Omaharuns on a handful of strong industries. If you’re job-hunting or weighing a move, here’s where the opportunities (and the big-name employers) are.
Top industries & employers
Insurance & financial services
Berkshire Hathaway, Mutual of Omaha, Physicians Mutual, Woodmen Life, First National Bank of Omaha, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska, Pacific Life's Omaha operations
Omaha's insurance depth is real and old — the city grew a cluster of fraternal and mutual insurers from the late nineteenth century and never lost it. Berkshire Hathaway is headquartered in an unremarkable office block on Farnam Street, and Mutual of Omaha's tower is the tallest building in the state. This is a back-office, actuarial and underwriting economy rather than a trading one, which means steady hiring and unglamorous stability.
Railroads, trucking & logistics
Union Pacific, Werner Enterprises, Crete Carrier, BNSF's Council Bluffs yard, the Omaha intermodal terminals
Union Pacific has been headquartered here since 1862 and is the largest railroad in the United States by route mileage; its downtown headquarters and the Bailey Yard system make Omaha a genuine rail town rather than a city that happens to have trains. Werner and Crete put a deep trucking layer alongside it. If you are in supply chain, this is one of the best small markets in the country.
Defence & national security
Offutt Air Force Base, US Strategic Command, 55th Wing, a large cleared-contractor layer around Bellevue and Papillion
US Strategic Command — the combatant command responsible for America's nuclear deterrent — is headquartered at Offutt, south of the city. Direct roles almost always require US citizenship and usually a security clearance, so treat this as context for the local economy rather than an accessible job market on arrival; the contractor tier around it is large but gated the same way.
Health care & biocontainment research
Nebraska Medicine and the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Children's Nebraska, CHI Health, Methodist Health System, Boys Town National Research Hospital
UNMC's Nebraska Biocontainment Unit is one of a very small number of facilities in the country able to treat high-consequence infectious disease, and it treated Ebola patients in 2014; the federal quarantine facility built alongside it is the only one of its kind. Health care is the sector most likely to be hiring here regardless of what the rest of the economy is doing.
Construction, engineering & architecture
Kiewit, HDR, Lund-Ross, Leo A Daly, Olsson
Kiewit is one of the largest construction and engineering firms in North America and is headquartered here; HDR and Leo A Daly are large employee-owned engineering and architecture practices in the same city. For civil engineers, project managers and construction professionals, Omaha punches far above a metro of this size — these firms staff national work from Nebraska.
Data centres, food & agribusiness
Google, Meta and Microsoft campuses in Sarpy County, Greater Omaha Packing, Omaha Steaks, Green Plains, Scoular, Valmont Industries
Sarpy County south of the city has become one of the larger hyperscale data-centre clusters in the country, drawn by cheap public power, cheap land and a low natural-disaster profile for the buildings themselves. Alongside it sits the older economy: beef processing, grain trading, ethanol and irrigation equipment, all of which are national businesses run from here.
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