How Many ESOP Companies Are There? 6,231 Employee-Owned Sponsors by State, Industry and Size (Plan Year 2024)

The market in brief

• 6,231 companies sponsored at least one ongoing ESOP in plan year 2024, holding 6,336 plans, by SMBB's count of the Department of Labor's raw Form 5500 filings.
• The plans report 15,339,388 total participants and 11,173,642 active participants at the end of the plan year.
• 3,149 ESOP companies (50.5%) have fewer than 100 participants; the median company has 98.
• 268 companies with 5,000 or more participants (4.3% of sponsors) hold 89.5% of all ESOP participants.
• Maine (26.83), North Dakota (23.84) and Hawaii (20.50) have the most ESOP companies per 1,000 corporations with 20 or more employees; the US ratio is 13.32.
• Professional services, manufacturing and construction together account for 57.1% of ESOP companies.
• The number of ESOP companies rose by 99 (1.6%) between plan years 2015 and 2024, while S corporation ESOP plans grew 36.5% and KSOP plans fell 15.6%.
• Applied to plan year 2023, the same method finds 6,516 ESOP plans, 9 fewer than the Labor Department's weighted estimate of 6,525.

How many ESOP companies are there: 6,231 sponsors in plan year 2024

Counting ESOP companies from the raw filings takes four decisions: which codes mark an ESOP, which plan year to count, how to treat plans that ended during the year, and whether to count plans or employers. With the choices below, plan year 2024 has 6,336 ongoing ESOP plans run by 6,231 companies.

Every private retirement plan with more than one participant files an annual Form 5500 with the Department of Labor. On line 8a the filer enters two-character plan characteristic codes. The 2024 Form 5500 instructions define code 2O as an ESOP that is not debt-financed and code 2P as an ESOP that buys employer stock with borrowed money or other debt financing. We treat a plan as an ESOP if it carries either code.

ESOP company (as counted here): An employer identification number (EIN) that sponsors at least one ESOP plan (code 2O or 2P) whose plan year began in 2024 and whose return is not marked final. Under 26 U.S.C. 4975(e)(7), an ESOP is a qualified stock bonus plan, or stock bonus and money purchase plan, designed to invest primarily in qualifying employer securities.

The Form 5500 datasets are organized by form year, and the datasets guide says each Latest file keeps only the newest accepted filing per plan. A form-year file can still hold returns for other plan years: the form year 2024 file contains 109 ESOP-coded filings for other plan years, mostly amended older returns and short 2025 plan years. We pooled all form-year files from 2015 to 2025, kept one record per sponsor EIN and plan number for each plan year, and dropped 6 duplicates.

We removed 159 final returns, filed by plans that terminated or merged during 2024. That leaves 6,336 ongoing plans. Because 84 companies run more than one ESOP, the company count is lower: 6,231.

Two checks support the definition. First, the short Form 5500-SF never carries an ESOP code: 0 of 799,188 form year 2024 short-form filings do. Second, plans coded 2Q (the employer maintaining the ESOP is an S corporation) without 2O or 2P are excluded; there are 70 such ongoing plans, and counting them would add 67 companies for a total of 6,298.

Plan year 2024 is close to complete but not final. Of the 6,516 plan year 2023 ESOPs, 185 (2.8%) have a latest filing received after 2025-09-25, the same point in the filing cycle. That 2.8% is an upper bound on what plan year 2024 may still gain, because a late amendment replaces an on-time original in the Latest file.

The filings match the Labor Department's own estimate within 9 plans

Run on plan year 2023, the same method counts 6,516 ESOP plans. The Department of Labor's weighted estimate for plan years ending in 2023 is 6,525, a gap of -0.14%. The trade association count is higher because it uses a broader code definition.

The Private Pension Plan Bulletin for 2023 (version 1.1, January 2026, data extracted 2025-06-30) reports 6,525 ESOPs with 15.1 million total participants and $2.05 trillion in assets. DOL weights its figures to estimate delinquent filers and counts plan years ending in a year, so small differences from an unweighted count are expected.

