How this registry works
FactoryRegistry is a free, public register of U.S. manufacturing facilities — NAICS 31–33 — compiled from federal records and kept current. It lists 314,455 facilities across 3,115 counties in 56 states and territories, 140,978 of them carrying a recent operating signal. Every page is public and indexable: no login, no paywall, no pay-to-rank.
Where the data comes from
The facility backbone: identity, address and coordinates.
Employment bands, and evidence a plant was operating in a given year.
Federal contractor registrations, which renew annually and so signal liveness.
Geography, industry classification and geocoding.
All of these are public records. Where a facility’s status is computed, the page shows which sources contributed and when each last reported. Nothing is self-reported unless it is marked Claimed.
What the status labels mean
Status is computed nightly from the sources above. It is never entered by hand and it is not for sale. Sources that merely prove a facility exists — a permit registry, for example — never on their own make a facility look alive.
Operating signal within 12 months from two or more independent sources.
Operating signal within 24 months, or from a single source.
Present in a source dataset, with no recent operating signal.
A closure has been reported but not corroborated.
Closure corroborated by two or more sources.
Unverified is deliberately neutral rather than a warning: the absence of a signal is not evidence that a plant has closed, only that no federal source has reported on it recently.
Some facilities carry no coordinates because their address could not be matched to Census TIGER. Those are listed with location marked unverified and are not placed on the map — we would rather show nothing than a pin in the wrong place.
What we will not do
FactoryRegistry is a registry. We do not broker work, quote jobs, take a cut of orders, or operate a competing manufacturing business. Listing a facility never puts us on the other side of its table.
We do not run a lead-generation business against the companies in this registry. There are no lead-capture popups, and there is no version of this site where a buyer’s enquiry is auctioned to the highest bidder.
Result order is relevance, data completeness and confidence — nothing else. No field in our database can raise a facility’s position in exchange for payment. If we ever run a clearly-labeled featured slot, it will sit outside organic results, not inside them.
Facility, company, industry and location pages are fully public and indexable. There is no login wall on search or on refined results, and there never will be. You should not have to hand over an email address to find out who makes something near you.
Operating status is derived from independent federal records — EPA, OSHA, SAM.gov and the U.S. Census. It is not something a company can buy. A facility marked Active earned that from two or more independent sources, not from a subscription.
Something on a page is wrong?
Federal data is imperfect and facilities change. Corrections are free, need no account, and are recorded as signals against the record rather than silently overwriting it — so the register keeps an honest history of what each source said and when. Where a source and a correction disagree, we show both.
If you run the facility, claiming its page is the fastest route — it is free and does not change where you rank.