Rockford Works
Where the work is.
Rockford makes things. The numbers say so more clearly than any speech does.
This page is the labor market with the labels left on: what work is here, what it pays, how people get into it, and where every figure came from. No round numbers invented for a podium.
A campaign that talks about jobs should be willing to show its arithmetic. If you find something wrong on this page, tell us and it gets fixed with a note saying what changed.
The Rockford metro, July 2026
- Labor force
- 156,700People working or looking.
- Employed residents
- 149,900Counted where they live.
- Jobs located here
- 143,900Counted where the employer is. Down 0.3% on the year.
- Unemployment
- 4.3%Down from 5.0% in May. Not seasonally adjusted.
- Which Rockford?
- The metro area is Winnebago and Boone counties together. The city is smaller. This page says which one every time, because mixing them is how a jobs number ends up off by fifty thousand.
Where the jobs are
Three sectors hold about 55% of the work.
Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest employer in the metro, then education and health, then manufacturing. Together they are 79,700 of the 143,900 jobs here, which is about 55%.
| Industry | Jobs | Share | Year on year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trade, transportation & utilities | 29,200 | 20% | −2.3% |
| Education & health services | 26,200 | 18% | +1.2% |
| Manufacturing | 24,300 | 17% | +0.4% |
| Government | 16,100 | 11% | +0.6% |
| Leisure & hospitality | 15,300 | 11% | −0.6% |
| Professional & business services | 13,100 | 9% | −1.5% |
| Other services | 7,300 | 5% | −1.4% |
| Mining, logging & construction | 7,200 | 5% | +5.9% |
| Financial activities | 3,900 | 3% | −4.9% |
| Information | 1,300 | 1% | 0.0% |
| Total nonfarm | 143,900 | 100% | −0.3% |
Two things in that table deserve saying out loud rather than leaving in a column. Construction is up 5.9% on the year — the fastest growth of any sector here. And the biggest sector is shrinking: trade, transportation and utilities is down 2.3%, which in a metro this size is roughly seven hundred jobs. Total employment is down 0.3% on the year. That is close to flat, and it is a great deal better than the 1.2% decline the same measure showed in May, but it is not growth.
Shares are rounded and may not total 100%. Figures are July 2026, preliminary, not seasonally adjusted.
A town that makes things
12% of the work here is production. Nationally it is 5.5%.
That is the single most distinctive fact about how Rockford earns a living. 16,500 production jobs — machinists, assemblers, welders, machine operators, inspectors — at more than twice the national concentration. Add transportation and material moving at 11.9%, and the two largest occupational groups in this metro are both hands-on.
Inside that group, some occupations are concentrated here at multiples you rarely see anywhere. A location quotient of 2.00 means an occupation is twice as common here as it is nationally.
| Occupation | Jobs here | Vs. national | Average pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lathe & turning machine operators | 170 | 11.23× | $47,720 |
| Heat treating equipment operators | 120 | 9.34× | $44,600 |
| CNC tool operators | 1,380 | 9.18× | $50,180 |
| Tool and die makers | 390 | 7.67× | $55,550 |
| Machinists | 1,800 | 7.10× | $53,650 |
| Plating machine operators | 180 | 6.23× | $42,070 |
| Grinding & polishing machine operators | 310 | 5.26× | $46,130 |
| Packaging & filling machine operators | 1,380 | 4.11× | $41,590 |
| Assemblers & fabricators | 3,130 | 2.52× | $47,260 |
| Welders, cutters & solderers | 870 | 2.35× | $53,380 |
| Inspectors, testers & sorters | 1,180 | 2.23× | $49,690 |
| CNC tool programmers | 60 | 2.38× | $67,450 |
| All production occupations | 16,500 | 2.18× | $49,950 |
Read the small numbers as carefully as the big ones. There are 170 lathe operators in this metro, not thousands; the 11.23× says the trade barely exists elsewhere anymore, not that it is where the hiring is. The occupations with both scale and concentration are the ones to watch: assemblers, machinists, CNC operators, inspectors and welders — together about 8,400 jobs.
Annual figures are the hourly mean multiplied by 2,080 hours, the way BLS presents them. They are not a salary offer, and they exclude the self-employed.
What the work pays
Rockford pays below the country on average, and above it in the trades.
