Meet the 10 companies with the most employees in the Fortune 500

The Fortune 500 ranks American companies by revenue, which means the list says almost nothing about where the jobs are. A software company can book tens of billions of dollars in sales with a few tens of thousands of employees. A supermarket chain needs hundreds of thousands of people to earn a fraction of that margin. The biggest Fortune 500 employers are the companies whose scale shows up in payroll rather than in profit per worker. They are retailers, delivery networks, grocers, pharmacies and coffee shops — businesses that need people standing in a store, driving a route or sorting a package.

Headcount matters beyond trivia. These companies set informal wage floors in the industries they dominate, and their staffing decisions move local labor markets. A new distribution center can reshape employment across a county. A round of store closures does the same in reverse. They are also where the most visible labor fights of recent years have played out. The Teamsters contract at UPS, union drives at Amazon $AMZN warehouses and the organizing campaign at Starbucks $SBUX stores all involve companies on this list.

The figures that follow come from company disclosures and the workforce totals reported in Fortune's rankings, which count employees worldwide rather than only in the U.S. Treat them as recent approximations rather than fixed numbers. Headcount at this scale shifts constantly with seasonal hiring, acquisitions, divestitures and layoffs. FedEx $FDX and UPS both trimmed staff after pandemic-era package volumes cooled and automation took over more sorting work. Amazon's total can swing by six figures depending on whether it is counted in October or February.

What links these 10 companies is physical operations: shelves, trucks, warehouses, pharmacy counters and espresso machines. Together they employ roughly seven million people worldwide, a workforce close to the population of a mid-sized country. Walmart $WMT alone accounts for nearly a third of it. Here are the 10 largest employers on the Fortune 500, ranked by approximate global headcount.

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Roughly 2.1 million people work for Walmart $WMT worldwide, making it the largest private employer on the planet and the biggest employer on the Fortune 500 by a wide margin. About 1.6 million of those workers are in the U.S., a domestic payroll no other American company comes close to matching.

The headcount traces back to physical footprint. Walmart operates more than 10,500 stores and clubs across 19 countries, including Sam's Club in the U.S. and businesses in Mexico, Canada, China and India. A single supercenter needs cashiers, overnight stockers, department managers, deli staff and licensed pharmacists. One store can employ several hundred people, and that figure multiplies fast across thousands of locations.

A newer category of job has reshaped the mix. Store associates pick and pack online orders from the same shelves walk-in shoppers browse, then stage them for curbside pickup or same-day delivery. The shift turned ordinary supercenters into partial fulfillment sites and added paid hours without requiring a separate warehouse network built from scratch. Walmart GoLocal, the delivery service the company sells to other businesses, layered on driver and logistics work that did not exist there a decade ago.

Walmart also carries a sizable technology and supply chain workforce — software engineers, data scientists and automation specialists hired to compete with Amazon $AMZN on price and delivery speed.

Pay and benefits draw scrutiny precisely because of the headcount. The company has raised its average U.S. hourly wage repeatedly over the past decade, and it covers tuition and book costs for eligible workers through Live Better U, its education program run with a roster of partner colleges. Starting wages sit well above the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. Its use of part-time scheduling remains a recurring flashpoint in labor disputes and organizing campaigns.

Walmart's wage decisions function as a benchmark for the wider retail sector. In counties where it is the dominant employer, a raise, a store closure or a hiring freeze shows up in local labor data.

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Amazon $AMZN's global workforce stands at roughly 1.5 million people, second only to Walmart $WMT among Fortune 500 employers. Almost all of it was assembled in the past two decades, as the company moved from the online bookstore Jeff Bezos founded in 1994 to a logistics and cloud computing operation running across North America, Europe and Asia.

Most of those jobs sit inside the fulfillment and delivery network. Warehouse associates, sortation center staff and drivers form the operational core, although many of the drivers in Amazon-branded vans work for small contracted firms under the Delivery Service Partner program rather than for Amazon itself. Hundreds of fulfillment centers operate in the U.S. alone, each staffed by anywhere from several hundred to a few thousand people depending on size and function.

The headcount also swings more sharply than at most large employers. Amazon brings on well over 100,000 seasonal workers each fall for the holiday peak and scales back after the new year, so the reported total depends on when the count is taken. The workforce roughly doubled between the end of 2019 and the end of 2021 as pandemic ordering surged, and the company later cut about 27,000 corporate roles across late 2022 and 2023.

