Minnesota’s job mix is less “average American state” than it looks. The state has drifted further from the national pattern over the last thirty years, not toward it, and the distinctive pieces are medical devices, a thick factory base, and headquarters.
Nonfarm employment is about 3.07 million. Education and health is the largest block, roughly 631,000 jobs. Trade, transportation, and utilities is about 526,000; government about 439,000; professional and business services about 376,000; manufacturing about 325,000; leisure and hospitality about 277,000. Finance is smaller than its reputation, about 182,000, and it is one of the sectors actually shrinking.
The interesting part is the concentration.
Manufacturing still holds about one in ten Minnesota jobs, against roughly 7 percent nationally. The state ranks about 22nd in population and 14th in factory jobs, and the Minnesota Chamber counts it in the top five nationally in 44 manufacturing subsectors, first or second in sixteen of them. Those are not the glamorous ones. Medical devices, recreational vehicles, packaging machinery, printed circuit boards, industrial controls, pumps, breakfast cereal, commercial printing, doors and windows. Aerospace and defense manufacturing is only about 13,000 of those 325,000 factory jobs. The real specialty sitting next to it is electromedical instruments, about 27,000 jobs, and medical equipment and supplies, about 19,000. Medtronic and Boston Scientific each employ on the order of 10,000 people in the state. Medical devices are also one of the few factory segments projected to grow through 2034. Printing, paper, and fabricated metals are the ones expected to thin out.
Health care is the employment engine, not just a large sector. Mayo alone has about 57,000 Minnesota employees. More than half of the employers with 10,000-plus workers in the state are health systems. DEED’s 2024–2034 projections have health care and social assistance accounting for well over half of all net job growth. That is an aging-population story more than a productivity story, and it is already visible in the monthly numbers: education and health added about 18,000 jobs over the year through August 2026, more than any other supersector.
The other oddity is headquarters. Cargill, UnitedHealth, Target, General Mills, 3M, and Ecolab give Minnesota an outsized “management of companies” sector. Finance, insurance, professional services, and corporate offices are more than 80 percent metro. Manufacturing is split almost evenly, 54 percent Twin Cities and 46 percent Greater Minnesota. Agriculture and mining are more than 85 percent outstate. It is two labor markets sharing a state name.
DEED’s long-run comparison makes the divergence explicit. Since 1990, Minnesota’s mix has become less like the national mix: relatively more durable and nondurable manufacturing, finance, company headquarters, and health care; relatively less transportation and warehousing, information, professional services, and restaurants. Information and finance are still the weak spots in the current data, down about 5 percent and 3 percent over the year. Manufacturing, unusually, was up about 3 percent.
So the mix is a factory state that never fully deindustrialized, a medical-device cluster that dwarfs its aerospace slice, a headquarters town, and a health-care employer of last resort for net job growth. The thin defense footprint from the last question sits inside that, not on top of it.
