The 15 U.S. Companies With the Most Employees in 2026
Walmart employs about 2.1 million people. Amazon employs about 1.58 million. After those two, the fall is steep. No other American company reaches 550,000, and the drop from second place to third is more than a million people.
This ranking uses one kind of source for every company on it, the annual report each files with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Headcount is a disclosed item in a Form 10-K, which makes it dated, auditable and defined by the company itself, rather than an estimate assembled from job postings or news coverage. Every number below carries the day it was measured.
Three things have changed since the last edition of this list. UPS has shed tens of thousands of positions and says so in its own filing. Walgreens fell off the list entirely by going private. And two companies most readers could not place, Concentrix and Cognizant, now sit among the fifteen largest employers headquartered in the United States.
The 15 largest U.S. employers at a glance
| Rank | Company | Ticker | Employees | Headcount as of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Walmart | WMT | about 2,100,000 | January 31, 2026 |
| 2 | Amazon | AMZN | 1,576,000 | December 31, 2025 |
| 3 | FedEx | FDX | about 530,000 | May 31, 2026 |
| 4 | Home Depot | HD | about 472,400 | February 1, 2026 |
| 5 | UPS | UPS | about 460,000 | December 31, 2025 |
| 6 | Concentrix | CNXC | about 455,000 | November 30, 2025 |
| 7 | Target | TGT | about 415,000 | January 31, 2026 |
| 8 | Kroger | KR | more than 403,000 | January 31, 2026 |
| 9 | UnitedHealth Group | UNH | more than 390,000 | December 31, 2025 |
| 10 | Berkshire Hathaway | BRK | about 387,800 | December 31, 2025 |
| 11 | Starbucks | SBUX | about 381,000 | September 28, 2025 |
| 12 | TJX Companies | TJX | about 377,000 | January 31, 2026 |
| 13 | Cognizant | CTSH | about 351,600 | December 31, 2025 |
| 14 | Costco | COST | 341,000 | August 31, 2025 |
| 15 | HCA Healthcare | HCA | about 320,000 | December 31, 2025 |
Companies close their books on different dates, so these snapshots span ten months rather than a single day. That is a limitation of any list built from filings, and it is the price of using numbers the companies stand behind.
15. HCA Healthcare — about 320,000 employees
The largest for-profit hospital operator in the United States employs about 320,000 people, of whom roughly 90,000 work part-time or on an as-needed basis. That second figure is the interesting one. Hospital staffing runs on a float pool of nurses and technicians who pick up shifts as demand moves, so nearly a third of HCA’s roster is deliberately elastic.
Healthcare is the reason a company most Canadians have never used is this big. Patient care does not scale with software. Every additional bed needs people beside it, which puts hospital groups near the top of employment tables in a way that technology companies of far greater market value never approach.
14. Costco — 341,000 employees
Costco is the rare company on this list that breaks its headcount out by country: 223,000 in the United States, 55,000 in Canada and 63,000 across its other international markets, for 341,000 in total at the end of its 2025 financial year. It has added 25,000 people in two years, up from 316,000 in 2023.
The Canadian number deserves a moment. Costco employs roughly 55,000 people in this country, which places it in the same range as the entire global full-time equivalent workforce of BMO. A warehouse retailer is an employer here on the scale of a Big Six bank.
13. Cognizant — about 351,600 employees
Cognizant is headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey, and 256,900 of its 351,600 employees work in India. Only 41,600 are in North America. It is an American company by incorporation and listing whose workforce is overwhelmingly somewhere else, which is exactly why headcount rankings and “biggest American employer” rankings are not the same list.
The company writes software and runs technology operations for other businesses. Its people are the product, billed by the hour or by the contract, so growth in revenue and growth in headcount track each other far more closely than they would at a company selling licences.
12. TJX Companies — about 377,000 Associates
The parent of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods reports about 377,000 Associates, roughly 86 per cent of them working in stores, and notes that many work fewer than 40 hours a week. It also hires thousands of temporary staff for the back-to-school and holiday peaks, and those people are counted separately.
Canadian readers know this company better than the name suggests: Winners and HomeSense are TJX banners. The off-price model depends on buyers finding opportunistic lots of merchandise and on store staff processing a constantly changing assortment, which is labour the business cannot automate away without becoming a different kind of retailer.