The National Center for Employee Ownership (Employee Ownership by the Numbers, updated January 2026) counts 6,609 plans and 6,411 unique companies for 2023, of which 5,993 are private and 418 publicly traded. NCEO states that its count adds plans coded 2Q without 2O or 2P, which DOL does not. That definition, the data year, and NCEO's unique-company method (its page does not detail how related entities are grouped) account for the difference from our 6,190 plan year 2023 sponsors.

Half of ESOP companies have fewer than 100 participants

The typical ESOP company is a small or mid-sized employer: the median sponsor reports 98 participants and 50.5% report fewer than 100. Participants, by contrast, are concentrated in a few hundred very large companies.

The largest single size band is 100 to 249 participants (1,463 companies, 23.5%), followed closely by 50 to 99 (1,459 companies, 23.4%). Among stand-alone ESOP companies, the median is 89 participants and the mean is 346.0, pulled up by a few very large stand-alone plans.

At the other end, 268 companies with 5,000 or more participants (4.3% of sponsors) report 13,735,187 participants, 89.5% of the total. Only 32 of them run stand-alone ESOPs; the other 236 run KSOPs, the structure typical of large employers that put company stock inside a 401(k).

A participant count is not an employee count. Line 6f includes retired and separated people who still hold balances, and excludes employees not yet eligible. Small and large plan status on the Form 5500 also follows its own rules, so the 100-participant line here is a size marker, not a filing category.

Stand-alone ESOPs and KSOPs are two different populations

86.1% of ESOP companies run stand-alone ESOPs, but 87.9% of participants sit in companies with a KSOP. Any average that mixes the two describes neither.

The 5,367 stand-alone ESOP companies cover 1,856,822 participants, 1,352,393 of them active. The 864 companies with a KSOP cover 13,482,566. DOL's 2023 Bulletin shows the same split: 985 KSOPs held 13.1 million participants, 87.0% of the ESOP total.

Plan assets follow the same pattern. Schedules H and I attached to the plan year 2024 returns (2,866 large-plan Schedule H filings, 3,470 small-plan Schedule I filings) report $2.28 trillion in total ESOP plan assets, most of it inside KSOPs, which also hold their participants' other 401(k) investments. Stand-alone ESOPs hold $286.2 billion, and $261.8 billion of that (91.5%) is employer stock. The median stand-alone ESOP holds $8.0 million.

Two features dominate among ESOP companies. 4,056 (65.1%) report code 2Q, meaning the employer is an S corporation, and 3,757 (60.3%) report code 2P for a debt-financed ESOP. The 2P code describes the plan's current status; a plan that has repaid its acquisition loan may now report 2O.

Maine, North Dakota and Hawaii lead on ESOP companies per corporate employer

California has the most ESOP companies, but it also has the most corporations. Measured against C and S corporations with 20 or more employees, Maine (26.83 per 1,000), North Dakota (23.84) and Hawaii (20.50) stand out, and Delaware (3.03) and Nevada (3.39) trail.

By raw count, the leaders in plan year 2024 are California (733), Texas (333), Ohio (328), Pennsylvania (283) and Illinois (280). California alone holds 11.8% of US ESOP companies.

To compare states of different sizes, we divide ESOP companies by the number of C and S corporations with 20 or more employees in the Census Bureau's Statistics of U.S. Businesses 2022. An ESOP invests in employer securities, which means corporate stock, and only 2.1% of ESOP companies report fewer than 10 participants. Nationally the ratio is 13.32 ESOP companies per 1,000 such corporations (467,962 in 2022). Iowa (18.58) and Minnesota (17.81) follow the top three.

Read the participant columns with care. A company's participants are assigned to the state where it files, so one large retailer's KSOP makes Arkansas the state with the most ESOP participants despite only 42 ESOP companies. The ratio column uses 2022 Census counts, the latest release, against 2024 filings, and state Census counts include a multistate firm in each state where it operates.

