With 41,806 jobs at 1,177 establishments, manufacturing is the second largest employing industry in the 13-county Central Minnesota planning region, just behind health care and social assistance. Manufacturing accounts for 15.2 percent of total employment in Central Minnesota, which is 4 percent more concentrated than in the state as a whole, where 11.2 percent of total jobs are in manufacturing.

After expanding steadily from 2010 to 2015, manufacturing job growth slowed in Central Minnesota in 2016, then resumed growth in 2017. However, the region still has about 1,100 fewer manufacturing jobs than it did in 2007, the start of the recession (Figure 1).

Central Minnesota has just over 9.6 percent of total employment in the state, but 13 percent of the manufacturing jobs. More impressively, the region is home to over 28 percent of the state’s furniture and related product manufacturing employment – which includes kitchen cabinets; about 24 percent of the state’s jobs in transportation equipment manufacturing and paper manufacturing; and 22 percent of the statewide employment in nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing – which includes granite countertops.

With 8,460 jobs, the largest sector in the region is food manufacturing – which is nearly 18 percent of the statewide total. Almost half of those jobs are in the animal slaughtering and processing subsector, which had 4,056 jobs in the region.

Central Minnesota also shows higher concentrations of jobs in food manufacturing, fabricated metal product manufacturing, plastics and rubber product manufacturing, beverage manufacturing, and electrical equipment, appliance, and component manufacturing.

The manufacturing industry provides average annual wages of $52,520 in Central Minnesota, which was $10,000 higher than the average annual wage across all industries. With roughly $2.2 billion in total payroll in 2017, manufacturing wages accounted for almost 19 percent of all wages paid out in Central Minnesota. After rising 3.6 percent, average wages at manufacturing establishments narrowly outpaced the 3.3 percent wage growth across all industries from 2016 to 2017. Paper manufacturing provided the highest average annual wage in the region at $66,768 in 2017. Relatively high wages were also found in chemical manufacturing (which includes ethanol production) and computer and electronic product manufacturing, which both had average annual wages over $60,000 per year in 2017 (Figure 2).

For More Information

Contact Luke Greiner.