Top 10 Companies in St. Louis: The Giants That Call the Metro Home
Revised July 22, 2026
What are the biggest companies in St. Louis?
The metro’s giants: Centene (Fortune 500 #23), Enterprise Mobility, Edward Jones, World Wide Technology (~$20B revenue, Maryland Heights), Anheuser-Busch, BJC Health System (Missouri’s largest private employer, ~47,000 people), Emerson (#238), Nestlé Purina, Reinsurance Group of America (#196), and Bunge (~$53B, headquartered here since 2019). Greater St. Louis, Inc. counts seventeen Fortune 1000 headquarters in the region.
Keep reading ↓Here’s a bar-trivia question that stumps people who’ve lived here their whole lives: how many Fortune 1000 companies are headquartered in greater St. Louis? Most folks guess four or five — the beer, the brokerage, maybe the pet food. The actual answer, last time the count was published by Greater St. Louis, Inc., is seventeen and growing — and that count doesn’t even include the privately held giants that never appear on Fortune’s revenue-ranked lists at all.
Whether you’re a job seeker sizing up the market, a business owner wondering who anchors the local economy, or just someone who likes knowing what’s behind the logos on the highway, this is the honest tour: the ten biggest corporate names that call the metro home, what each actually does, and why they matter to the rest of us. Every fact here traces to the companies themselves or to Greater St. Louis, Inc.’s headquarters data — no padding, no guesswork, and no ranking anyone paid for.
1. Centene
The biggest company most St. Louisans have never bought anything from. Centene is a healthcare insurance giant — managed care, government health programs — and at #23 on the Fortune 500, it’s the highest-ranked company headquartered in the metro. Its Clayton campus reshaped that suburb’s skyline, and its scale makes it one of the region’s most consequential employers for healthcare, technology, and corporate roles alike — when Centene sneezes, Clayton commercial real estate catches a cold.
2. Enterprise Mobility
You know it as the rental counter, but Enterprise is quietly one of the largest privately held companies in America — which is why it never shows up on the Fortune 500 despite belonging in any conversation about it. Founded here and still family-owned and headquartered in the metro, Enterprise runs a global mobility business from St. Louis, and its name is on the Blues’ arena downtown.
3. Edward Jones
The investment firm built on the one-broker-office model — there’s probably a branch in a strip mall near you, and that’s the point. A Fortune 500 firm headquartered in the metro, Edward Jones runs one of the region’s largest corporate campuses and hires steadily across finance, technology, and operations. For St. Louis job seekers in financial services, it’s the anchor tenant of the whole local industry — and its steady hiring across technology and operations surprises people who only picture brokers.
4. World Wide Technology
The metro’s great under-the-radar success story. WWT is a technology solutions company — enterprise IT, cloud, AI infrastructure — with roughly $20 billion in revenue and a global headquarters at Westport Plaza in Maryland Heights (WWT). Privately held, founded here, and one of the largest Black-founded companies in the country, WWT is the biggest reason “St. Louis tech” is a serious phrase rather than a hopeful one.
5. Anheuser-Busch
The one everybody knows. The historic Soulard brewery complex has anchored the city since the 1850s, and it remains the U.S. brewing headquarters — One Busch Place, where the Budweiser Clydesdales still live part of the year and the brewery lights still draw crowds every December. Whatever has changed about global ownership, the brewing, the jobs, and the civic identity are still very much here — ask anyone who’s taken the brewery tour, or anyone whose grandfather worked the bottling line.
6. BJC Health System
Not a household “brand” so much as the place half the metro was born, treated, or employed. BJC — anchored by Barnes-Jewish Hospital and its Washington University medical partnership — is the largest private employer in Missouri, with a workforce around 47,000 after its merger with Kansas City’s Saint Luke’s (BJC). If employment is the measure, this is the biggest name on the list — and its hiring reach runs from surgeons to schedulers to software teams.
7. Emerson
A St. Louis industrial institution since 1890. Emerson builds automation technology and software for industries worldwide, sits at #238 on the Fortune 500, and runs its global operations from its longtime campus in the metro. It’s the classic quiet giant: little consumer visibility, enormous engineering payroll — and a name on more automation systems worldwide than most people will ever notice.
8. Nestlé Purina PetCare
If you have a dog or cat, Purina is probably in your pantry right now. The pet care giant’s North American headquarters sits at 800 Chouteau Avenue downtown — Purina has been a St. Louis company since its Ralston Purina days more than a century ago, and its checkerboard logo is as local as the Arch. It remains one of downtown’s largest corporate anchors and a major employer in marketing, R&D, and operations.
9. Reinsurance Group of America (RGA)
The metro’s most invisible giant: RGA sells reinsurance — insurance for insurance companies — from its Chesterfield headquarters, and at #196 on the Fortune 500 it outranks almost everything on this list in revenue while remaining unknown at most dinner tables — the corporate equivalent of the bassist who’s secretly the best musician in the band. For actuarial, finance, and data careers in St. Louis, it’s a destination employer.
10. Bunge
The newest heavyweight. The global agribusiness and food company — roughly $53 billion in revenue — moved its headquarters to the St. Louis area in 2019, instantly becoming one of the metro’s largest companies by revenue and deepening the region’s claim as an ag-tech capital alongside the plant-science corridor at Danforth and Bayer’s crop-science operations. A 3 billion company choosing St. Louis in this decade is the strongest possible counter-argument to the decline narrative.
How St. Louis built this bench
None of this is accidental. The metro’s corporate depth grew out of four historic strengths that still shape who headquarters here:
The river made it a trade town. Grain, goods, and beer moved through St. Louis before they moved through almost anywhere else west of the Mississippi — the lineage that runs from the 1850s brewery in Soulard straight to Bunge’s modern agribusiness headquarters and the region’s plant-science corridor.
