Top Employers in St. Petersburg, Florida

The largest employers based in St. Petersburg are Raymond James, Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, the City of St. Petersburg itself, BayCare St. Anthony's Hospital, St. Petersburg College, Jabil and Bayfront Health St. Petersburg, each ranked on the 2025 Pinellas County employer lists.

No official source ranks employers inside St. Petersburg city limits alone. The ranking that covers the city is countywide: Pinellas County Economic Development publishes the top private and public employers in Pinellas County for 2025, prepared by FloridaCommerce's Bureau of Workforce Statistics and Economic Research from the Data-Axle Employer Database, 2025 Edition 2 (Pinellas County Economic Development). The table below keeps only the ranked employers that the city or the employer itself places in St. Pete; the employment counts are for each employer's Pinellas County workforce, not one St. Petersburg site.

Raymond James is the anchor of the St. Pete list. The city's economic development office calls Financial Services the largest employment sector in St. Pete and says Raymond James, the largest financial services firm outside of Wall Street, is headquartered in St. Pete (City of St. Petersburg). On the county list, the firm ranks third among Pinellas private employers with 4,600 workers (Pinellas County Economic Development).

The 2025 Pinellas County ranking puts the Pinellas County Public School District first with 13,210 employees, followed by Publix with 7,575 and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs with 5,124, ahead of every St. Petersburg-based employer.

Pinellas County Economic Development publishes two tables (Pinellas County Economic Development). The private list runs Publix, Walmart (4,676), Raymond James & Associates (4,600), All Children's Health Systems (3,865), Morton F Plant Hospital (3,363) and Mease Hospital Trustees (2,582), then Honeywell International, St. Anthony's Hospital, Charter Communication, Jabil, BayCare Health System, Bayfront Health St. Petersburg, TD Synnex, Home Depot and FIS Management Services. Five of the fifteen private places go to general medical and surgical hospitals, and BayCare Health System, listed under managing offices with 1,830 workers, holds another.

Two cautions apply when reading the Pinellas list for St. Petersburg. The counts come from the Data-Axle Employer Database, 2025 Edition 2, and each one covers an employer's Pinellas County workforce rather than a single St. Petersburg site. The City of St. Petersburg, at 3,855 employees, is the one entry whose whole workforce works for St. Pete.

The City of St. Petersburg names Financial Services as the largest employment sector in St. Pete, and its Grow Smarter Initiative targets five sectors for new jobs: Marine and Life Sciences, Specialized Manufacturing, Financial Services, Data Analytics, and Creative Arts and Design.

The city says St. Petersburg has identified the five major industry sectors with the greatest potential to create new jobs and raise incomes (City of St. Petersburg). Marine and Life Sciences pairs the city's hospitals with marine research: the institutions it names are Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, Bayfront Health, the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, NOAA and USGS.

Manufacturing is the quieter half of the St. Pete job base. The city says manufacturing has always been among the top employment sectors in St. Pete and Pinellas County, and that Specialized Manufacturing is concentrating into two niches, electronics manufacturing and medical devices manufacturing (City of St. Petersburg). Jabil, which lists its corporate headquarters at 10800 Roosevelt Blvd. N. along with a manufacturing site at 10500 Dr M.L.K. Jr. St. N. (Jabil), had 1,987 Pinellas employees in 2025 (Pinellas County Economic Development). The two PCED tables disagree on Honeywell International: the private list ranks it seventh with 2,200 workers, while the combined private and public list gives it 2,060, and neither table places Honeywell in St. Petersburg.

St. Petersburg's large employers cluster in two places: the Gateway area in north St. Pete, home to Raymond James and Jabil, and the downtown Innovation District with Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, USF St. Petersburg and the Bayboro Harbor marine institutions.

The city describes the Gateway as lying at the crossroads of Tampa Bay in north St. Pete, supporting more than 2,700 businesses and 60,000 employees (City of St. Petersburg). Downtown, the same page places the Innovation District with the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg campus, Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital and Research Center, and Bayboro Harbor, with a concentration of marine institutions.

The hospitals sit closer to the old neighborhoods. BayCare St. Anthony's Hospital is at 1200 Seventh Ave. N., St. Petersburg, FL 33705, phone (727) 825-1100, and BayCare says it was founded in 1931 by the Franciscan Sisters of Allegany (BayCare). St. Anthony's ranks eighth on the 2025 Pinellas private list with 2,113 workers (Pinellas County Economic Development).

The Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metro area had a 4.7 percent unemployment rate in August 2026, a preliminary, not seasonally adjusted Bureau of Labor Statistics figure, compared with 4.3 percent for the United States.

The BLS metro table lists the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area at 4.7 percent for August 2026, preliminary (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). The BLS does not publish a monthly rate for St. Petersburg alone in that table, so the metro figure is the closest current measure for St. Pete residents.

The BLS Economy at a Glance page for Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater shows 1,559.6 thousand nonfarm jobs in August 2026, preliminary, up 0.9 percent from a year earlier, with manufacturing at 74.4 thousand (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). Preliminary figures are revised the following month, so the August 2026 numbers for the St. Pete metro may change.

The biggest new St. Petersburg jobs program in 2026 is the EDGE Initiative, a three-year, $6 million workforce program the City Council approved in January 2026 and St. Petersburg College administers for South St. Pete CRA residents.

The city announced on January 9, 2026 that council had approved a three-year, $6 million workforce development program administered by St. Petersburg College, itself a 2,008 employee Pinellas employer in 2025 (PCED), called St. Pete Works: Employment & Development for a Growing Economy (EDGE) (City of St. Petersburg). It links residents of the South St. Pete Community Redevelopment Area with jobs in the city's targeted industries and trains them in technical and construction trades.

The city announced on May 20, 2026 that Mayor Kenneth T. Welch and his Economic Development team would host the 2026 State of the Economy on June 3, 2026 at The Mahaffey Theater (City of St. Petersburg), and the city's economic development page links the 2026 State of the Economy Presentation and the St. Pete EDC's St. Pete Data pages (City of St. Petersburg).

One official page lags. The city's Gateway description still names Home Shopping Network among the region's top employers and lists, without dates, a Jabil wearable technology lab in a 69,000 square foot building at 10001 16th Street N and a 236,976 square foot FedEx distribution center at 1960 102nd Avenue N (City of St. Petersburg). HSN does not appear on either 2025 Pinellas top employer list, so the Pinellas County Economic Development tables are the better guide to who employs the most people in St. Petersburg today. Pinellas County Economic Development answers questions at 727.464.7332 from its office at 13805 58th Street North in Clearwater (PCED).