11. Starbucks — about 381,000 employees
Starbucks employed about 381,000 people worldwide at the end of September 2025. Roughly 223,000 of them were in the United States, of whom about 214,000 worked in company-operated stores, and about 158,000 were outside the country.
That split explains the shape of the company. Starbucks owns and staffs most of its own locations rather than franchising them, so its headcount rises and falls with store count in a way that a franchisor’s does not. McDonald’s, by comparison, reports just over 150,000 people for its corporate offices and company-operated restaurants combined, because the people in most of its restaurants work for franchisees.
10. Berkshire Hathaway — about 387,800 employees
Berkshire and its operating subsidiaries employed about 387,800 people at the end of 2025, roughly 80 per cent of them in the United States. The breakdown shows what the conglomerate actually is: about 175,600 in manufacturing businesses, about 42,600 in insurance, and about 35,000 at BNSF Railway, of whom around 30,000 belong to a labour union.
Almost none of them work for Berkshire itself. The company’s own filing puts it plainly: “Berkshire’s operating subsidiaries are managed on an unusually decentralized basis. There are few centralized or integrated business functions.” The Omaha head office allocates capital, and several hundred thousand people work at businesses it owns rather than runs. If you are unclear on what owning a share of a holding company like this actually gets you, our guide to what a stock is covers the difference between owning the parent and owning the operations.
9. UnitedHealth Group — more than 390,000 employees
UnitedHealth Group reported more than 390,000 employees at the end of 2025, and nearly 165,000 of them are clinical professionals. That last detail is the whole story of the company. The insurer has spent a decade buying and building the care-delivery side of the business through Optum, so a firm most people file under “health insurance” now employs doctors, nurses and pharmacists by the tens of thousands.
No other insurer comes close to this list.
8. Kroger — more than 403,000 employees
America’s largest supermarket operator employed more than 403,000 full- and part-time people as of the end of January 2026. Kroger spent about $183 million on training in 2025 and offers tuition reimbursement of up to $3,500 a year, which roughly 6,100 employees used.
Those numbers are worth reading as a labour-cost signal rather than a benefits brochure. Grocery runs on thin margins and high turnover, and the spending a chain does to keep people is a real line item that shows up in the same statements investors read for the margin.
7. Target — about 415,000 team members
Target employed about 415,000 full-time, part-time and seasonal team members as of the end of January 2026, and the company says workforce costs are its single largest operating expense.
What makes Target unusual on this list is that essentially all of those people work in one country. The chain’s attempt at Canada ended in 2015, and it has not returned. Every other retailer in the top ten spreads its headcount across multiple markets.
6. Concentrix — about 455,000 employees
The sixth-largest employer headquartered in the United States is a company almost no consumer has knowingly dealt with. Concentrix, based in Newark, California, employed about 455,000 people at the end of November 2025 across roughly 483 locations in 74 countries. About 240,000 are in Asia-Pacific and about 85,000 in the Americas.
Concentrix runs customer experience operations for other businesses. When you contact a large bank, airline or technology company, there is a reasonable chance the person answering works for Concentrix rather than the brand on the door. The company calls its staff “game-changers”, and its scale is the direct result of large firms deciding that answering their own customers was not a job they wanted to keep in house.
It is a useful reminder that employment rankings surface the plumbing of the economy. The companies that absorb work other companies shed grow enormous without ever becoming household names.
5. UPS — about 460,000 employees
UPS reported about 460,000 employees at the end of 2025, excluding temporary seasonal staff, with 370,000 of them in the United States. The workforce splits into roughly 75,000 management employees, nearly 35 per cent of whom are part-time, and about 385,000 hourly employees, nearly half of whom are part-time.
This is the largest decline on the list. Our 2024 edition put UPS at 536,000. The company’s own filing describes the reason without euphemism. A programme it calls Fit to Serve set out to right-size the business through “a workforce reduction of approximately 14,000 positions, primarily within management”. UPS says the initiative completed in 2025, cost $463 million and delivered savings of about $1.0 billion.
Fit to Serve accounts for only part of the fall. Measured against our earlier figure, UPS is down roughly 76,000 people, about one in seven, and a delivery network does not shed that many while handling the same volume.
