Employee Ownership Companies Make Time Magazine’s Best Private Companies List

Employee ownership figures prominently in Time magazine’s brand-new list of America's Best Private Companies of 2026. Fourteen of the top 100 companies are employee-owned; 13 are partially or entirely ESOP-owned, and 1 company is partly owned through an employee ownership trust. The list includes 500 companies; we looked at the top 100. Time partnered with Statista to “evaluate and rank the most prominent firms in the country based on employee satisfaction, financial performance, and sustainability transparency. Both public companies and private companies that report their financial and sustainability data were considered.” Details on the methodology can be found here.

It's worth noting that this is the first time this list has appeared in Time. The magazine highlighted employee ownership in its introduction to the list, stating that younger generations "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."

The study included an employee survey and a net impact score, a measure developed by the Upright Project that looks at data from over 10,000 companies. The score is based on several features of positive and negative impact on these dimensions:

• Jobs
• Taxes
• Social infrastructure support (both physical and human)
• Promoting understanding between people
• Promoting human rights
• Creating and distributing knowledge
• Health and joy
• Environment

The ranking is also based on responses to surveys conducted by Statista of how employees rate their employers. Companies must opt into the Statista survey to be eligible. The list appears below.

Employee ownership companies on the top 100 firms on TIME’s Best Private Companies List