The region’s largest employment centers pull workers across city lines, while some of its wealthiest communities remain primarily places to live.
50,870 local jobs make it the center of a labor market that extends far beyond the city boundary.
That makes changes in its employers, office use, and transit demand regional events—not merely city-level ones.
Its local job base changed +88% during that period.
The useful next question is whether that came from one employer, a broader industry cluster, or many smaller businesses—because each creates a different kind of durability.
A high median household income sits alongside just 0.19 local jobs per resident.
That makes access to employment elsewhere—and the durability of remote work—especially important to the city’s future.
Cities high on income but low on jobs per resident depend more heavily on regional job centers, remote work, and the transportation links between home and work.
Choose any two cities. The bars show each city's position across the full region; farther right means more of that measure, not necessarily a better outcome.
The one list Delaware’s own local governments compile draws on each institution’s public disclosures rather than confidential state labor-market records—so it can only ever be a statewide picture, not a per-city one.
A federal confidentiality rule (20 CFR Part 603) blocks named, audited employer data below the state level. Dover’s and Newark’s own Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports say so directly: individual employer identities collected through the state’s labor-market program may not be disclosed, so their statistical sections report only county-wide industry aggregates.
Wilmington’s ACFR does list named institutions and counts—but on closer reading, that table’s roster is statewide (it names Dover Air Force Base and Sussex County hospitals despite the table’s own footnote claiming a New Castle County scope). It was assembled from each institution’s own public disclosures, not the confidential state dataset, which is why it could be compiled at all.
The city-level exceptionMilford is the one Delaware city with a genuine local employer table: its own FY2024 financial statements name Perdue Farms as the largest single employer in and around the city, well ahead of Bayhealth’s Sussex Campus and the Milford School District.
Statewide roster, compiled from public company and government disclosures—not a single audited census.
Source: City of Wilmington FY2024 ACFR, Table XIV ↗ · City of Dover FY2024 ACFR, Table 21 ↗ (confidentiality citation) · City of Milford FY2024 Annual Financial Statements ↗. Several counts are statewide rather than one-city totals.