America’s Greatest Workplaces by State 2026 Methodology Overview
America’s Greatest Workplaces by State 2026 recognizes the best U.S. employers in each state based on their performance across 10 key dimensions of workplace satisfaction. The comprehensive study combines both national and in-state recommendations for employers with 1,000 or more employees, placing a greater emphasis on responses from employees who reside in the same state as the company they’re evaluating. The survey was conducted between April 2025 and October 2025, gathering more than 2.7 million company reviews from over 179,000 employees.
Additionally, data from three previous studies conducted between 2022 and 2024, covering over 4.9 million reviews and 400,000 respondents, were included with a lower weight. Together, this makes America’s Greatest Workplaces by State 2026 one of the largest independent employee studies in the United States.
An extensive desk research effort took place to identify and document Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tied to overall employee satisfaction. These metrics include overall satisfaction scores from online employee reviews, satisfaction with management, employee happiness, worker appreciation, and historical consistency.
In addition, Plant-A partnered with Aniline.ai, a leading HR analytics firm, to consider more than 37 million data points across more than 120 KPIs that include Leadership, Integrity, Workplace, and Benefits.
The Critical Mention media monitoring platform from Onclusive was utilized to screen companies for adverse media coverage and public records within the past two years (December 31, 2023 to December 31, 2025). This comprehensive review identified company involvement in a wide range of significant issues, including legal and regulatory actions (such as major lawsuits, settlements, or investigations by the SEC or DOJ) and workplace and labor violations (including discrimination or harassment lawsuits, union busting, and toxic workplace allegations). Any company implicated in these activities was subsequently excluded from the final ranking list. Newsweek and Plant-A conducted multiple
iterations of the media monitoring process to validate exclusions and ensure the accuracy of the results.
A proprietary scoring model was used to calculate the final project score for each company by state, incorporating weighted scores across target groups, questionnaire items, categories, and desk research elements. The highest-scoring employers in each state have been recognized by Newsweek and Plant-A Insights as America’s Greatest Workplaces by State 2026.
Plant-A Insights Group has a strict no-pay-to-play policy. All awards are based on independent research and unbiased data analysis.
The exclusion of a company from this list is not a reflection of its performance and is not disputed.
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