4. Home Depot — about 472,400 associates
Home Depot employed about 472,400 associates at the end of its 2025 financial year, of whom about 53,400 were salaried and the rest paid hourly. That ratio, roughly one salaried person for every eight on an hourly wage, is close to the standard shape of American big-box retail.
The home improvement chain sits above every grocer and every general merchandiser except Walmart, which says something about the labour intensity of selling lumber, appliances and building supplies out of warehouses that also need staff who can answer a contractor’s question.
3. FedEx — about 530,000 employees
FedEx reported about 300,000 permanent full-time and about 230,000 permanent part-time employees as of May 31, 2026, roughly 530,000 people, alongside some 5,300 service providers handling linehaul and pickup-and-delivery work.
That figure comes with a date that matters more than usual. FedEx completed the spin-off of FedEx Freight on June 1, 2026, the day after its financial year ended, so the 530,000 above is the last count that included a business FedEx no longer owns. Its Federal Express segment on its own employed about 452,000 people on the same date. Expect next year’s filing to show a considerably smaller company, without a single job having been lost to make it so.
This is the sort of discontinuity that makes year-over-year headcount comparisons treacherous, and the reason this list states an as-of date beside every number.
2. Amazon — 1,576,000 employees
Amazon employed approximately 1,576,000 full-time and part-time people as of December 31, 2025. The company adds, in the same breath, that it also uses “independent contractors and temporary personnel to supplement our workforce”, which means the true number of people doing Amazon’s work on any given day is higher than the one it reports.
That caveat is not a criticism, it is the methodology of the whole list. Every company here draws its own line between an employee and a contractor, and delivery, warehousing and seasonal retail are precisely the industries where that line moves the most.
Amazon is the only company besides Walmart on this list that employs more than a million people. Third place is about a third of its size.
1. Walmart — about 2.1 million associates
Walmart employed approximately 2.1 million associates as of January 31, 2026, according to its annual report for the 2026 financial year. About 1.6 million of them work in the United States and about 0.5 million work internationally.
That U.S. figure is the one the 2024 version of this article got wrong, and the mistake is common enough to be worth naming. Walmart’s 2.1 million is a worldwide number. Presenting it as an American headcount overstates the domestic figure by half a million people and quietly makes every other entry incomparable.
The margin is not close. Walmart employs more people than the next three companies on this list put together.
How this list is counted, and why other lists disagree
Rankings of the largest employers vary wildly, and the disagreements are almost always about definitions rather than facts. Here is what this one does.
- Total employees worldwide, as the company itself reports them, not United States employees only. Where a company discloses the domestic split, this article states it in the entry.
- A U.S. company means incorporated and headquartered in the United States. Both were checked against SEC registration records for all fifteen.
- The most recent annual report, which means the as-of dates range from August 2025 to May 2026 depending on each company’s financial year end.
- Full-time and part-time together where the company reports them together. Contractors, franchisee staff and temporary seasonal workers are excluded when the company excludes them.
- No invented precision. Where a filing says “more than 390,000”, this list says more than 390,000.
Anyone can check any of these figures. Each company’s filings are free to read on the SEC’s EDGAR database; the headcount lives in Item 1 of the Form 10-K, usually under a heading called Human Capital.
Big employers that are not on this list
Four names that appear on competing rankings are absent here on purpose.
Accenture employed approximately 779,000 people as of August 31, 2025, which would place it second, ahead of Amazon. It files a Form 10-K with the SEC and trades on the New York Stock Exchange, but it is incorporated in Ireland. It is not a U.S. company, and including it is the single most common error in this genre.
Walgreens Boots Alliance employed about 312,000 people as of August 2024, its last annual report as a public company. It deregistered its shares in September 2025 after being taken private, so there is no current filing to cite. A company that stops reporting does not stop employing people, but it does stop being verifiable.
Marriott International manages the employment of roughly 414,000 associates, a number large enough for seventh place. About 148,000 of them are actually employed by Marriott. The other 266,000 are employed by the owners of the hotels and merely managed by Marriott, which is a different relationship and a different list.
