil and gas companies in Houston.

Worked example: a vibration monitoring service

Illustrative example. The company, rates and assumptions are invented; the plant counts are Census data.

Bayou Reliability (bayoureliability.example) runs monthly vibration routes on pumps, compressors and fans, and wants process plants with 50 to 499 employees.

• Houston plants with 50 to 499 employees: 429 + 297 + 96 = 822.
• Chemicals, petroleum products, plastics and rubber, food and beverage make up 473 + 67 + 219 + 498 + 111 = 1,368 of the metro's 5,739 plants (24%). At the same share, about 196 fit on size and industry, a floor, because process plants run larger than average.
• Bayou starts with Harris, Brazoria, Chambers and Galveston, where the process plants cluster, and books one plant visit for every 15 accounts it researches: about 13 site walks from the first pass.

The slow part is learning which plants have rotating equipment problems this year: a new unit, an expansion, a reliability engineer job posting. Bebop can search for "Houston-area chemical and plastics plants with 50 to 499 employees hiring reliability engineers" and research each one.

Subject: Pumps and compressors at [Company] [site]

Hi [first name],

I saw [Company] is [adding a unit at / hiring a reliability engineer for] the [site] plant. When rotating equipment is added faster than the monitoring program grows, the first sign is usually a failed seal.

We run monthly vibration routes for Gulf Coast process plants and hand over a ranked list of the machines to fix first. Could we walk your critical pumps in [month]?

[Your name], Bayou Reliability

Next step: see how plants are organized to buy, and who signs, in the manufacturing industry guide.