Oregon’s Company Headquarters: Strong Growth

While Oregon is home to just two Fortune 500 companies, that doesn’t mean headquarters don’t have an impact on our economy. Oregon’s 1,300 establishments in the ‘management of companies’ sector employ nearly 47,000 people and pay a whopping average wage of $114,500. And while it’s just 3 percent of Oregon’s private-sector employment, it generates 6.8 percent of the state’s private-sector payroll and contributed 4.5 percent to job growth since the end of the Great Recession.

After growing at about the same pace as the overall economy (private sector) through the first half of the 2000s, the management of companies sector began to pull away right before the Great Recession hit. The state would go on to lose nearly 150,000 jobs, a decline of 8 percent. In contrast, management of companies was resilient. It shed just 1,100 jobs, a decline of 3 percent. And while it took nearly five years for the greater economy to regain all of the jobs lost during the recession, management of companies rebounded in two years. Since the end of the recession, it’s grown nearly twice as fast as the overall economy.

Post-recession growth has also handily outpaced national trends in this sector. Since mid-2010, Oregon’s headquarters expanded by 34 percent; one-and-a-half times faster than the nation’s 22 percent.

To read more about the management of companies, see the full article "Oregon's Company Headquarters: Strong Growth and High Wages", written by Regional Economist Amy Vander Vliet.