Aviation left an engineering deep bench. The McDonnell Douglas legacy lives on in Boeing’s major defense operations near the airport — and in generations of engineers whose skills seeded companies across the region.
Medicine became an industry. The Washington University–BJC medical center didn’t just treat the region; it built one of the country’s premier academic-medical economies, with Centene’s insurance empire and a health-tech scene steadily growing up around it.
Family ownership kept companies home. Enterprise, Edward Jones’ partnership model, WWT — St. Louis’s giants skew unusually private and founder-rooted, which is a big reason they never merged their way out of town the way so many public companies eventually do.
The bench: five more worth knowing
The list could honestly run twenty deep. Rounding out the picture from the same Fortune 1000 data: Post Holdings (the cereal-and-consumer-foods company, #477), Energizer (yes, the battery bunny is a St. Louis company), Graybar (electrical and industrial distribution), Core & Main (waterworks distribution, #497), and Build-A-Bear, whose world headquarters sits downtown on 18th Street. Seventeen Fortune 1000 headquarters, plus the private giants — for a metro our size, that’s a remarkably deep bench — deeper per capita than most metros twice our size, and the quiet engine behind everything from charity galas to stadium naming rights.
Where the headquarters actually sit
The corporate map clusters more tightly than people expect. Clayton is the boardroom of the region — Centene’s towers, Enterprise’s home base, Emerson nearby. West County stacks the rest of the suburban giants: Edward Jones’ sprawling campus, RGA out in Chesterfield, and World Wide Technology at Westport Plaza in Maryland Heights. Downtown holds the makers and the mascots — Purina on Chouteau Avenue, Build-A-Bear on 18th Street — with Anheuser-Busch just south at One Busch Place in Soulard.
That geography matters practically: it’s why Clayton lunch spots survive on expense accounts, why Highway 40 westbound at 5 p.m. is what it is (a parking lot with exits), and why “where do you work?” in St. Louis is half a question about your commute.
The next chapter: what’s growing
The bench isn’t static. A few currents worth watching, stated honestly: the region’s plant-science and ag-tech corridor keeps compounding — Bunge’s arrival, Bayer’s crop-science operations, and the Danforth Plant Science Center give St. Louis a legitimate claim to the ag-innovation capital conversation. Geospatial is the newest gravity well: the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s massive new western headquarters in north St. Louis has drawn a growing cluster of mapping and data firms around it. And the startup layer — Cortex in Midtown, T-REX downtown, the TechSTL community — keeps working to turn all that corporate depth into founder pipelines and the next generation of names on this list.
None of that is guaranteed to mint the next Fortune 500 name. But it’s the same recipe that built the current list: institutions, engineers, and companies that decided staying home was a strategy.
What this means if you live here
Three practical takeaways from all this corporate geography:
For job seekers: these headquarters mean the metro hires for national-scale roles — finance at Edward Jones and RGA, tech at WWT and Centene, brand marketing at Purina and Post, healthcare across BJC and Mercy — at a cost of living well below the coasts. Our guide to the best jobs near St. Louis maps the strongest career paths, and the marketing jobs guide digs into what those corporate marketing seats actually pay.
For small business owners: giants create ecosystems. Every headquarters on this list is surrounded by caterers, contractors, cleaning crews, IT shops, and coffee spots that live on its gravity. The corporate map is also a customer map: a catering company that lands one corporate campus account changes its whole year, and the vendors who serve these giants are hiding in every strip mall from Maryland Heights to Chesterfield.
For everyone else: civic bragging rights, properly sourced. Next time someone calls St. Louis a flyover town, you have seventeen Fortune 1000 headquarters, the country’s biggest rental-car company, a $20 billion tech firm, and the beer — all with local addresses, and all hiring your neighbors.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in St. Louis?
The metro’s Fortune 500 headquarters include Centene (#23), Emerson (#238), Reinsurance Group of America (#196), Edward Jones, and Post Holdings among a larger group — Greater St. Louis, Inc. counts seventeen Fortune 1000 headquarters in the region in its most recent tally. Privately held giants like Enterprise Mobility and World Wide Technology don’t appear on Fortune’s revenue lists but rank with the largest of them.
Who is the largest employer in St. Louis?
By headcount, BJC Health System — the largest private employer in the entire state of Missouri, with a workforce of roughly 47,000 following its merger with Saint Luke’s. Among non-healthcare employers, the giants include Edward Jones, Enterprise Mobility, World Wide Technology, and the region’s major universities and government bodies.
Is St. Louis a good city for corporate careers?
Honestly, yes — and it’s underrated. Seventeen Fortune 1000 headquarters plus major private companies means national-scale roles in insurance, finance, technology, healthcare, consumer brands, and agribusiness, without coastal living costs. The trade-off is concentration: certain industries (healthcare, finance, ag-tech) run deep here, while some others cluster elsewhere.
What products made by St. Louis companies do I probably own?
Check your house: Purina pet food, Energizer batteries, Post cereals, and Anheuser-Busch beverages are all made by companies headquartered in the metro — and if you’ve ever rented a car, there’s a good chance the receipt said Enterprise, National, or Alamo, all one St. Louis-based company.
The giants anchor the metro — but the neighborhoods run on small business. Browse the local companies that actually fix your sink, cut your hair, and cater your party on St Louis Near Me Directory.
If you run one of those businesses, listing it puts you on the map next to the customers — and the corporate neighbors — already searching for you.
Written by a dedicated team of St. Louis locals who live, work, and play right here in the St. Louis metro. Founder Lane Forman and team are committed to building the region’s most trusted directory by verifying listings and connecting local businesses with loyal customers across Missouri and Illinois.