Manufacturing – A Tale of Two Trends
July 24, 2026Oregon’s manufacturing sector has undergone a long term structural shift marked by shrinking employment, weakening seasonal patterns, and repeated recession driven resets, while Deschutes County’s manufacturing base has deviated from this statewide trajectory by leveraging growth across multiple subsectors to expand both jobs and manufacturing firms.
Statewide Manufacturing Has Declined Since the 1990s
In March 1998, Oregon’s manufacturing sector peaked at 231,700 seasonally adjusted jobs. It would be the last time employment reached that level. Over the next decade, the industry edged downward, interrupted only by a short rally from 2003 to 2006 that lifted employment to 208,700. The Great Recession pushed losses even deeper, and by late 2010 manufacturing employment had dropped to 162,700.
By the time employment bottomed out in late 2010, the industry had already weathered more than a decade of losses. What followed was a slow but steady climb. Manufacturing employment in Oregon rose through the 2010s, reaching 198,900 by mid 2019. This positive momentum would break with the pandemic. Employment dropped sharply to 180,200 in May 2020. Despite brief signals of recovery and a relative peak in employment in late 2022, the industry never regained the ground lost from the downturn induced by the pandemic. The pre-pandemic trend of slow growth has reversed, and the industry is currently experiencing a steady decline in employment.
After each recession the seasonal effect on manufacturing in Oregon has weakened, and every downturn has produced a clear downward shift in employment levels. Historically, this tracks with the nature of Oregon manufacturing. The industry once relied heavily on wood product manufacturing, a highly seasonal sector that produced large swings tied to its hiring cycles. As manufacturing diversified, often through abrupt shocks rather than gradual change, those seasonal fluctuations gradually diminished.
At the same time, Oregon’s manufacturing continues to have difficulty regaining the jobs it loses during downturns and its shift to a more diversified sector has not stopped it from shrinking. Before the pandemic hit, manufacturing employment in Oregon had been dredging its way upward, working through nearly two decades of gradual recovery after the record lows preceded the 2007 housing recession. The pandemic interrupted that progress, reshaping Oregon manufacturing into a sector less driven by seasonal swings, and like earlier recessions, it caused a sharp drop in employment, but this time the decline persisted even after a brief rebound. What’s left is a manufacturing sector with muted seasonal peaks and a long‑term downward trend.
Diversification Supports Deschutes Manufacturing Trends
Although it would be ideal to discuss manufacturing trends across the entire Bend MSA, the available data, and therefore the underlying trend, is overwhelmingly driven by Deschutes County. Employment levels there dominate the regional totals, and as a result, the trend largely reflects Deschutes County’s hiring patterns. For that reason, the analysis focuses on Deschutes County data.
When recovery began to take hold in 2010, a more consistent seasonal pattern returned, and employment grew for roughly eight years. In mid‑2017, hiring began to slow, and by 2019 the industry was registering year‑over‑year declines – something that hadn’t happened since 2010. At the state level,
Oregon manufacturing was still moving upward during this period, continuing its slow, decade‑long recovery. But unlike Oregon, which still showed strong forward momentum heading into the pandemic recession, the pandemic reversed Deschutes County’s downward trajectory. Employment quickly and completely rebounded, and as of May 2026, manufacturing employment has reached a new seasonal high of 6,620 jobs.
Stark notes that “rising demand for technology, healthcare innovation and advanced manufacturing created opportunities across multiple sectors. At the same time, many companies [in the region] invested in automation, equipment upgrades and capacity expansion, driving demand for machinery and other manufactured products. Deschutes County's diverse manufacturing base was well positioned to capitalize on these trends."
Together, these subsectors added more than 2,200 jobs from 2010 to 2025. Growth in these subsectors accelerated in the post‑pandemic period, pushing both employment and firm counts to new highs. When asked about the drivers of the post pandemic acceleration, Stark observed that “The post-pandemic economy created a unique environment for manufacturers. Federal stimulus, strong consumer spending and increased business investment fueled demand across a wide range of industries. Manufacturers responded by expanding production, investing in new equipment and growing their workforce, which helped drive significant gains in food and beverage, machinery and transportation equipment manufacturing throughout Deschutes County.”
As employment expanded in these subsectors, firm growth followed a similar pattern, with food manufacturing adding 42 firms, beverage manufacturing adding 39, and fabricated metal product manufacturing adding 22 firms while also gaining 167 jobs during this period. While the number of wood manufacturing establishments remained essentially unchanged, declining by only one during this period, employment in the sector continued its long‑term decline. On an annual-average basis, employment in wood manufacturing has fallen by 43% between 2010 and 2025.