Away from the warehouses sits a large technical and corporate payroll tied to Amazon Web Services, the advertising business and the devices unit behind Echo speakers and Kindle e-readers. Those roles cluster in Seattle, in Arlington, Virginia, where Amazon built its second headquarters, and in office hubs including Austin and New York.

Labor conditions in the warehouse network have turned into a running policy fight. Workers at the JFK8 facility on Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022, the first successful union election at a U.S. Amazon warehouse, and the Amazon Labor Union later affiliated with the Teamsters. California passed a law in 2021 requiring large warehouse employers to disclose productivity quotas to workers. Amazon has raised starting pay repeatedly and installed robotics systems that move inventory across warehouse floors and cut down on manual lifting.

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UPS employs roughly 500,000 people worldwide, ranking it among the largest logistics employers anywhere. It is also one of the few companies in this ranking whose payroll has contracted rather than expanded, with tens of thousands of jobs eliminated since 2023 as parcel volumes receded from their pandemic peak.

The frontline workforce splits into two broad groups. Package handlers work inside hubs and sorting centers, loading, unloading and routing parcels on shifts that frequently run overnight. Drivers handle pickup and final delivery, and the brown truck and uniform have identified the company for more than a century. Driving is the better-paid tier of the operation and has long been treated as a career job rather than a way station.

Most of the U.S. workforce belongs to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which sets UPS apart from nearly every other large private employer in the country. The 2023 contract negotiation drew national attention because a walkout would have stalled shipments across much of the economy. The deal raised wages for part-time handlers and full-time drivers alike, and it reset pay expectations in an industry where a large share of delivery work is done by nonunion or contracted labor.

Automation has changed which jobs exist. Sorting systems installed across the hub network move more parcels with fewer people on the belt, pushing hiring toward maintenance, technical and driving roles instead of manual sorting. Under its Network of the Future plan, UPS has consolidated and closed buildings while automating others, which concentrates employment in a smaller number of larger facilities. The company has also expanded healthcare logistics and e-commerce fulfillment services, which carry their own staffing needs, including temperature-controlled warehousing and customs work.

Headcount swells every winter, when UPS brings on tens of thousands of temporary workers for the holiday shipping peak before the roster contracts again in January. Because its volumes track retail and e-commerce demand, the company's employment totals move with consumer spending faster than payrolls at firms in steadier industries.

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Home Depot $HD's headcount stands at roughly 465,000, and the overwhelming majority of those jobs sit inside stores rather than in offices or distribution centers. The retailer operates more than 2,300 locations across the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and store payroll accounts for nearly all of its Fortune 500 workforce total.

Hiring is what sets the company apart from other large retail employers. Home Depot recruits from the construction trades, favoring applicants who have worked as electricians, plumbers, carpenters or contractors and can field technical questions in the aisles. It has also run long-standing recruitment programs aimed at military veterans and reservists. An associate in an orange apron is expected to sell and to advise, which pushes training requirements above those of a standard cashier role.

Staffing tracks the housing market more closely than it tracks general consumer spending. Home sales, renovation projects and storm seasons all move demand for lumber, appliances and building materials, and headcount expands or flattens with that cycle.

The Pro business adds another category of employee. It serves contractors and builders who buy in volume, and it carries its own sales and account teams separate from walk-in retail. Home Depot has expanded that operation for years. Its 2024 purchase of SRS Distribution, a building-products supplier serving roofing, pool and landscaping professionals, brought thousands of employees into the company outside the traditional store format.

Supply chain roles form the newest layer. Home Depot has built out distribution facilities designed for bulky freight — appliances, doors, drywall — that moves poorly through a standard parcel network. Those sites created logistics jobs that barely existed in the company's structure a decade ago.

Pay has moved as well. In 2023 the company said it would direct $1 billion toward annualized compensation increases for frontline hourly workers in North America. Tuition reimbursement is available to part-time associates as well as full-timers. Because store locations follow population and housing density, the employment footprint spreads across the continent instead of concentrating in a handful of metro areas.

