The list of industries on LinkedIn lives in one official reference, and the option you pick decides which searches you turn up in.

What the industry field on LinkedIn actually is

Industry is a single structured field on a LinkedIn profile and on a LinkedIn Page. You do not type it freely. You pick a value from a fixed taxonomy that LinkedIn maintains, and that value is what search, filters and ad targeting read.

LinkedIn Help puts the purpose plainly: choose the industry that best matches your company or the type of work that you do. When you add one, other people can more easily find your profile or Page when they search for someone in your industry.

That makes it a routing field, not a branding field. Nobody reads your industry the way they read your headline. Machines read it, and they decide whether your profile or your company appears in a filtered result at all.

For sellers the field works in two directions at once. It decides which buyer searches surface you, and it is the same field you set when you filter for accounts worth calling.

Where the list of industries on LinkedIn is published

There is no screen inside LinkedIn that shows every option. The profile field is a typeahead box: you start typing and it offers matches. If you do not already know the label, the box is not much help.

The full list lives outside the product. LinkedIn Help links to it as the Full list of industries, and that link goes to LinkedIn's Industry Codes V2 reference tables, hosted on Microsoft Learn. That reference is the source this guide counted and quotes from.

The reference page even tells you how to use it: press Ctrl and F to open a search box, and try related keywords if your first guess finds nothing. It is a lookup table, not an article.

How many industries LinkedIn lists

The reference page holds two tables. Active Nodes carries the industries you can currently choose. Inactive Nodes carries deprecated labels that LinkedIn keeps documented for anyone reading older data.

Counting the rows in those tables on the date this page was checked gives the numbers below. They are a reading of the source, not a figure taken from another article.

Two numbers matter in practice. There are 434 live options, so the odds that nothing fits are low. There are only 20 sectors at the top, so most buyers who filter broadly are choosing from a short menu.

The 20 top-level sectors and what sits under each

Every active industry hangs off one of 20 sectors. The table gives each sector, how many industries sit below it, and a few of the children a B2B seller is likely to want.

Manufacturing is by far the deepest branch, with 90 industries beneath it. Holding Companies has none. That imbalance is worth knowing before you decide a parent-level filter is too broad to be useful.

How the industry hierarchy works

Each row in the reference gives four things: an industry ID, a label, a hierarchy path written with arrows, and a description of what the industry covers. The path is the part most people skip, and it is the part that decides who finds you.

A company that chooses Mobile Gaming Apps is still inside Software Development, still inside Technology, Information and Internet, and still inside the Technology, Information and Media sector. Narrow choices do not remove you from the branch above.

The descriptions in the reference are worth reading when two labels look interchangeable. They are written as scope definitions, so they usually settle the argument faster than the label alone.

Where the labels you expect are not

The biggest practical trap is assuming an industry sits where its name suggests. Several of the most valuable B2B labels sit under a parent that sellers rarely guess. These paths come straight from the reference tables.

The consequence is concrete. A seller who targets the Technology, Information and Media sector expecting to reach IT services firms will miss every one of them, because that whole branch lives under Professional Services.

Inside the branches B2B sellers use most

A sector name tells you very little on its own. What you need before you filter is the set of industries sitting directly underneath it. The table lists those children exactly as the reference tables give them, for the branches most B2B sellers work in.

Three patterns stand out for anyone building a target list. Wholesale and Retail are wide and flat, so a parent filter there is close to a full sweep of the sector.

Manufacturing is wide and deep, with 90 industries below it, so a parent filter buys reach and loses all precision. Technology, Information and Internet is narrow at the top, so its children matter more than its name.

Software vendors and IT services firms sit in different sectors entirely. Software Development lives under Technology, Information and Internet, while IT services, computer and network security and custom software development all hang off Professional Services.

LinkedIn industry options for profiles and Pages

The same taxonomy serves both object types, but they are set in different places and by different people. LinkedIn treats them as separate records, and they can disagree.

LinkedIn Help notes that the LinkedIn industry options available inside Recruiter and Talent Insights are a filtered set, and may not include every industry in the full list. If a label exists in the reference, it is not guaranteed to be filterable everywhere.

How the industry field works on a profile

The profile carries one industry. The Edit intro window has a single Industry box, and LinkedIn Help describes adding an industry rather than a set of them. There is no way to say you serve three sectors through this field.