Professional services, manufacturing and construction hold 57.1% of ESOP companies

Three sectors account for more than half of all ESOP companies, each with roughly a fifth. Retail and finance add large participant counts through a few big employers.

Sector comes from the six-digit business code each sponsor enters on line 2d of the Form 5500, using the list in the filing instructions. Professional, scientific and technical services (engineering, architecture, consulting) has 1,229 ESOP companies (19.7%), manufacturing 1,199 (19.2%) and construction 1,134 (18.2%). Finance and insurance has 734 ESOP companies, and 528 of the 740 ongoing ESOP plans in that sector list a bank or other depository institution business code (NAICS 5221).

Medians differ by sector. The median manufacturing ESOP company reports 107 participants, construction 90 and professional services 85. Retail trade has only 358 ESOP companies but 5,325,982 participants, because a few large retailers run KSOPs.

Ten years of filings show a flat count, more S corporation ESOPs and fewer KSOPs

ESOP companies numbered 6,132 in plan year 2015 and 6,231 in 2024. The mix changed more than the total: S corporation ESOP plans grew by 1,088 while KSOP plans fell by 172.

The count fell slowly from 2015 to a low of 6,035 companies in 2020, then rose each year to 6,231 in 2024, the highest in the series even before late 2024 filings arrive. DOL's weighted Bulletin series follows a similar path, bottoming out a year earlier, from 6,561 ESOPs in 2015 to 6,525 in 2023.

S corporation ESOP plans rose from 2,979 to 4,067 (36.5%), and debt-financed (2P) plans from 2,921 to 3,767. KSOP plans fell from 1,101 to 929 (15.6% fewer). New ESOPs keep arriving: 217 ongoing plan year 2024 plans list a 2024 effective date, a floor because ESOPs converted from older plans keep their original date. NCEO counts 309 new ESOPs in 2023 with its own method.

What the count means for an owner weighing a sale to employees

An ESOP is one of several exits for a private company owner. The filings show it is used mostly by companies with dozens to a few hundred participants, and mostly by S corporations, with debt financing in a majority of cases.

For an owner, the useful facts in these filings are the size and form of companies that already use ESOPs: half report fewer than 100 participants, 65.1% are S corporations, and 60.3% carry a debt-financed ESOP. The ESOP companies are concentrated in professional services, manufacturing and construction. The six stages of a conventional sale are described at how a business sale works, and questions to ask an adviser apply to an ESOP adviser as well.

Tax rules in one line: under 26 U.S.C. 1042, a seller of C corporation stock to an ESOP that owns at least 30 percent afterward may defer gain by buying qualified replacement property, and for sales after December 31, 2027, SECURE 2.0 extends a partial election (up to 10 percent of the amount realized) to S corporation stock.

Local benchmarks we calculated

Download the calculations (CSV)