The average wage across all occupations here is $29.34 an hour, against $33.54 nationally. That gap is real and this campaign is not going to hide it. But it is not evenly spread, and in the work Rockford does most, it reverses.
| Occupational group | Rockford | U.S. | Share of local jobs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Construction & extraction | $37.30 | $31.42 | 3.4% |
| Installation, maintenance & repair | $30.30 | $30.44 | 4.3% |
| Healthcare support | $20.41 | $19.62 | 4.5% |
| Protective service | $29.26 | $29.19 | 2.0% |
| Production | $24.02 | $24.81 | 12.0% |
| Transportation & material moving | $22.14 | $23.96 | 11.9% |
| Architecture & engineering | $46.19 | $51.36 | 1.8% |
| All occupations | $29.34 | $33.54 | 100% |
Construction pays $5.88 an hour more here than the national average for the same work. Maintenance and repair, healthcare support and protective service are all at or slightly above the national figure. Production, the occupation this town is built on, pays about eighty cents an hour below the national average — close, and worth closing.
Where Rockford falls furthest behind is in the high-wage office occupations: management, business and finance, computing, law. Those are also the occupations this metro has the fewest of. That is what the overall wage gap mostly is — a difference in the mix of work, not proof that a Rockford machinist is underpaid relative to a machinist somewhere else.
More than one way in
23.5% of Rockford adults hold a bachelor’s degree. The economy is not built for the other 76.5% to fail.
Among city residents 25 and over, 84.9% finished high school and 23.5% hold a four-year degree. Meanwhile the metro’s two largest occupational groups are production and transportation. An honest careers conversation in this town starts from those two facts at the same time.
Four broad routes into the work that Rockford actually has. These are the usual shapes, not a promise about any one employer or program:
-
Make
Production and advanced manufacturing. High school or equivalent, then a certificate or on-the-job training, then operator work — CNC, welding, assembly, inspection — and from there setup, programming or a first-line supervisor role.
16,500 jobs here. Supervisors average $73,930; CNC programmers $67,450.
-
Fix
Installation, maintenance and repair. Trade program or apprenticeship, then industrial maintenance, HVAC, electrical or mechanical work, then technician or lead.
4.3% of local jobs, at $30.30 an hour — level with the national average for the same work.
-
Build
Construction. Pre-apprenticeship, then a registered apprenticeship, then the trade — carpenter, electrician, plumber, operator — and on to journeyman, foreman or your own contract.
The best-paid group in this table, at $37.30 an hour, and the fastest-growing sector in the metro.
-
Move
Transportation and logistics. A CDL or employer training, then driving, material handling or warehouse work, then dispatch, maintenance or operations.
11.9% of local jobs. The sector is shrinking overall, so ask about a specific employer before you commit to a program.
This page does not yet list the local programs, apprenticeships and employers behind each route. That takes real reporting rather than a national dataset, and printing a training provider that has stopped taking students would be worse than printing nothing. Tell us what belongs here and it gets added with a name and a date.
What these numbers don’t say
- They are two different vintages. The headline counts are July 2026 and preliminary. The occupation and wage detail is May 2025, published in July 2026. That is simply how fast each survey moves.
- They are the metro, not the city. Winnebago and Boone counties together. Where a figure is City of Rockford — the education numbers above — it says so.
- Monthly figures are not seasonally adjusted. Some of the improvement between May and July is summer.
- The wage survey excludes the self-employed. In a town with this many one-truck contractors and small shops, that is a real omission.
- An average is not an offer. Half of the people in any of these occupations earn less than the average shown.
- Two figures you may have seen elsewhere are not on this page. A “105,000 working people” count and a “94,000 in small business” count both circulate locally. We could not source either, so we left them out.
What this has to do with the plan
A retention strategy that cannot name what it is retaining is a press release. This is what it is retaining: an unusually deep bench of machining, fabrication, maintenance and logistics skill, in a metro where total employment is flat and the largest sector is losing jobs.
That points the jobs plan at the employers already here before the ones being recruited, at permit speed for the ones deciding whether to expand, and at treating the trades as a first-choice career rather than a fallback.
The jobs plan →
What a mayor can actually do about
any of it →
Where the numbers come from
- Labor force, employment, unemployment and jobs by industry. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Rockford, IL Economy at a Glance. July 2026, preliminary, not seasonally adjusted; data extracted September 4, 2026.
- Occupational shares, wages and location quotients. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wages in Rockford — May 2025, published July 24, 2026. Excludes the self-employed.
- Education figures for city residents. U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, Rockford city, Illinois, 2020–2024 estimates.
- Sector shares and the three-sector total are our arithmetic on the BLS industry figures. The four routes under “more than one way in” are our grouping, not a BLS definition of a skilled trade.