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Industry Primers

Bottom-up NAICS industry primers written for both public-market and private investors. Leaf industries are researched from the ground up; every group, subsector, and sector above them reads as a contrast across the industries beneath it.

2122 industries · 24 sectors · NAICS 2022

Researched with AI assistance from official U.S. statistics and independent sources, with citations on every page. Figures are not individually verified against pinned evidence — primers marked Evidence-verified are. Industry research, not investment advice. Methodology.

SubsectorNAICS 926Public Administration

Administration of Economic Programs (NAICS 926): An Investor's Primer

A Histometrics rollup primer for public- and private-market investors. This subsector contains a single child industry group (9261); this page is a short pass-through — read the 9261 primer for full company-level detail.

1. Overview

NAICS 926 is a three-digit subsector in the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) — the U.S. government's 2022 standard scheme for sorting economic activity — sitting inside Sector 92, Public Administration.[1] It gathers the government offices, federal, state, and local, that write, administer, license, and enforce the rules of the commercial economy: economic development and official statistics, transportation regulation, utility rate-setting, agricultural and commodity-market oversight, and general business licensing and inspection.[1]

The one fact an investor needs up front is that this whole subsector is the referee, not a player. Every establishment counted here is a government unit — no ticker, no share, no dividend. It earns a primer because it sets the economics of some of the largest, most widely held assets in the country. All exposure is indirect, through the vendors that serve these agencies and the assets they regulate.

2. What's inside — and why the level equals its one child

NAICS 926 has exactly one child: industry group 9261, Administration of Economic Programs. There are no sibling industry groups. That makes the subsector (926) and the industry group (9261) the same population of establishments — a rare one-to-one, "pass-through" node in the classification. Every figure, driver, and company that applies to 9261 applies unchanged to 926.

The detail lives one level down. 9261 splits into five five-digit industries, which differ sharply in size and in how you touch them:

  • 92612 — Transportation regulation, licensing, inspection (by far the largest: ~324,100 jobs).[3]
  • 92615 — Miscellaneous commercial-sector licensing and inspection (~105,000 jobs).[4]
  • 92611 — General economic-programs administration and statistics (~93,900 jobs).[5]
  • 92613 — Utilities regulation (small headcount, ~$215B/yr of utility capital spending governed).[7][15]
  • 92614 — Agricultural marketing and commodities regulation (small headcount, polices trillions in derivatives).[11][12]

Because 926 is identical to 9261, this page does not re-tell those five stories. The 9261 primer is the full document; the sections below give only this level's rollup figures and the shortest possible orientation.

FTE = full-time equivalent; DOT = department of transportation; FERC = Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; CFTC = Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

3. Size (this level's rollup figures + undercount caveat)

Ground-truth posture. Histometrics holds no ingested federal business-statistics metrics for NAICS 926 — and that blank is the honest story, not a gap. The U.S. Census Bureau's Economic Census, County Business Patterns (CBP), and Statistics of U.S. Businesses exclude Sector 92 (Public Administration) by design, because these are government bodies, not firms.[2] There are no receipts, no firm counts, and no shares to report; any such number would be invented. Every figure below is drawn from the child primers' cited Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and agency sources and labeled as such.

A partial, honest rollup. Because 926 = 9261, its total is the 9261 total. The three children that BLS measures cleanly (via the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, QCEW, 2024 annual averages) sum to a floor of roughly 523,000 government jobs and about $51 billion in annual payroll across ~14,960 reporting units:[3][4][5]

Measured child Employment Total annual wages Reporting units
92612 — Transportation ~324,100 ~$30.8B ~5,418
92615 — Misc. commercial licensing ~105,000 ~$11.0B ~4,495
92611 — General economic programs ~93,900 ~$9.41B ~5,050
Measured subtotal (= 926 floor) ~523,000 ~$51.2B ~14,960

To that floor add the two children sized by budget rather than QCEW: at least ~11,000 more federal staff (≈5,900 at FERC/FCC/NRC and ≈5,200 at USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service and the CFTC),[7][11][12] plus thousands of uncounted employees at ~50 state utility commissions and 50 state agriculture departments.[10] Subsector 926 therefore plausibly employs well over half a million people with payroll comfortably north of $50 billion — but this is a payroll, not revenue: 926 produces rules, licenses, inspections, statistics, and oversight, not sales.