What the numbers show

1. 6,231 US companies sponsored an ongoing ESOP in plan year 2024, by distinct employer identification number (DOL Form 5500 filings extracted 2026-09-25).^[2]
2. Those companies held 6,336 ongoing ESOP plans; 84 companies sponsor more than one ESOP.^[2]
3. ESOPs reported 15,339,388 total participants and 11,173,642 active participants at the end of plan year 2024 in the United States.^[2]
4. 50.5% of US ESOP companies (3,149) reported fewer than 100 participants in plan year 2024.^[2]
5. The 268 ESOP companies with at least 5,000 participants hold 89.5% of US ESOP participants (plan year 2024).^[2]
6. 5,367 of the 6,231 ESOP companies (86.1%) run stand-alone ESOPs with no 401(k) feature; they cover 1,856,822 participants (plan year 2024).^[2]
7. Companies with a KSOP, an ESOP combined with a 401(k), are 864 sponsors but hold 87.9% of ESOP participants (plan year 2024).^[2]
8. 65.1% of US ESOP companies (4,056) report an S corporation ESOP and 60.3% (3,757) a debt-financed ESOP, code 2P (plan year 2024).^[2][5]
9. Stand-alone ESOPs held $286.2 billion at the end of plan year 2024, 91.5% of it ($261.8 billion) in employer securities.^[3]
10. California has the most ESOP companies (733, 11.8% of the US), followed by Texas (333) and Ohio (328) in plan year 2024.^[2]
11. Maine has 26.83 ESOP companies per 1,000 C and S corporations with 20 or more employees, the highest ratio of any state; Delaware has the lowest at 3.03.^[2][10]
12. Professional, scientific and technical services (1,229), manufacturing (1,199) and construction (1,134) are the largest ESOP sectors in plan year 2024.^[2]
13. US ESOP companies numbered 6,132 in plan year 2015 and 6,231 in 2024, a change of 1.6%, with a low of 6,035 in 2020.^[2]
14. S corporation ESOP plans rose from 2,979 to 4,067 between plan years 2015 and 2024, while KSOP plans fell from 1,101 to 929.^[2]
15. No Form 5500-SF short-form filing carried an ESOP code in form year 2024 (0 of 799,188), so ESOPs appear only on the full Form 5500.^[4]

Frequently asked questions

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Reproduce this analysis

Every figure comes from the files below. The scripts that pulled and computed them are kept with the report and can be re-run.

Data quality and exclusions

• 109 ESOP-coded filings in the form year 2024 file report a plan year other than 2024 (amended older returns, short 2025 plan years); they were assigned to their own plan year, not to 2024.
• 6 duplicate plan records for plan year 2024 across form-year files were removed (kept the latest plan-year begin date, then the latest received date).
• 159 final returns for plan year 2024 were excluded from the ongoing count; they remain in the all-plans count of 6,495.
• 70 ongoing plans coded 2Q without 2O or 2P were excluded from the headline and reported as a sensitivity (67 additional companies).
• 28 ESOP companies reported zero or no end-of-year participants; they stay in the count and fall in the 0 or not reported size band.
• 36 ESOP companies with a territory, foreign or blank state are counted nationally but excluded from state ratios.
• Codes were split into 2-character tokens rather than substring-matched; 0 code strings had an odd length in any form year.

Methodology

Source selection. The count comes from the Department of Labor's Form 5500 Latest datasets for form years 2015 to 2025, downloaded once on 2026-11-02 from askebsa.dol.gov (files extracted 2026-09-25 and posted 2026-09-30). DOL's Private Pension Plan Bulletin (Table D10) and NCEO's published 2023 figures serve as cross-checks only. State denominators come from the Census Bureau's Statistics of U.S. Businesses 2022, the latest release.

Inclusion. A plan is an ESOP when line 8a lists code 2O or 2P (2024 Form 5500 instructions). The plan year is the year in which the plan year began. All form-year files are pooled; one record is kept per sponsor EIN and three-digit plan number per plan year (latest begin date, then latest received date). Final returns are excluded from the ongoing count. A company is a distinct sponsor EIN.

Exclusion and sensitivity. Plans coded 2Q without 2O or 2P are excluded and reported as a sensitivity (70 plans, 67 companies). Form 5500-SF filings were scanned in full and carry no ESOP codes. One-participant plans file Form 5500-EZ, which is not in these datasets.

Conflicting numbers. DOL weights for delinquent filers and tabulates plan years ending in a year; NCEO adds 2Q-only plans and reports its own unique-company count. We show all three counts side by side rather than choosing one, and we report our own replication for plan year 2023 against DOL's figure.

