Pharmaceutical companies in New York City: a headquarters town with its plants on Long Island and in New Jersey

This report is for job seekers, partners and sellers looking for drug companies in New York City. It uses the five boroughs for the city figures and the Census Bureau's New York-Newark-Jersey City metro for the plants around it, and every company fact comes from the company's own annual report.

Why the plant count is so small

County Business Patterns (CBP) 2023, NAICS 3254 (Pharmaceutical and Medicine Manufacturing), the five counties of New York City:

Eight of the 11 have 1 to 4 employees; the Census Bureau doesn't publish the other size classes. The other four boroughs have no published row at all. Since 2017 the Census Bureau publishes a cell only if it holds three or more establishments, so a borough with one or two small plants drops out. FDA's registration file shows that they exist: it lists drug manufacturers such as Perrigo New York in the Bronx, Epic Pharma in Laurelton and PML NYC in Long Island City. Read 11 as a floor, not a full count.

CBP counts establishments, single locations with paid employees, rather than companies, and skips the self-employed. Code 3254 also counts only manufacturing sites, so it misses what New York actually has: head offices, research labs and distributors, each classed in its own industry.

Where the region's plants are

The New York-Newark-Jersey City metro (CBSA 35620) had 266 drug manufacturing establishments with 30,736 employees in 2023. The largest counties:

Nassau's employee total was published but flagged high-noise: the noise the Census Bureau adds for confidentiality moved it by 5% or more. On the New York side, Suffolk County is the manufacturing center, with more drug plant jobs than any other county in the metro. Statewide, New York had 147 establishments and 24,906 employees. For the New Jersey side, see the New Jersey pharmaceutical market report.

Listed drug companies headquartered in the city

SEC EDGAR shows 45 listed companies in the drug and biological product codes (SIC 2833 to 2836) with a New York City business address. The largest, each checked against the cover and financial statements of its latest 10-K:

Two names EDGAR still files under New York have moved, according to their own filings: TG Therapeutics' 10-K for 2025 gives its address as Morrisville, North Carolina, and Tilray Brands' 10-K gives Leamington, Ontario. Pfizer's 10-K adds that its global headquarters are in New York City and that the leadership team for Pfizer Global Supply, which ran 36 manufacturing plants at the end of 2025, is primarily located there. For Pfizer's headcount history, see how many employees Pfizer has.

Labs, distributors and FDA's file in the five boroughs

The same 2023 Census data gives a truer picture of the city's drug economy than code 3254 does:

FDA's Drug Establishments Current Registration Site (DECRS) lists 25 registered drug sites in the five boroughs in our count of the 30 October 2026 download: 8 manufacturers, 4 medical gas suppliers (our classification by firm name), 10 that only label, pack or relabel, and 3 that make PET imaging drugs. Several of the labelers are consumer brands, including cosmetics companies such as Glossier, registered because they put their names on over-the-counter products. Registering is the company's own act; it isn't an FDA approval.

Checking a New York company

• Licence. FDA lists the New York State Office of the Professions as the agency that licenses wholesale drug distributors in New York. Ask a distributor or third-party logistics partner for its licence number and check it there.
• Compliance. FDA's Data Dashboard shows inspections, warning letters and recalls for any registered site.
• Filings. For a listed company, the 10-K's Item 1 (business), Item 1A (risks) and human capital section tell you more about its plans and workforce than any directory.
• The network. NewYorkBIO, the state's life sciences association, runs a member directory, a jobs section and regular events in the city.

Selling to New York drug companies

The buyers in the city sit in head-office functions: commercial operations, market access, medical affairs, legal, finance and IT, plus research operations at the labs. Plant purchases (equipment, maintenance, packaging) are made on Long Island and in New Jersey, usually by site teams.

Worked example: a translation firm

Illustrative example. The firm and its prices are invented; the counts come from CBP 2023 and the 10-Ks above.

Hudson Lingua (hudsonlingua.example) translates clinical, regulatory and patient documents.

1. Pick the accounts. The 9 listed headquarters above, plus the 115 Manhattan biotech R&D establishments, many of them small sponsors running trials abroad.
2. Find the owner. At a 300-person company, clinical operations or regulatory affairs usually buys translation; at Pfizer's size it runs through procurement and a preferred-vendor list.
3. Do the arithmetic. Reaching the right person at 40% of 124 accounts gives 50 conversations. If 8 send a trial project and 3 become steady clients at $60,000 a year, that's $180,000.

Finding which of 115 small sponsors have trials starting abroad is the slow part; Bebop researches each account and suggests who to contact.

For the global ranking these companies belong to, see the largest pharmaceutical companies.

Next step: see how New York's company base compares across all industries in companies in New York City.