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Target $TGT counts roughly 440,000 employees, most of them spread across more than 1,900 U.S. stores that double as shopping floors and order-fulfillment sites. The company ships the large majority of its online orders from those stores rather than from dedicated warehouses, which has changed what a store job involves.

Associates who once stocked shelves and ran registers now pick items for curbside pickup, bag same-day delivery orders and stage packages for carriers. The 2017 purchase of Shipt, a same-day delivery platform, pushed that shift further by tying store inventory to a network of independent shoppers. Many employees split shifts between the sales floor and the back room.

Pay has been a deliberate lever. Target raised its starting wage several times over the past decade and now sets hourly starting pay by local market conditions rather than one flat national rate. Benefits work the same way: a debt-free education program covering tuition at a list of partner schools, plus backup care for children and adult family members, both aimed at the high turnover common to hourly retail work.

The supply chain behind the stores carries its own payroll. Target runs traditional regional distribution centers alongside a newer category of sortation centers, which take online orders already picked in stores and batch them for faster last-mile delivery. Those sites need staff distinct from store teams, and the company has kept opening them while competing with Amazon $AMZN and Walmart $WMT on delivery speed.

Headcount has grown more slowly here than at Walmart or Amazon, reflecting a strategy built on remodeling existing locations and opening smaller-format stores in cities and college towns rather than expanding the footprint quickly. Corporate staff are concentrated in Minneapolis, where the retailer has been based since it opened its first store in 1962 as part of the Dayton's department store company.

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With roughly 430,000 employees, Kroger is the largest traditional supermarket employer in the U.S. and the parent company behind dozens of regional grocery banners, including Ralphs, Fred Meyer, Harris Teeter, King Soopers and QFC, alongside stores that carry the Kroger name.

Grocery is a labor-intensive business, and the headcount reflects it. Cashiers, stockers, pharmacists, meat cutters, deli workers and bakery staff fill out most of the payroll across more than 2,700 supermarkets. Food retail also runs on a schedule that general merchandise does not. Shelves are restocked overnight, bakeries start before dawn and stores open seven days a week year-round, because household grocery demand holds steady instead of clustering around a handful of shopping peaks.

Kroger's proposed acquisition of rival Albertsons put that workforce at the center of a national antitrust fight. The Federal Trade Commission sued to block the deal, and unions representing workers at both chains opposed it, arguing that a combined company would reduce competition for grocery labor and lead to store closures in overlapping markets. A federal judge granted an injunction in December 2024, and Albertsons terminated the agreement the same month.

Much of Kroger's store workforce is represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers, which negotiates contracts division by division rather than through a single national agreement. Those talks have periodically produced strikes or strike authorization votes at specific regional chains, usually over wage scales, healthcare contributions and the number of hours available to part-time staff.

Not every Kroger job sits behind a register. The company operates its own food manufacturing plants, turning out dairy, bakery and other store-brand products, which adds factory and distribution work to a payroll otherwise dominated by store shifts.

Kroger has also built automated customer fulfillment centers with the British technology firm Ocado, designed to assemble online grocery orders by robot rather than by employees walking store aisles. Those sites created a category of warehouse and logistics work that did not previously exist inside the company, though Kroger has since scaled back parts of the network as online grocery demand settled below early projections.

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Roughly 396,000 people work for Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B, though the holding company itself runs out of an Omaha headquarters staffed by only a few dozen people. Nearly the entire workforce sits inside businesses Berkshire owns outright, including the railroad BNSF, the auto insurer Geico and the aerospace component manufacturer Precision Castparts.

That structure makes Berkshire's payroll the least unified on this list. Its employees include locomotive engineers and track crews, insurance underwriters and claims adjusters, carpet mill workers at Shaw Industries, utility line workers at Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and salespeople on the floor at Nebraska Furniture Mart. Few of them share a job description, an industry or a building with anyone else on the same payroll.

Berkshire's management approach reinforces that separation. Subsidiary chief executives set their own hiring, pay and staffing policies instead of following a centralized human resources framework issued from Omaha. Labor practices vary widely across the group, shaped by the industry and the local market each business operates in. BNSF's workforce bargains under the national rail agreements governed by the Railway Labor Act, while Geico's claims and call-center staff work under terms the insurer sets on its own. Warren Buffett built that decentralized model over close to six decades running the company, and designated Greg Abel, the vice chairman responsible for non-insurance operations, as his successor as chief executive.