Because it is one value, it is a positioning decision rather than a description. A consultant who serves hospitals but whose profile says Business Consulting and Services will be filtered out of health care searches, and vice versa.

The industry field sits alongside the rest of your introduction, so it works best when the headline and about section agree with it. Our guide on how to create a LinkedIn profile covers the surrounding fields.

One more detail matters for accuracy. If the Experience section shows the right company but the wrong industry, LinkedIn Help says the fix belongs to the Page super admin, not to you: correcting the Page updates what shows on the profile.

How the industry field works on a Page

On a Page the industry is part of the details a super admin maintains, and it carries more weight than the profile version because advertisers and account searches read the company record first.

LinkedIn Help is direct about the payoff: Pages with details such as a logo, a description and a website URL are more discoverable. Industry belongs in that same set of fields that make a Page findable.

If your company sells into several sectors, the Page industry describes what your company is, not who it sells to. Serving markets is a job for your content and your LinkedIn marketing strategy, not for this field.

Changing your industry on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Help gives the steps for both desktop and mobile. The desktop path is short, and the change takes effect on the profile immediately.

• Desktop: click the Me icon, select View Profile, click the Edit icon in your introduction section, type a name in the Industry field, pick from the options, then click Save.
• Mobile app: tap your profile picture, then View Profile, tap the Edit icon in your introduction section, type in the Industry field, select an option, then tap Save.
• Mobile browser and Lite app: tap your profile picture, tap the Edit icon in your introduction section, choose an option from the Industry dropdown, then tap Save in the upper right.
• Page: open the super admin view, click Edit page in the left menu, then use the Details tab to set the industry.

Changing the value does not rewrite your history or your connections. It changes which filtered results include you from that point on, which is exactly why it is worth getting right rather than leaving at whatever was suggested when you signed up.

How to choose and set your LinkedIn industry

1. Open the official list, not a blog copy

   LinkedIn Help links to the Industry Codes V2 reference tables. Open that page and use Ctrl and F to search it, as the page itself suggests.

2. Search for the words your buyers use

   Try the label you would use, then the words your customers use for you, then the service you sell. The same work often appears under more than one branch.

3. Read the hierarchy path, not just the label

   Each entry shows a path such as Professional Services then IT Services and IT Consulting. The branch decides which parent-level filters will include you.

4. Pick the branch your buyers filter on

   If buyers search a parent sector, sit under that parent. If they search a narrow label, take the exact child and accept the smaller audience.

5. Set it on the profile and on the Page separately

   The profile field is in the Edit intro window. The Page field is under Edit page, Details, and only a super admin can change it.

6. Check the result in a filtered search

   Run a search or a Sales Navigator filter for the industry you chose and confirm you appear. Recheck after LinkedIn updates its options.

Why the industry field matters for being found

LinkedIn Help states the mechanism without hedging: adding an industry makes it easier for other people to find your profile or Page when they search for someone in your industry, and helps connect you to relevant opportunities, connections and content.

Read that as a filter, not a ranking boost. Industry rarely decides who ranks first. It decides who is in the result set at all, which is a harsher outcome than ranking low.

• Recruiter and Talent Insights expose an industry filter over candidate searches, using a filtered subset of the full taxonomy.
• Sales Navigator offers Industry as a lead filter and as an account filter, on separate tabs with separate behavior.
• Campaign Manager uses company industry to build ad audiences, with a hierarchy you can target at any level.
• Everyday member search lets people narrow people and company results, which is where most buyers start.

An empty industry is the only choice that guarantees a bad outcome. A slightly imperfect label keeps you inside a filtered result; a blank field removes you from every one of them. The same logic runs through LinkedIn SEO.

Industry versus function in Sales Navigator

These two filters get confused constantly, and the confusion costs list quality. Industry answers what business this is. Function answers what kind of work this person does. They are stored and derived differently.

Sales Navigator Help describes Function as filtering leads by their job function category, and gives General Management as an example that gathers organizational leaders who are not part of a specific domain, such as CEOs, Presidents and Chairpersons.

The practical rule for building a list: industry narrows the companies, function and seniority narrow the people. Using industry alone gives you a sector with no role focus. Using function alone gives you the right job in the wrong market. Our Sales Navigator guide covers the rest of the filter set.

Selecting a parent pulls in every child

This is the single most useful behavior to know. Sales Navigator Help states that when you select an industry filter in account search, accounts are filtered with child industries too.

