Industries — Orlando, Florida

Orlando, the county seat of Orange County and home to an estimated 311,732 residents as of the U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2023, is internationally recognized as a tourism destination, but its industrial base encompasses four distinct sectors: tourism and hospitality, aerospace and defense simulation, healthcare, and digital and creative technology. Each sector operates at regional scale, drawing on the broader metropolitan area that extends into Osceola, Seminole, and Lake counties.

The Orlando Economic Partnership reported in March 2025 that Orlando ranked first nationally among major metropolitan areas in job growth, population growth, and GDP growth in 2024, adding 37,500 new jobs and 76,000 new residents in a single year. Healthcare and leisure and hospitality were the two dominant job-creating sectors in 2025, according to the Partnership's early-2026 analysis. The city's median household income of $69,268 and a poverty rate of 15.5% — above the national average — reflect the structural concentration of employment in service-sector roles that characterizes a tourism-heavy economy.

Tourism is Orlando's largest single industry by employment share. According to Capital Analytics Associates, Orlando welcomed a record 75.3 million visitors in 2024 — a 1.8% increase over 2023 — generating approximately $93 billion in economic impact and contributing $5.6 billion in local and state tax revenue. The industry accounts for roughly 30% of local employment.

Three private operators anchor the sector. Walt Disney World Resort, situated approximately 20 miles southwest of downtown Orlando on roughly 27,000 acres of unincorporated Orange and Osceola counties, is documented by the Florida Department of Commerce's VISIT FLORIDA analysis as the catalyst that transformed Orlando from a rural agricultural area into the most visited destination in the United States following its opening in October 1971. Universal Orlando Resort — comprising Universal Studios Florida, Islands of Adventure, Volcano Bay, and the Epic Universe park that opened May 22, 2025 — constitutes the region's second major theme park complex. SeaWorld Orlando operates as the third major branded destination.

The structural dependence of the local economy on visitor spending is visible in the city's demographics: the ACS 2023 records a labor force participation rate of 81.7% alongside a 5.3% unemployment rate and a median household income ($69,268) that reflects the prevalence of hospitality, food service, and retail positions in the workforce.

Orlando hosts one of the most concentrated clusters of modeling, training, and simulation (MTS) industry activity in the United States. According to the Orlando Economic Partnership, more than $6 billion in modeling, training, and simulation contracts flow through Central Florida annually. The institutional anchor of this cluster is the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division (NAWCTSD), a federal facility located at Orlando's Central Florida Research Park in eastern Orange County.

The Central Florida Research Park, adjacent to the University of Central Florida's main campus, houses NAWCTSD alongside numerous defense contractors and simulation firms, making it one of the nation's largest research parks by employment in the defense sector. Lockheed Martin operates Missiles and Fire Control research, development, and manufacturing facilities in the region and is among the area's largest private employers in the defense category, as documented by the Orlando Economic Partnership.

The academic foundation of the cluster is the University of Central Florida's Institute for Simulation and Training, founded in 1982, which provides research output and a trained workforce pipeline to defense and commercial simulation companies. According to the Orlando Economic Partnership, the Central Florida Tech Grove was established in 2019 as a collaborative facility connecting UCF research with industry and government partners within the simulation ecosystem. The MTS cluster is geographically distinct from the tourism economy, concentrated in the eastern arc of Orange County rather than the tourist corridor to the southwest.

Healthcare is the principal non-tourism growth sector in Orlando's economy. Two large multi-site health systems dominate the regional market. AdventHealth, headquartered in Altamonte Springs in neighboring Seminole County, employs approximately 37,672 workers in the Orlando region and operates across nine states, according to the Orlando Economic Partnership. Orlando Health operates a network encompassing 1,780 inpatient beds, including Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children, which serves as a pediatric referral center for the broader Central Florida region.

The scale of healthcare employment gives the sector a stabilizing function in Orlando's economy relative to the cyclical nature of tourism. The 2025 Orlando Talent Report published by the Orlando Economic Partnership identifies healthcare as one of three fields forecast to experience high growth through 2031, alongside digital and creative industries and science and engineering. The sector's expansion is partially driven by the demographic growth of the broader metropolitan area, which added 76,000 new residents in 2024 alone.

Orlando's digital and creative technology sector is anchored institutionally by the Creative Village, a 68-acre mixed-use, transit-oriented development in downtown Orlando described by the City of Orlando as oriented toward digital media, gaming, and technology. The development includes UCF and Valencia College campus facilities, creating a direct pipeline between higher education and the industry cluster. Electronic Arts' Orlando Studio and the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA) are among the named occupants documented by the Creative Village development entity.

In November 2024, master developer Craig Ustler filed plans for a 7-story mixed-use building within Creative Village comprising 122 market-rate residential units and 22,000 square feet of commercial space, as reported by the Creative Village development entity. This filing indicates continued buildout of the district nearly a decade after its initial planning.

The University of Central Florida, located in eastern Orange County, functions as the region's principal research university and talent supplier across multiple industry verticals — simulation, healthcare, digital media, and engineering — connecting the technology sector to the defense simulation cluster at the Central Florida Research Park. The 2025 Orlando Talent Report frames the long-term civic aspiration for this sector as positioning Orlando as a 'global creative capital,' a designation reflecting the broadening of the region's economic identity beyond its historical tourism-and-hospitality base.

The most significant single industry event of the 2024–2025 period was the opening of Universal's Epic Universe on May 22, 2025. CNBC described Comcast's investment in Epic Universe as the largest single investment the company has ever made in its Florida theme parks business. An economic analysis commissioned by Universal and conducted by Dr. Sean Snaith of UCF's Institute for Economic Forecasting, reported by both CNBC and Fortune, projects the park will generate approximately $2 billion for Florida in its first year of operation and that more than 17,500 jobs will be created in year one. Approximately 65,000 jobs were created during the construction phase, according to the same analysis.

At the metropolitan scale, the Orlando Economic Partnership documented in March 2025 that Orlando ranked first nationally among major metro areas in job growth, population growth, and GDP growth simultaneously in 2024 — a combination the Partnership termed a 'triple crown.' The 37,500 jobs added in 2024 spanned multiple sectors, with leisure and hospitality and healthcare leading by volume. Fortune additionally reported that Universal's cumulative economic impact in Florida since 2019 has reached $44 billion, a figure derived from the same UCF Institute for Economic Forecasting analysis.

The 2025 Orlando Talent Report, published by the Orlando Economic Partnership, identifies three fields as high-growth through 2031: healthcare, digital and creative industries, and science and engineering. These three sectors correspond directly to the non-tourism pillars of Orlando's economy — healthcare systems anchored by AdventHealth and Orlando Health, the digital media and gaming cluster at Creative Village and UCF, and the defense simulation ecosystem centered on NAWCTSD and the Central Florida Research Park.

The structural tension in Orlando's workforce is documented in the ACS 2023 data: a poverty rate of 15.5% and a median household income of $69,268 exist alongside an 81.7% labor force participation rate, indicating high workforce engagement but persistent income constraints that reflect the prevalence of lower-wage hospitality and service positions. Educational attainment — 26.1% of residents hold a bachelor's degree or higher — suggests room for workforce development in sectors that require higher credentialing, a gap that UCF, Valencia College, and the Creative Village campus infrastructure are positioned to address. The Orlando Economic Partnership's framing of Orlando as a prospective 'global creative capital' reflects institutional recognition that long-term wage growth depends on expanding the share of employment in higher-value industry sectors relative to the tourism base.