The United States generated $30.76 trillion in current-dollar gross domestic product in 2025, according to the latest complete annual industry data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

That economic value was not distributed evenly. Real estate and rental and leasing generated $4.24 trillion, accounting for 13.8% of U.S. GDP. Its contribution was approximately $1.74 trillion greater than that of professional, scientific, and technical services, the second-largest industry group.

Together, the five largest industry groups produced $13.89 trillion in value added, or 45.1% of GDP. The 10 largest accounted for $22.30 trillion, equivalent to 72.5% of the economy.

The analysis uses BEA estimates published with its June 25, 2026 GDP-by-industry release. Rankings are based on nominal 2025 value added, while comparisons of production growth over time use inflation-adjusted data. The BEA’s current GDP-by-industry release confirms that 2025 is the latest complete annual period available.

Industry value added measures the economic value an industry creates through production. It equals the value of the industry’s gross output after subtracting the intermediate goods and services consumed during production.

For example, a manufacturer’s gross output includes the value of the products it produces. Its intermediate inputs may include materials, energy, transportation, components, and purchased business services. Value added isolates what remains after those production costs are deducted.

This approach prevents the same economic activity from being counted repeatedly as goods and services move through supply chains. When value added is summed across private industries and government, the result equals GDP.

BEA divides value added into three primary components:

The distinction between value added and revenue is important. An industry can generate enormous sales but rank lower in value added if it relies heavily on inputs purchased from other industries. BEA’s guide to the industry accounts provides the complete definition and methodology.

The ranking uses 22 non-overlapping BEA industry groups. This is more detailed than comparing only private goods-producing industries, private services-producing industries, and government, while avoiding the double counting that would result from mixing industry aggregates with their underlying components.

At this level, manufacturing is divided between durable and nondurable goods. Government is divided between federal and state and local. Other categories generally correspond to major industry sectors, including information, finance and insurance, health care, construction, and retail trade.

BEA’s tables contain additional detail within many of these groups. However, categories such as real estate, housing, and total real estate and rental and leasing cannot all be ranked together because they overlap.

The table ranks industries using 2025 current-dollar value added. The final column shows the change in each industry’s share of GDP from 2019 to 2025, measured in percentage points. Using 2019 provides a recent pre-pandemic benchmark.

Source: Calculations using BEA’s Value Added by Industry and Value Added by Industry as a Percentage of GDP tables. Dollar values are current-dollar estimates. Changes from 2019 are calculated from the underlying current-dollar values and GDP totals before being rounded to one decimal place. Data reflect the June 25, 2026 vintage available through the BEA GDP-by-Industry Interactive Data Application.

Real estate and rental and leasing was the largest industry group by a considerable margin. Its $4.239 trillion in value added was approximately 70% greater than the contribution from professional, scientific, and technical services.

The size of the category reflects more than real estate agents, property managers, and commercial landlords. BEA’s underlying 2025 figures divide it into:

Within real estate, BEA attributed approximately $3.005 trillion to housing and $848.9 billion to other real estate.

The housing component includes the estimated rental value of owner-occupied homes. National accounting treats homeowners as if they provide housing services to themselves, allowing equivalent housing services to be measured consistently whether a property is rented or owner-occupied.

This accounting treatment helps explain why real estate contributes much more to GDP than employment or corporate-revenue rankings might suggest. BEA’s housing-services methodology explains how housing production is incorporated into the industry accounts.

Four industry groups generated between $2.34 trillion and $2.49 trillion in 2025.

Professional, scientific, and technical services ranked second at $2.494 trillion. This category includes legal services, computer systems design, engineering, consulting, scientific research, accounting, and other knowledge-intensive activities.

Finance and insurance followed at $2.442 trillion. Its value added includes credit intermediation, securities and investment activities, insurance, and financial vehicles.

Health care and social assistance contributed $2.371 trillion. Its detailed components include ambulatory health care services, hospitals, nursing and residential care facilities, and social assistance.

State and local generated $2.340 trillion. BEA includes government in its industry accounts because government agencies produce services even when those services are not sold at market prices. State and local activity includes public education, public safety, transportation administration, and other government services.

The four groups were separated by only $154.7 billion, making their contributions relatively close despite their different business models, workforces, and sources of demand.

Retail and wholesale trade each contributed approximately $1.9 trillion. Retail trade ranked slightly higher at $1.922 trillion, compared with $1.905 trillion for wholesale trade. Both represented 6.2% of GDP after rounding.

Information generated $1.695 trillion, or 5.5% of GDP. The industry includes publishing and software, motion pictures and sound recording, broadcasting and telecommunications, data processing, and internet-related information services.

Durable goods contributed $1.556 trillion. This manufacturing subgroup covers products designed to last for an extended period, including machinery, motor vehicles, computers, electronics, fabricated metals, and transportation equipment.