Derived metrics. Sponsor participants are sums of line 6f across a sponsor's ongoing ESOP plans. Size bands, sector (first two digits of the line 2d business code) and state (location address, else mailing address) are assigned per sponsor. State density divides sponsors by C and S corporations with 20 or more employees (SUSB 2022, legal form codes 2 and 3, enterprise sizes 20 to 99, 100 to 499 and 500+). Assets join Schedule H (large plans) and Schedule I (small plans) on ACK_ID. All calculations are in scripts/ and reproduce from raw/.

Limitations. Plan year 2024 may still gain up to 2.8% more plans from late filings. Participant counts are not headcounts. Public and private companies cannot be separated from the filings alone. State is the filing address. This page was last updated 2026-11-02. Owners looking for a broker or M&A adviser for a conventional sale can use the broker match form.

This report presents published data with its limitations. It is not legal, financial or investment advice.

Sources, ranked by quality

Tier 1: primary and official sources (16)

• [1] U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration. Form 5500 Datasets (Form 5500 Latest files, form years 2015 to 2025). Form years 2015 to 2025; files extracted 2026-09-25, posted 2026-09-30. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [2] U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration. F_5500_2024_Latest.zip (Form 5500 main form, form year 2024). Form year 2024; extracted 2026-09-25. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [3] U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration. F_SCH_H_2024_Latest.zip and F_SCH_I_2024_Latest.zip (Schedules H and I, form year 2024). Form year 2024; extracted 2026-09-25. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [4] U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration. F_5500_SF_2024_Latest.zip (Form 5500-SF short form, form year 2024). Form year 2024; extracted 2026-09-25. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [5] U.S. Department of Labor, IRS and PBGC. 2024 Instructions for Form 5500 (List of Plan Characteristics Codes, line 2d business codes). 2024 plan year forms. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [6] U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration. Form 5500 Datasets Guide. 2009 and later datasets. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [7] U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration. Private Pension Plan Bulletin: Abstract of 2023 Form 5500 Annual Reports (Version 1.1, January 2026), Tables D10 and D11. Plan years ending in 2023; data extracted 2025-06-30. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [8] U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration. Private Pension Plan Bulletin abstracts, 2015 to 2022 editions, Table D10. Plan years ending in 2015 to 2022. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [9] U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration. Private Pension Plan Bulletin: Abstract of 2022 Form 5500 Annual Reports. Plan years ending in 2022; data extracted 2024-07-08. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [10] U.S. Census Bureau. Statistics of U.S. Businesses 2022: firms by state, legal form of organization and enterprise size. 2022 (released 2025-05-29). Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [11] U.S. Government Publishing Office (govinfo). 26 U.S.C. 1042, Sales of stock to employee stock ownership plans or certain cooperatives (2023 edition, with note on Pub. L. 117-328 sec. 114). Code as of the 2023 edition. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [12] U.S. Government Publishing Office (govinfo). 26 U.S.C. 4975(e)(7), definition of employee stock ownership plan (2023 edition). Code as of the 2023 edition. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [13] Internal Revenue Service. Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). Page reviewed 2026-07-23. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [14] U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration. Employee Ownership Initiative. Page read 2026-11-02. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [15] U.S. Government Publishing Office (govinfo). S. 2403, Retire through Ownership Act, engrossed in Senate. Passed the Senate 2025-10-09. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [16] Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives. Roll Call 314, S. 2403 (Retire through Ownership Act), 119th Congress, 2nd Session. Vote of 2026-09-16. Accessed 2026-11-02.

Tier 2: trade bodies, market research, company data (2)

• [17] National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO). Employee Ownership by the Numbers (updated January 2026). 2023 Form 5500 filings. Accessed 2026-11-02.
• [18] esop.org (data from NCEO Employee Ownership by the Numbers). Interactive Heatmap of US ESOPs (2026 update). 2023 Form 5500 filings. Accessed 2026-11-02.

Tier 3: journalism and expert commentary (1)

• [19] Voya Financial. Retire through Ownership Act signed into law (October 27, 2026). 2026-10-27. Accessed 2026-11-02.