ManpowerGroup places workers by the hundreds of thousands and says it helps improve the lives of about 485,000 workers daily. It has approximately 25,400 full-time equivalent employees of its own. Staffing firms count their placements as clients’ workers, not their own, and any ranking that treats the two as the same thing will be wrong by an order of magnitude.
What changed since the last edition
The 2024 version of this article listed ten companies. Comparing it against the current filings shows how quickly this table moves.
- UPS fell from 536,000 to about 460,000, the largest decline on the list, driven by the reduction its filing describes.
- Walgreens disappeared by going private rather than by shrinking.
- Concentrix, Cognizant, TJX and Costco appear for the first time, and three of the four are companies whose scale sits outside consumer awareness.
- FedEx is about to shrink on paper because of the FedEx Freight separation, without any change to the number of people doing the work.
- The top two did not move, and will not move soon.
How Canada’s largest employers compare
Canadian issuers that list in the United States file a Form 40-F, which carries the same kind of disclosure. It provides a fair comparison, using the same class of document.
| Company | Employees | As of |
|---|---|---|
| Magna International | about 156,000 | December 31, 2025 |
| TD Bank Group | 102,218 average FTE | fiscal 2025, ended October 31, 2025 |
| Scotiabank | 86,431 FTE | October 31, 2025 |
| BMO | more than 53,000 FTE | October 31, 2025 |
| CN | 23,839 | December 31, 2025 |
Magna, the largest Canadian employer in this group, reports about 156,000 people, of whom roughly 144,000 work at wholly owned or controlled operations. Walmart alone employs more than thirteen times that. TD, at just over 100,000 average full-time equivalents, would not come close to the American top fifteen. If you want to see how the Canadian banks compare with one another rather than with Walmart, our ranking of the best Canadian bank stocks breaks down the Big Six.
The comparison is not a verdict on Canadian business. It is a reminder of the population difference, and of the fact that the largest employers in any economy are the ones that sell to consumers in person.
What headcount does and does not tell an investor
Employee counts are a poor guide to company value and a good guide to company shape.
The fifteen companies above are labour-intensive businesses: retail, logistics, healthcare and outsourced services. Most of the American technology giants are nowhere near them. Meta ran on 78,865 employees at the end of 2025. Alphabet had 190,820. Apple reported about 166,000 full-time equivalents. None of the three would place in the top fifteen, and the ratio that separates them from a grocer, revenue or profit per head, is the number worth watching rather than the raw count.
Headcount does matter in three practical ways. It tells you how exposed a company is to wage inflation, which lands directly on the margin when hundreds of thousands of people get a raise. It tells you how much of the cost base is fixed against how much can flex, which is why UPS could remove positions while Costco added them. And a sharp change in it, in either direction, is a management decision made visible, disclosed in the filing before it shows up in the results.
For a Canadian investor, all fifteen of these companies trade on American exchanges, which raises the practical question of how to own them. Most people get exposure to the whole group at once through an index fund rather than picking among them, and our guide to the best Canadian ETFs covers the funds that hold the U.S. market. If you would rather buy a single American name directly, the mechanics are the same for any of them, and our walkthrough of how to buy Tesla stock in Canada applies to Walmart or Costco just as well. Anyone starting from nothing should begin with how to open a brokerage account.
One wrinkle is worth knowing before you buy: dividends from U.S. companies are taxed differently depending on which account holds the shares, and the answer is not the same for an RRSP as it is for a TFSA. It is a small detail that compounds over decades.
The short version
- Walmart, about 2.1 million people, is far ahead of everything else and has been for a long time. Amazon, at 1,576,000, is the only other American company above a million.
- The list is retail, logistics and healthcare. Technology does not appear until well outside the top fifteen, because software does not need people the way a warehouse does.
- Two of the fifteen are business-services firms most readers cannot name, Concentrix and Cognizant, both of which grew by absorbing work other companies stopped doing themselves.
- Every figure here comes from a company’s own annual report and carries the date it was measured. That is why some of these numbers differ from the ones you will see elsewhere.
- Headcount is a measure of shape, not value. Meta runs on 78,865 people. The count tells you where the labour risk sits, not what the shares are worth.
Disclaimer: The content on bestcanadianstocks.ca is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions. Employee counts are as reported in each company’s most recent annual report filed with the SEC; the headcount date for each company is shown in the table.
