Orlandoruns on a handful of strong industries. If you’re job-hunting or weighing a move, here’s where the opportunities (and the big-name employers) are.
Top industries & employers
Theme parks, hospitality & conventions
Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando (Epic Universe opened May 2025), SeaWorld, Orange County Convention Center, Marriott Vacations Worldwide, Hilton Grand Vacations
Walt Disney World employs around 77,000 people and is the largest single-site employer in the United States; Universal opened an entire fourth park in May 2025. The Orange County Convention Center is one of the largest in the country. The concentration is even heavier than Anaheim's — and 2020 showed exactly how a metro built on it behaves when the parks close.
Modelling, simulation & training
Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, Leidos, CAE USA, the Team Orlando cluster at Central Florida Research Park
Orlando's least-known and best-paid sector. The US military's simulation and training procurement commands sit together at Central Florida Research Park beside UCF, and the contractor cluster grew up around them. It is the reason a theme-park city has a serious engineering job market, and it is largely closed to non-citizens because of clearance requirements.
Health care & life sciences
AdventHealth, Orlando Health, Nemours Children's Hospital, Orlando VA Medical Center, UCF College of Medicine, the Lake Nona Medical City cluster
The metro's two big hospital systems each employ tens of thousands and are the most reliable hiring in the region when tourism turns. Lake Nona's Medical City assembled a medical school, a children's hospital, a VA hospital and research institutes on one site in under twenty years.
Aerospace & space
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Siemens Energy's Orlando gas turbine operations, the Space Coast supply chain an hour east
Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center are an hour's drive east, and the supply chain and workforce spill into the Orlando metro. Siemens Energy runs a large gas turbine engineering and manufacturing operation in Orlando that has nothing to do with tourism at all.
Higher education & research
University of Central Florida, Valencia College, Rollins College (Winter Park), Full Sail University
UCF is one of the largest universities in the United States by enrolment and sits next to the research park, which is why the simulation and optics clusters are here. Its optics and photonics college (CREOL) anchors a genuine specialist industry.
Logistics, construction & professional services
Amazon fulfilment operations, Darden Restaurants (headquartered in Orlando), the I-4 corridor distribution market, a very large residential construction sector
Central Florida is one of the fastest-growing metros in the country, and construction and distribution have grown with it. Darden — Olive Garden, LongHorn and others — is a genuine Fortune 500 headquarters in the city, which is rarer here than the metro's size suggests.
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