America's Best Private Companies of 2026
· Time
Splashy public companies often dominate headlines, but the majority of the companies in the U.S. are privately owned and these companies are just as important to the economic ecosystem as the public ones—they support millions of jobs and contribute trillions to the economy. For business owners, there are a number of benefits to staying private. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, being private “allows a company space to invest in and grow its business over a longer period without the same pressure to meet short-term financial targets.” Additionally, without the pressure of public disclosure, “private companies can more freely experiment with new technology and innovation, including greater tolerance for what others might see as ‘failure.’”
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To identify the leaders in this space, TIME partnered with data firm Statista to launch the first edition of America’s Best Private Companies this year. The analysis highlights 500 privately owned companies ranked high on both employee satisfaction surveys and positive net impact on society, global knowledge and health, and the environment.
Methodology: How TIME and Statista Determined America's Best Private Companies of 2026
There’s been a shift in the work culture for big companies over the century. Previously, employees of big, well-known companies were guaranteed stable income benefits until retirement, “but we have less and less public companies like that,” says Jegoo Lee, assistant professor of management at the University of Rhode Island’s College of Business. “The number of public companies in the United States has decreased. Right now, one of the problems public companies have is the burden of big shareholders—Wall Street—that really focus on dividends and quarterly profit rather than longer-term profit.”
This, he notes, is one of the reasons why public companies struggle to remain purpose-driven, because they have to justify their purpose to shareholders. And it’s also why it’s hard to design a corporate governance structure with priorities around employee wellness or corporate responsibility. One of the reasons Patagonia (no. 1 on the list) has been very successful at environmental sustainability and profit is because they are private, Lee says. Patagonia’s owner, Yvonn Chouinard, has designed the various ownership models for the company so that it would be kept out of the hands of outside investors that could push it away from its environmentally focused mission or hurt its employees.
After the Covid-19 pandemic, however, more companies became more interested in providing wellness benefits for their employees, after seeing how workers negatively impacted by burnout, AI, and loneliness translated into a productivity and performance problem, Lee says. Focusing on keeping its employees happy is historically how grocery chain Wegmans (no. 2) has stood out among competitors.
Now, younger generations entering the workforce are less drawn to big companies than the generations prior. They factor in wellness outside of work in addition to salary. “They really care about their family, life issues; whether their work will be valuable to their own life. In that sense private companies might be a better place because they can design their own purpose,” Lee says. In this trend, they may also be interested in alternative organization structures like employee-owned companies or worker cooperatives, which have been growing in popularity, with the federal government even encouraging more employers to adopt such models. Southern staple Publix (no. 9) and warehouse chain WinCo (no. 10) are both employee-owned through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).
“Usually, employee-owned companies have higher productivity, their revenue growth is usually 3-4% higher than other companies, and then their quit rate is about a third of other companies,” Lee says. “These numbers always show that employees are very actively engaged in their own company, because their perspective is more long term. … These are motivational incentives for employee owners to make their companies better, and perform better, and that could impact their retirement.” On the other hand, worker cooperatives benefit from “a lot of diverse opinions and comments and insight that really makes their corporate strategy different than other competitors,” Lee says.
See the full list of America’s Best Private Companies of 2026 below: