Top Employers in Illinois in 2026: Who Is Hiring, Who Is Cutting, and Where

The largest employers in Illinois are governments and hospital systems, not the corporate headquarters on the skyline. The federal government has about 55,100 Chicago-area workers on Crain's 2026 list, the State of Illinois counted 55,340 employees in May 2025, and Advocate Health Care and Northwestern Medicine each top 31,000. The year's news is split: United, AbbVie, and Rivian are adding people while Walgreens, Capital One, and Amazon Fresh filed layoff notices.

Two cautions: Crain's counts the Chicago area, not the state, and Walmart's figure is the last one the company published for Illinois, four years ago.

Who is adding jobs in 2026

United is the biggest hirer in plain sight. The airline told its newsroom in January that it would add roughly 2,500 employees at O'Hare by the end of 2026 on top of a Chicago workforce that has grown past 18,000 in ten years, as it pushed to a record 750 daily flights for the summer. The $8.5 billion O'Hare expansion is behind the growth, and headquarters remains the Willis Tower, where it moved from Elk Grove Village in 2007.

AbbVie's Illinois fact sheet, dated April 2026, puts its state workforce above 11,500 and lists 350 new operations jobs in North Chicago, tied to a $380 million investment in active-ingredient manufacturing that is due to be fully running by 2029.

State Farm is consolidating rather than cutting. In March 2026 the company said it would move all of its roughly 13,000 Bloomington associates into the Corporate South campus by the end of 2027, closing the downtown headquarters building and the Illinois Operations Center, and that the local headcount had hovered around 13,000 for several years. The newsroom release also confirmed hybrid and remote work continues for its 62,000-plus national workforce. In September the company said it would add about 3,000 claims jobs nationwide in 2027; it did not say how many land in Bloomington.

Rivian started R2 deliveries from the Normal plant in June 2026, and CEO RJ Scaringe said company headcount had reached 17,000, about 1,800 more than at the start of the year. The plant employs around 8,000 people, which makes Rivian McLean County's second-largest employer behind State Farm. The same month, the company cut roughly 300 jobs across the business; local reporting indicated the Normal assembly line was not included.

OSF HealthCare's facts page reports almost 27,000 Mission Partners, its word for staff, across 174 locations and 16 hospitals, run from Peoria. Advocate, for its part, set a unified $18.85 minimum starting wage this year.

Who cut jobs this year

Walgreens is the biggest story in the suburbs. Sycamore Partners closed its roughly $10 billion take-private on August 28, 2025, installed former Staples executive Mike Motz as CEO, and in February 2026 filed Illinois WARN notices covering 469 employees at the Deerfield headquarters on Wilmot Road, in downtown Chicago, and in Danville, with 60 days' notice starting February 10. The company said it now expects fewer than 100 store closures this year, far below earlier projections.

Capital One's integration of Discover, bought for about $35 billion, hit Riverwoods hard. The 2026 round eliminated 1,139 positions, including 532 at the former Discover headquarters and 69 Illinois residents working remotely; most had a final day of May 4, with smaller groups leaving through October 2. Counting a late-2025 round, the total is 1,748 jobs, none of them front-line customer roles according to the company.

Amazon shows up on both lists. Crain's recorded a 3.8% drop in its Chicago-area headcount, and January 2026 WARN filings for Amazon Fresh covered 1,413 workers across nine notices, the largest single-employer total of the month. At the same time the company is building two robotics fulfillment centers in Matteson and Markham.

Chicago Public Schools laid off 162 employees in July 2026, half from central office, while proposing a $9.88 billion 2026-27 budget with five possible furlough days. Deere, headquartered in Moline, cut 287 Illinois jobs effective January 3, 2025, including 200 at Harvester Works in East Moline, citing weak tractor demand.

Local note: Caterpillar still runs plants in East Peoria, Mossville, Decatur, Mapleton, and Pontiac, but it moved its headquarters to Irving, Texas, in 2022 and does not publish an Illinois headcount, so treat the figures you see online as unconfirmed.

The statewide numbers behind the names

The Illinois Department of Employment Security's August 2026 release put unemployment at 4.7%, down from a revised 4.9% in July but 0.4 points higher than a year earlier. Nonfarm payrolls stood at 6,175,600, down 4,400 in the month and up only 15,000 over the year, a 0.2% gain against 0.4% nationally. Private education and health services, the sector holding the state's largest employers, lost 6,100 jobs in August.

Layoff filings tell the same story. Illinois employers posted 184 WARN notices covering 22,711 workers in calendar 2025, the second-highest annual total in the WARN Firehose tracker, and January 2026 added 15 notices for 1,827 workers with retail hit hardest. The Illinois Department of Commerce publishes the official list, and it is the first thing to check before accepting an offer from a company in the middle of an acquisition.

Downstate, the anchors are public. The State of Illinois is Springfield's largest employer, the University of Illinois System reports 30,359 full-time-equivalent staff plus 10,053 graduate assistants, and OSF in Peoria and Carle Health in Urbana lead health care.

Before you apply

• Check the Illinois WARN list at the Department of Commerce for any employer in an acquisition or spin-off (Walgreens, Discover, Kraft Heinz).

• Hospital systems hire directly; Advocate, Northwestern Medicine, and OSF each run their own careers site.

• Compare pay against location: our cost of living guide and the Bloomington and Peoria profiles cover rents and property taxes.

• Headcounts verified October 2026 against Crain's 2026 list as reported, IDES, and company newsrooms; where a company has not published a state figure, we say so rather than estimate.

Quick answers

Who is the largest employer in Illinois? By headcount, government: the federal government (55,138 in the Chicago area), the State of Illinois (55,340), and Chicago Public Schools (46,244). Among private employers, Walmart's last published Illinois figure was 59,234, and Advocate Health Care leads the Chicago area at 31,761.

Which Illinois companies laid people off in 2026? Walgreens (469 jobs in Deerfield, Chicago, and Danville), Capital One at the former Discover headquarters in Riverwoods (1,139), Amazon Fresh (1,413 in January WARN notices), Chicago Public Schools (162), and Rivian (about 300 companywide in June).

Is Illinois adding jobs? Barely. Payrolls grew 15,000, or 0.2%, in the year to August 2026 against 0.4% nationally, and unemployment was 4.7%. Aviation, pharma manufacturing, and EV production are growing; retail, finance back offices, and school districts are shrinking.