Major Employers in Melbourne, Florida

Northrop Grumman is the largest employer in Melbourne, with 6,818 workers inside city limits in fiscal 2025, more than twice the 3,354 counted for the second ranked School Board of Brevard County.

The ranking is Schedule 16 of the City of Melbourne fiscal 2025 ACFR, the audited annual report for the year that ended September 30, 2025. It lists ten principal employers, their share of total city employment and the same figures from nine years earlier. Its stated source is the city Revenue Department and the companies listed, so each count is what the employer reported, not a payroll audit.

Together the 2025 top ten employ 21,188 people, 51.14 percent of everyone working in the city, against 18,500 and 52.08 percent for the 2016 top ten (city ACFR). The list mixes defense contractors with a school district, a university, a hospital system, the city government and a retailer. The city's own count of 1,047 includes airport staff, as a footnote to the schedule explains.

Since 2016 Northrop Grumman has more than doubled its Melbourne workforce and replaced Health First at the top, while Health First and L3Harris both report fewer workers inside the city.

In the 2016 column of the city schedule, Health First led with 4,066 employees and 11.45 percent of city employment; in 2025 it reported 2,371 and ranked fourth. Northrop Grumman rose from 2,894 to 6,818, a gain of 3,924, and its share climbed from 8.15 to 16.46 percent. The School Board of Brevard County nearly doubled its city count, from 1,720 to 3,354. L3Harris fell from 2,532 and third place to 1,778 and fifth.

Two 2016 names are gone from the list: Teletech, then seventh with 1,205, and Eastern Florida State College, then tenth with 591. MC Assembly and WABTEC entered at ninth and tenth. Footnotes keep the corporate history straight: Harris Corporation and L3 merged as of June 29, 2019; Rockwell Collins was bought by UTC on November 27, 2018 and renamed Collins Aerospace; Health First and MIMA merged in 2013.

A drop in a city count does not prove a company shrank. The schedule is a count of total city employment, so an employer's sites outside Melbourne fall outside it. L3Harris, for one, lists Palm Bay, Melbourne and Malabar among the locations of its SAS segment in its fiscal 2025 Form 10-K, which also reports about 45,000 employees company wide as of January 2, 2026 and principal executive offices at 1025 West NASA Boulevard, Melbourne.

The Melbourne Orlando International Airport campus is a cluster of aerospace and defense employers, and the airport says it is home to a daily population of more than 20,000 individuals.

The airport business page names Northrop Grumman, Embraer Executive Jets, L3Harris, Collins Aerospace, STS Mod Center, Thales, GE Transportation, Southeast Aerospace, Satcom Direct, Avidyne Corporation and Dassault Falcon Jet as companies in its neighborhood, and gives its annual economic impact as more than $3 billion. That impact figure is the airport's own estimate. The page lists 321-723-6227 for inquiries.

Northrop Grumman's Melbourne careers page describes the largest of those sites: 17 buildings on a 109 acre campus adjacent to the airport, where the company designs, develops and tests advanced manned aircraft and battle management command and control systems. The page lists the U.S. Navy E-2D Advanced Hawkeye among its flagship programs. The airport also shows up on the property side: in Schedule 7 of the city ACFR the Melbourne Airport Authority is the largest taxable property owner in the city at $199,534,446, a figure sourced to the Brevard County Property Appraiser.

Outside the airport, the largest Melbourne employers are public schools, a private university, a hospital system and the city itself, which together account for more than 9,000 of the jobs on the list.

Adding the school board (3,354), Florida Tech (2,510), Health First (2,371) and the City of Melbourne (1,047) from the fiscal 2025 schedule gives 9,282 jobs. Florida Institute of Technology says on its About page that it was founded in 1958 as Brevard Engineering College; its main campus address is 150 W. University Blvd., Melbourne, FL 32901, phone (321) 674-8000.

Public employment is large across Brevard County as well. The 2025 annual averages in the BLS QCEW county file count 19,832 local government jobs, 9,803 of them in local government education, and 6,438 federal jobs paying an average of $117,501 a year. Private hospitals in the county employed 7,683 and private health care and social assistance as a whole employed 33,548 at an average of $63,414.

The pay gap between Brevard sectors is wide. Private health care and social assistance averaged $63,414 in 2025, while federal jobs averaged $117,501 and the county average for all jobs was $70,833 (BLS QCEW).

Brevard County averaged 243,568 jobs covered by unemployment insurance in 2025, at an average annual pay of $70,833, and manufacturing paid far above that average.

The figures are the 2025 annual averages from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages for Brevard County, which counts jobs at every employer filing unemployment insurance reports. Private employers held 214,525 of the jobs. The county added 1,444 jobs over 2024, a gain of 0.6 percent.

The split inside electronics and aerospace matters for Melbourne. Aerospace product and parts manufacturing grew by 13.3 percent in a year while computer and electronic product manufacturing lost 732 jobs, so the two manufacturing industries moved in opposite directions in Brevard in 2025. Federal employment fell 7.6 percent. These are county figures for all of Brevard, so they describe the labor market Melbourne employers hire from rather than the city alone.

In August 2026 the Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville metro had 259.7 thousand nonfarm jobs, 0.5 percent more than a year earlier, with manufacturing and education and health services growing and government shrinking.

The BLS Economy at a Glance page for the Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville metro shows preliminary August 2026 counts of 36.7 thousand manufacturing jobs, up 3.1 percent over 12 months; 41.6 thousand in education and health services, up 4.3 percent; and 29.3 thousand in government, down 1.0 percent. The metro unemployment rate was 4.8 percent, not seasonally adjusted. BLS marks the August figures preliminary.

Inside the city, Schedule 15 of the city ACFR reports a fiscal 2025 unemployment rate of 4.5 percent, up from 3.7 percent in 2024 and 2.6 percent in 2022, citing the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The principal employers list itself is updated once a year; the fiscal 2026 report, due after the September 30, 2026 year end, will be the first official check on whether Northrop Grumman's lead and the decline at Health First continued.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against Schedules 7, 15 and 16 of the Melbourne fiscal 2025 ACFR, the 2025 Brevard QCEW file, the August 2026 metro BLS figures and the airport, Northrop Grumman and Florida Tech pages.