Construction narrowly held the tenth position at $1.3413 trillion. Nondurable goods manufacturing was immediately behind it at $1.3401 trillion, a difference of only $1.2 billion.

The structure of the economy became more service-oriented between 2019 and 2025. Private services-producing industries increased their share of GDP from 70.7% to 72.9%.

Private goods-producing industries declined from 17.1% to 15.9%, while government’s share fell from 12.2% to 11.2%.

Among the 22 industry groups, real estate and rental and leasing recorded the largest increase in economic share, gaining approximately 0.8 percentage point between 2019 and 2025.

Professional, scientific, and technical services gained 0.4 percentage point. Finance and insurance and retail trade each gained 0.3 point, while health care and social assistance, wholesale trade, and information each gained approximately 0.2 point.

These changes show which industries captured a larger proportion of current-dollar GDP. They do not measure real production growth alone because nominal shares are affected by both changes in output and changes in industry prices.

State and local government experienced one of the largest declines, falling from approximately 8.4% of GDP in 2019 to 7.6% in 2025.

Its nominal value added still increased from $1.813 trillion to $2.340 trillion, but it grew more slowly in current-dollar terms than the economy as a whole. As a result, it fell from the second-largest industry group in 2019 to fifth place in 2025.

Durable goods also lost approximately 0.8 percentage point, declining from about 5.9% to 5.1% of GDP. Nondurable goods fell by roughly 0.3 point, while the federal government’s share declined by approximately 0.2 point.

Construction’s share decreased by less than one-tenth of a percentage point. Its share rounds to 4.4% in both years, but calculations using the underlying dollar values show a decline of approximately 0.1 percentage point.

A declining GDP share does not necessarily mean that an industry contracted. It means its current-dollar value added grew more slowly than total current-dollar GDP.

Nominal value added provides the appropriate measure for ranking the current size of industries. It is not sufficient for comparing production growth over time because nominal figures include the effects of inflation.

For growth comparisons, BEA’s real value-added series removes the effects of industry price changes. Between 2019 and 2025, real U.S. GDP increased 15.1%. Industry performance varied substantially around that benchmark.

Information was the fastest-growing of the 22 industry groups, with real value added increasing 56.3%. Yet it ranked eighth in current-dollar size.

Professional, scientific, and technical services combined large economic scale with rapid expansion. Its real value added increased 38.7%, the second-highest growth rate among the industry groups.

Management of companies and enterprises provides the clearest example of the difference between size and growth. It generated only $576.8 billion in nominal value added, placing it outside the top 10, but its real value added increased 33.1%, the third-fastest rate.

Other notable real increases included:

Several large industries recorded much weaker real performance. Durable goods grew 4.3%, construction grew 0.5%, and wholesale trade declined 2.4% in real terms. Other services except government declined 10.4%.

The comparison illustrates why nominal and real measures should not be mixed. Wholesale trade’s current-dollar value added increased by nearly 47% between 2019 and 2025, even though its inflation-adjusted value added declined.

The ranking demonstrates that the United States’ largest sources of economic value extend far beyond the production of physical goods. Real estate, professional services, finance, health care, trade, and information occupy seven of the first eight positions.

This service concentration has several economic implications. Growth increasingly depends on skilled labor, intellectual property, digital infrastructure, financial intermediation, health services, and housing.

It also means that changes in interest rates, property markets, technology investment, health care demand, and professional employment can affect a large portion of national economic activity.

Manufacturing remains economically significant. Durable and nondurable goods together generated $2.897 trillion in value added, equivalent to approximately 9.4% of GDP. However, their combined share was below the 13.8% generated by real estate and rental and leasing alone.

The results also show why growth contributions depend on both size and momentum. A relatively small industry can expand rapidly without moving total GDP as much as a modest change in real estate, finance, health care, or professional services.

As BEA explains, an industry’s contribution to real GDP growth reflects both its inflation-adjusted growth rate and its weight in the overall economy.

The analysis uses BEA’s latest complete annual GDP-by-industry estimates for 2025, compared with 2019. The data vintage is June 25, 2026.

The ranking uses current-dollar value added because nominal figures measure each industry’s contribution at prices prevailing in 2025. GDP shares are calculated by dividing each industry’s current-dollar value added by current-dollar U.S. GDP.

The change in GDP share is calculated from the underlying current-dollar values before rounding:

Changes are expressed in percentage points and rounded to one decimal place. This approach avoids distortions that can result from subtracting BEA shares that have already been rounded.

Real growth rates are cumulative changes from 2019 to 2025 calculated from BEA’s real value-added series in chained 2017 dollars.

Chained-dollar estimates are suitable for calculating growth rates but generally should not be added across detailed industries. BEA’s chain-weighting methodology means the sum of real industry components may not equal the published real aggregate.

All 22 industry groups used in the ranking are mutually exclusive and collectively reconcile to BEA’s reported GDP total in both 2019 and 2025. The estimates remain subject to future BEA revisions, including the next annual update scheduled for September 2026.