The company's headcount has grown mainly through acquisition rather than gradual expansion. Berkshire completed its purchase of Burlington Northern Santa Fe in 2010 and acquired Precision Castparts in 2016, and each deal moved tens of thousands of workers onto the books at once. That is a different growth pattern from the retailers and carriers elsewhere on this ranking, which added employees store by store and facility by facility.

Because the portfolio spans railroads, insurance, energy, manufacturing, building products and retail, Berkshire's total workforce tends to move less sharply than a single-industry employer's. A freight slowdown can reduce hiring at BNSF while insurance or utility operations hold steady. The reported figure also shifts with deals rather than with hiring cycles, since selling a subsidiary removes its entire staff from the count in one step.

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With roughly 500,000 people on its global payroll, FedEx $FDX stands alongside UPS at the top of American package delivery — but it counts its delivery workforce very differently. Many of the drivers behind the wheel of FedEx Ground vehicles work for independent contractors who own delivery routes rather than for FedEx itself.

That contractor arrangement has drawn lawsuits and regulatory attention over how drivers should be classified. The structure gives route owners a small business to run, and it also leaves those drivers outside the benefits and collective bargaining that cover the directly employed workforce at its chief rival. The difference matters when comparing headcount between the two companies, because not all of the labor that moves a FedEx Ground parcel shows up on the company's own employee rolls.

Three operations account for most of the payroll. FedEx Express runs the air cargo network built around time-definite delivery. FedEx Ground handles road-based parcel work. FedEx Freight operates the less-than-truckload trucking business. Each requires a different mix of workers — pilots and aircraft mechanics in one, dock crews and tractor-trailer drivers in another.

Memphis anchors the air operation. The SuperHub there sorts packages overnight, staffed by ramp agents, sorters and maintenance technicians working while most of the country sleeps, so parcels can reach their destination the next morning. Memphis International Airport ranks among the busiest cargo airports in the world, and that volume depends on a specialized labor pool with little overlap with suburban ground delivery.

Headcount has come down in recent years. FedEx has used buyouts and restructuring under a cost program it calls DRIVE, carried out alongside a plan to fold its separate Express and Ground operating companies into a single network. Parcel volumes fell from their pandemic peak, and staffing followed. International shipping and time-sensitive freight make up a meaningful share of revenue, so shifts in global trade and tariff policy reach FedEx payrolls faster than they reach domestically focused retail employers.

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Roughly 380,000 people work for Starbucks $SBUX worldwide, nearly all of them inside company-operated cafes. That makes it the largest employer in this ranking whose payroll comes almost entirely from preparing and serving food and drinks.

The ownership model explains why that total runs so high. Most McDonald's $MCD restaurants belong to franchisees, so the crews working in them never appear in that company's headcount. Starbucks keeps the majority of its stores on its own books. Baristas, shift supervisors and store managers all draw company paychecks, supported by district managers and a corporate staff centered on the Seattle headquarters.

Labor organizing has reshaped the company's relationship with that workforce. Hundreds of U.S. stores have voted to join Starbucks Workers United since the first successful election in Buffalo, New York, in December 2021. The company and the union spent years in disputes over store closures, discipline and organizing practices. In 2024 they announced a framework intended to open the way toward contract bargaining at unionized locations.

Staffing levels sit at the center of those disputes. Mobile ordering and heavily customized drinks have raised both the volume and the complexity of orders moving through a single store. Schedules have not always expanded to match, and organizers have pointed to that gap as a core grievance.

Benefits are a large part of how the chain competes for frontline workers. Employees working an average of 20 hours a week qualify for health coverage, which is uncommon in part-time food service. The company also covers tuition for a first online bachelor's degree through a partnership with Arizona State University, available to U.S. employees at the same 20-hour threshold. Starbucks set a $15 hourly floor for its U.S. hourly workforce in 2022, above the federal minimum wage but below starting pay at warehouse clubs such as Costco $COST.

Outside the U.S., the headcount depends on which markets the company runs itself. Many international stores operate under licensing deals with local partners, whose staff sit on someone else's payroll. China is the exception that matters most, because Starbucks owns and staffs its stores there directly, making it the company's largest company-operated market after the U.S.