Undercount caveat. Two layers. First, the Sector-92 exclusion means the standard business picture is structurally empty. Second, even within QCEW the counts are floors, because licensing, inspection, and economic-development labor is frequently embedded inside larger departments and coded to other public-administration lines.[4] The population these agencies touch dwarfs the one they staff: roughly 30% of U.S. workers hold a job that legally requires a government license,[19] and utility commissions of a few hundred staff each set the returns on tens of billions of dollars of assets.[10][15]

4. Investable universe (where value concentrates across the children)

No pure play exists anywhere in NAICS 926 — the entire subsector is government. Value concentrates in the private companies around each regulator, and unevenly across the five children:

  • The largest listed asset pools sit under utilities (92613) and transportation (92612): regulated electric, gas, and water utilities, plus toll-road/airport owners and the large engineering and program-management firms.[24]
  • The highest-margin near-monopolies sit under commodities (92614): the two derivatives exchanges whose fee and clearing income scales with CFTC-supervised trading.[26]
  • The mid-cap "govtech" and services layer spans economic programs (92611) and licensing (92615): administrative and licensing software, program operations, federal consulting, and testing/inspection/certification firms.[21][22][23]

A useful rollup insight: several names give diversified exposure to more than one child at once, so buying one can mean owning a slice of the whole regulatory-administration complex rather than a single agency line. Every one is a proxy, not a pure play. Tickers and full company tables live in the 9261 primer and its five children.

5. How the money works

Two money stories run through the subsector, and they never sum.

A) The agencies run on appropriations or self-funding, and move far more capital than they spend. Economic-program and transportation offices run on tax-funded appropriations (transportation drawing on the federal fuel excise, flat since 1993, plus general revenue),[14] while much of the regulatory apparatus is fee-funded / cost-recovery — FERC recovers ~100% of its budget from the industry it regulates, the FCC has been 100% fee-funded since 2009, and most state licensing and utility boards run on assessments and application/exam/renewal fees.[7][8]

B) The vendors and regulated companies earn on ordinary, attractive economics — engineering backlog and book-to-bill; govtech recurring subscriptions plus per-transaction fees; testing/inspection/certification per-service fees; exchange transaction and clearing fees; and, for regulated utilities, rate base × allowed return on equity (ROE) (roughly 9.5–9.7% for U.S. electric utilities in 2024–25).[15] Note the regulated-utility rate-base math applies only to the utilities child (92613) — do not force it onto transportation, licensing, or commodity economics.

6. Demand drivers

"Demand" here means workload for the agencies and dollars for their private proxies. The subsector's common drivers are the government budget cycle (appropriations, continuing resolutions, and the roughly five-year transportation reauthorization), digitization of paper- and mainframe-era systems, and new areas to regulate. Child-specific engines include federal infrastructure funding (the ~$1.2 trillion 2021 law) for transportation;[13] the AI/data-center electricity-load surge and a utility capital super-cycle for utilities;[16][15] the expansion of occupational and new-sector licensing (cannabis, sports betting, crypto) for the licensing child;[19] and industrial policy plus Farm Bill and trade cycles for economic programs and agriculture.[17] Across the whole subsector the underlying need is close to recession-proof — governments do not stop regulating in a downturn — so demand is durable but budget-gated.

