10 Biggest Industries in America

If you are looking for a career field, these are the 10 biggest industries in America that contribute the most to the US GDP.

There are several ways of determining how big the biggest industries in America are.  Two of the most popular are GDP share and number of employees. We went with industry GDP share because we feel that is a more accurate representation of how particular industry impacts country’s economy. Employee count, as important as it is, can be misleading at times. For instance, the single largest employer in the US is the government, with more than 22 million employees. While they provide a valuable service (well, not all of them, the Congress is obviously excluded) their role is more support one and doesn’t influence the economy in the same way as real estate or manufacturing. Still, government services have a GDP share and they are represented on our list. For the most part, this represents how much money government spends on various services and projects.

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The US economy is still the largest in the world by far. It represents more than 20% of the global economy.  Although the gap is shrinking, it is still 70% larger than China’s, which is second on the list. Numbers 2 through 7 are taken by Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Brazil, in that order. The United States GDP is larger than all those 6 countries’ GDPs combined. In 2014, it was valued at more than $17.4 trillion. In fact, if biggest industries in America were countries, they would rank in Top 20 per GDP in the world. The smallest industry on our list would still have higher GDP than Switzerland. The fact that almost all of them are among fastest growing industries in America helped secure their positions.

Without getting into how these numbers impact people’s lives, they are still impressive. A lion share of US economy, or 76.8% to be precise, is represented by these 10 biggest industries in America. Let’s see which industries control three-quarters of America’s economy.