Florida Advanced Manufacturing in 2026

Florida had 429,100 manufacturing jobs in August 2026, a preliminary Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate, up 0.5 percent from a year earlier and close to the 430,000 recorded in July.

The monthly series climbed through spring and summer 2026: 425,100 in March, 427,000 in April, 427,200 in May, 427,900 in June and 430,000 in July, then a slight dip to 429,100 in August (BLS Economy at a Glance, Florida). BLS marks the August number preliminary.

The fuller count comes from the QCEW, which covers every employer paying unemployment insurance. For 2025, its newest complete year, Florida private manufacturing averaged 27,136 establishments and 426,975 jobs, a decline of 522 jobs from 2024, essentially flat (BLS QCEW 2025, Florida). Manufacturing paid an average of $86,479 a year in Florida in 2025, against $72,719 across all private industries, a gap of almost $14,000 a year per worker.

Aerospace products and parts is Florida's largest advanced manufacturing industry by jobs, with 35,063 in 2025, ahead of medical equipment, precision instruments, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals.

This guide treats five high-wage, technology-heavy NAICS industries as advanced manufacturing. All figures are 2025 annual averages for private employers in Florida from the statewide QCEW file (BLS QCEW 2025, Florida).

At the broader level, Florida computer and electronic product makers employed 46,819 people at an average of $123,517, and transportation equipment makers (NAICS 336) employed 57,786 at $109,319 (BLS QCEW 2025). Machinery manufacturing added 1,300 jobs, up 3.8 percent, one of the larger gains in the sector. Boat and ship building, part of the same transportation equipment group, is covered in the Florida marine services industry guide.

The split in 2025 is clear in the Florida numbers: aerospace and pharmaceuticals hired, while the electronics lines (instruments and semiconductors) shed about a thousand jobs between them.

Brevard County on the Space Coast is Florida's advanced manufacturing center, with 9,500 aerospace jobs and 6,695 precision instrument jobs in 2025, followed by Palm Beach, Pinellas, Duval and Okaloosa counties for particular industries.

Brevard's 9,500 aerospace products and parts jobs grew by 1,115, or 13.3 percent, in 2025 and paid an average of $135,215 (BLS QCEW 2025, aerospace). The same file gives Brevard an aerospace employment location quotient of 10.74, the highest of any Florida county listed. Palm Beach County had 3,929 aerospace jobs at the highest average pay in that industry among published Florida counties, $174,445, although it lost 686 jobs in the year. Okaloosa County in the Panhandle had 1,286 aerospace jobs.

Precision instruments, which include navigation and guidance gear, cluster in Brevard with 6,695 jobs and in Pinellas County with 3,686 (BLS QCEW 2025, instruments). Medical device making is spread wider: Duval County led with 3,482 medical equipment jobs at an average of $167,658, and Collier County had 2,575 (BLS QCEW 2025, medical equipment).

Some counties show establishments but no published job count: Orange County lists 30 aerospace establishments with no job figure in the 2025 file. The Florida aerospace cluster guide and the Florida defense industry guide go deeper on the Space Coast and Panhandle employers behind these numbers.

In May 2026 the Governor announced what his office called a landmark project, Blue Origin's $600 million expansion at Rocket Park on the Cape Canaveral Spaceport, an upper stage factory of about 830,000 square feet expected to support 500 aerospace jobs.

Governor Ron DeSantis announced the project on May 22, 2026, and said the jobs would average more than $98,000 in salary (Executive Office of the Governor). The facility uses the Spaceport Improvement Program for construction support (Space Florida). Blue Origin's chief executive, Dave Limp, said in the same release that the company has scaled since 2015 to nearly 4,000 employees, has invested more than $2.3 billion across 500 Florida suppliers and runs 11 sites in Brevard and Orange counties.

SpaceX's Starship work is the other big Space Coast build. On February 3, 2025, the Governor's office said SpaceX would build launch and landing infrastructure at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, pending environmental approval, plus an integration facility called Gigabay with more than 40 million cubic feet of processing space, at least $1.8 billion of capital investment and an estimated 600 new jobs by 2030 (Executive Office of the Governor).

The Spaceport Improvement Program behind the Blue Origin project is a partnership of Space Florida and the Florida Department of Transportation. Since 2012 the program has supported 48 major infrastructure projects and helped create more than 5,000 aerospace jobs, building on more than $531 million of state investment leveraged with $3.3 billion of private funding; its 2026 call took applications until April 22, 2026, for fiscal years 2027 through 2031 (Space Florida).

Florida already has about 17,500 semiconductor and electronic component manufacturing jobs, and the University of Florida's Florida Semiconductor Institute is opening in Jacksonville to grow chip research and training.

UF's Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering set up the institute in October 2023 as a statewide hub for semiconductor work (UF News). The Jacksonville site will be anchored by a $45 million Advanced Technology Center, with $35 million appropriated for research operations, $80 million in all. UF says the institute aims to catalyze more than 10,000 new high-wage jobs, and an FSI report projected Florida's semiconductor and electronics workforce growing 25 percent, from 18,000 jobs to nearly 23,000 by 2030.

The two official counts differ. QCEW shows 17,482 Florida jobs in semiconductor and other electronic component manufacturing in 2025, down 503 from 2024 (BLS QCEW 2025), while the FSI report, released in fall 2024 and funded in part by the Florida Department of Education, started from 18,000 semiconductor and electronics jobs.

Florida manufacturers can get technical help from FloridaMakes, the state's federally funded Manufacturing Extension Partnership center.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology announced a cooperative agreement award for the Florida center to FloridaMakes, Inc. on September 26, 2024, with anticipated funding of $5,319,200 a year and $25,596,000 over five years (NIST). FloridaMakes had already run the existing center for nearly 10 consecutive years. In fiscal year 2023, its client work produced over $295 million in new and retained sales, nearly $96.5 million in new client investments and 2,367 jobs created or retained in Florida. The center is one of 51 in the national MEP network, which must recompete its awards every 10 years.

For aerospace companies that need launch-site infrastructure rather than shop-floor help, the Space Florida program above is the state channel, and its 2026 call opened February 6, 2026 (Space Florida). Last verified: October 15, 2026, on the BLS, NIST, Space Florida, UF News and Executive Office of the Governor websites.