7. Regulation

Uniquely, in NAICS 926 the establishments are the regulators, so "regulation" has two faces. The agencies are bounded by authorizing statutes, appropriations, state and federal Administrative Procedure Acts, and oversight. The private proxies are governed by the frameworks each agency administers: the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and Uniform Guidance (2 CFR 200) for federal contractors and grantees;[28][29] environmental review and Buy-America rules for transportation work; FERC/FCC/NRC jurisdiction and state utility-commission rate-setting for utilities; the Commodity Exchange Act for CFTC-supervised markets; and antitrust supervision of self-interested licensing boards after North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners v. FTC (2015).[20] The recurring investor question is the federal–state split and appointment cycle — most utility commissioners are appointed but 11 states elect them, and regulatory outcomes swing with who holds the seats.[10]

8. Consolidation

Government agencies do not compete or merge — each holds a legal monopoly within its jurisdiction. All the consolidation happens in the private layers, and it is brisk: private-equity buyouts in federal services/consulting (Guidehouse, ManTech, the Amentum–Jacobs combination);[28][29][26] large utility and water M&A (Brookfield–Duke Energy Florida, American Water–Essential, the GIP/EQT bid for AES);[27] and serial roll-ups across engineering, tolling technology, govtech, and testing/inspection/certification.[25] The takeaway: buyers keep concentrating the service and regulated-asset layers even though the regulator itself never changes hands.

9. Risks

The subsector's shared risks are appropriations and policy risk (budget cuts, continuing resolutions, shutdowns that stall contractor backlogs), procurement and execution risk (recompetes, price pressure, fixed-price overruns), and basis/measurement risk — most public proxies are diversified, so a company with heavy government revenue may still have little exposure to any one of these functions; isolate the real segment before drawing conclusions. Across the board there is data-opacity risk: because standard Census business statistics ignore Sector 92, anyone sizing 926 from commercial datasets will misjudge it, and the honest gauges are QCEW, agency budgets, and fee collections.[2][19]

10. How to invest & outlook

You cannot own NAICS 926 — you own what it serves or gates. The routes, ranked roughly by size of listed opportunity: regulated utilities and infrastructure (the largest listed pools, plus utility/municipal bonds and private infrastructure funds); market infrastructure (the exchange duopoly, ag merchants, commodity ETFs); and the govtech/consulting/inspection services layer (administrative and licensing software, program operations, federal consulting, credentialing, and testing/inspection/certification). In every case, underwrite the government-revenue mix, backlog quality, contract type, recompete schedule, and the regulatory permission itself as carefully as the financials.

Outlook. The subsector is structurally durable and financially indirect: the need for economic administration is about as recession-proof as demand gets, but the returns accrue to the private companies and assets around it — and it will never become a standalone investable sector. The main counterforce everywhere is policy volatility. Because 926 is identical to its one child, the full company-level detail lives in the 9261 primer and the five leaf primers (92611–92615) beneath it.

Sources

  1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Manual — Sector 92 (Public Administration), subsector 926 and industry group 9261 definitions. https://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
  2. U.S. Census Bureau, "Economic Census / County Business Patterns — Understanding NAICS" (Sector 92 excluded from standard business statistics). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census/year/2022/guidance/understanding-naics.html
  3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, QCEW, 2024 annual averages, NAICS 926120 (transportation). https://data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/2024/a/industry/926120.csv
  4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, QCEW, 2024 annual averages, NAICS 926150 (misc. commercial). https://data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/2024/a/industry/926150.csv
  5. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, QCEW, 2024 annual averages, NAICS 926110 (general economic programs). https://data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/2024/a/industry/926110.csv
  6. S&P Global Commodity Insights, "FERC plans 2025 budget amid staffing concerns," 2025 (~1,560–1,580 FTE; full cost recovery). https://www.spglobal.com/commodity-insights/en/news-research/latest-news/crude-oil/022825-ferc-plans-2025-budget-amid-staffing-concerns-federal-workforce-cuts
  7. Congressional Research Service, "The Federal Communications Commission: Structure, Operations, and Budget" (R45699; 100% fee funding since 2009). https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45699
  8. S&P Global Market Intelligence, "US utility commissioners: Who they are and how they impact regulation" (54 commissions, 216 seats; 11 states elect), 2024. https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/research/us-utility-commissioners-who-they-are-and-how-they-impact-regulation
  9. USAFacts, "What does the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) do?" (~4,517 employees, Sept. 2024). https://usafacts.org/explainers/what-does-the-us-government-do/subagency/agricultural-marketing-service/
  10. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, "FY2025 President's Budget" (~$399.0M, 725 FTE), 2024. https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/files/CFTC%20FY%202025%20President's%20Budget_Final_for%20Posting.pdf
  11. Federal Highway Administration, "Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act" (~$1.2T law). https://highways.dot.gov/infrastructure-investment-and-jobs-act
  12. Tax Policy Center, "What is the Highway Trust Fund, and how is it financed?" (federal fuel excise, unchanged since 1993). https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-highway-trust-fund-and-how-it-financed
  13. S&P Global Market Intelligence, "US utility capex forecast…" (~$215B in 2025); authorized electric ROE ~9.5–9.7%, 2024–25. https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/research/2025/10/us-utility-capex-forecast-nudges-higher-on-increased-generation-spending-plans
  14. U.S. Department of Energy, "DOE Releases New Report Evaluating Increase in Electricity Demand from Data Centers" (58→176 TWh 2014–2023; 325–580 TWh by 2028), 2024. https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-evaluating-increase-electricity-demand-data-centers
  15. W.E. Upjohn Institute, Timothy J. Bartik, "Business Incentives / Making Sense of Incentives" (~$50–60B/yr in state & local incentives). https://www.upjohn.org/business-incentives
  16. Brookings Institution, "Nearly 30 percent of workers in the U.S. need a license to perform their job," 2024. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/nearly-30-percent-of-workers-in-the-u-s-need-a-license-to-perform-their-job-it-is-time-to-examine-occupational-licensing-practices/
  17. Supreme Court of the United States, North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners v. FTC, 574 U.S. 494 (2015). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-534_19m2.pdf
  18. Tyler Technologies, Inc., Annual Report on Form 10-K, FY2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/860731/000086073126000016/tyl-20251231.htm
  19. Maximus, Inc., Annual Report on Form 10-K, FY2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1032220/000103222026000014/mms-20251231.htm
  20. Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp., Annual Report on Form 10-K (~98% U.S. government revenue). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1443646/000162828026037521/bah-20260331.htm
  21. AECOM, Form 10-K / Annual Report FY2024; American Water–Essential Utilities merger (Oct. 2025). https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000868857&type=10-K
  22. Verra Mobility Corp., FY2024 Form 10-K, 2025; USDA Economic Research Service, meatpacking concentration (top-4 beef packers ~85%). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1677703/000167770326000024/cndt-20251231.htm
  23. CME Group, "All-Time Record Annual Revenue for 2024"; Intercontinental Exchange, "ICE Reports Strong Full Year 2024 Results." https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/agricultural/commodity-index.html
  24. Guidehouse, "Guidehouse Completes Transaction with Bain Capital" (~$5.3B), 2023. https://guidehouse.com/news/corporate-news/2023/guidehouse-completes-transaction-with-bain-capital
  25. The Carlyle Group, "Carlyle to Acquire ManTech" (~$4.2B), 2022. https://www.carlyle.com/media-room/news-release-archive/carlyle-acquire-mantech
  26. Amentum, "Amentum Completes Combination with Jacobs' Critical Mission Solutions and Cyber and Intelligence Units," 2024. https://ir.amentum.com/news/news-details/2024/Amentum-Completes-Transformational-Combination-with-Jacobs-Critical-Mission-Solutions-and-Cyber-and-Intelligence-Units/default.aspx
  27. Duke Energy, "Duke Energy partners with Brookfield…" ($6B, 19.7% of Duke Energy Florida, Aug. 2025); Global Infrastructure Partners, "Consortium Led by GIP and EQT Agrees to Acquire AES" (~$33.4B EV); American Water–Essential all-stock merger (Oct. 2025). https://investors.duke-energy.com/news/news-details/2025/
  28. Federal Acquisition Regulation, "Part 16 — Types of Contracts." https://www.acquisition.gov/far/part-16
  29. Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, "Title 2, Part 200 — Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards." https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-2/subtitle-A/chapter-II/part-200