Campaign Manager works the same way. LinkedIn's help describes selecting a parent industry to target multiple related industries at once, and gives the example of targeting Technology, Information and Media to reach every industry below it, or narrowing to Software Development instead.

• Start at the parent when you are sizing a market or do not yet know which sub-label your buyers chose.
• Drop to the child when the parent drags in sectors you cannot serve, and volume is not the problem.
• Never assume symmetry: picking a child does not include its parent or its siblings, only what sits beneath it.
• Check the branch first, because a parent that looks right by name may not contain the industries you mean, as the IT services example shows.

This is also why sloppy sector targeting looks fine in the campaign builder and fails in the pipeline. The audience size looks healthy because the parent swept in branches you never intended to pay for.

Where LinkedIn gets the industry it targets on

For advertising, LinkedIn documents the chain in unusual detail, and the detail explains why some records look wrong. Company Industry is defined as the primary industry of the company where the member is employed, as stated by the company.

LinkedIn also says a company can belong to multiple industries, and that a deep learning model uses signals such as company name, company size, employee skills and job distribution to map companies to industries.

Two things follow for sellers. Industry on a record is not always a declaration; sometimes it is a model output. And enriching your own list, as covered in B2B data, is how you check a sector claim before you build a campaign on it.

Industry codes, IDs and the NAICS question

Every industry in the reference has a numeric ID. Financial Services is 43, Software Development is 4, IT Services and IT Consulting is 96. Those IDs are what the API and many export tools return instead of a readable label.

LinkedIn states that it updated its industry taxonomy to align with North American Industry Classification System standards. That alignment is about structure, not about the numbers themselves.

The reference is explicit that the industry IDs are LinkedIn defined and differ from the IDs used in NAICS codes, and its FAQ adds that the codes used to describe targetable industries are unique to the LinkedIn platform. Microsoft publishes a separate table mapping NAICS codes to the matching LinkedIn codes.

If your CRM or data provider stores NAICS or SIC codes, that mapping table is the bridge. Do not assume a NAICS code and a LinkedIn industry ID that look similar refer to the same thing.

Deprecated industries and old data

The reference keeps a second table of deprecated entries: 53 labels that are documented but no longer part of the active set. Familiar names sit there, including Apparel and Fashion, Animation, Arts and Crafts, Automotive, Aviation and Aerospace and Biotechnology.

Those rows explain a common complaint. Someone remembers choosing an industry years ago, cannot find it now, and assumes LinkedIn broke something. The label was retired and the work moved to a different branch.

The same thing affects old exports and old targeting documents. An industry list saved two years ago may contain labels that no longer resolve, which is a good reason to rebuild a target list from the current taxonomy rather than a spreadsheet.

Picking the right one when several fit

Most real businesses fit two or three labels. The choice is not about accuracy alone, because several options can be accurate at once. It is about which accurate option puts you in front of the right filter.

A worked example, written for this page: a security consultancy could choose Computer and Network Security, IT Services and IT Consulting, or Business Consulting and Services. All three are defensible.

The first two sit on the same branch, so either keeps the firm inside Professional Services and inside IT services filters. The third puts it beside general management consultancies. If buyers filter for IT services, the third option quietly removes the firm from view.

Where your customers sit should drive this, which is the same input as your ideal customer profile. If the profile says you sell to hospitals, your visibility depends on being where hospital buyers look.

How a seller should use the industry field

Industry is a coarse filter, so it works best as the first cut rather than the whole definition of a segment. Signals such as technographics and hiring activity separate the accounts worth calling from the rest of the sector.

When you are ready to turn a filter into outreach, the process is the same as any other source of names. Our guides on LinkedIn prospecting and how to make a prospect list pick up from there.

Common mistakes with the LinkedIn industry field

• Leaving the field empty, which removes you from every industry-filtered search instead of putting you in an imperfect one.
• Picking the label that sounds most impressive rather than the one your buyers would filter on.
• Keeping whatever industry was suggested at signup, years after the work changed.
• Assuming a label sits under the sector its name suggests, then targeting the wrong parent.
• Targeting a parent sector without checking which branches it sweeps in, and paying for the extras.
• Treating the Page industry as a description of your customers rather than of your company.
• Trusting an industry value on a prospect record that was inferred rather than stated, then naming that sector in a message.
• Working from a blog copy of the list when LinkedIn Help says the options change over time.

A connection note for a prospect found by industry filter

The note below is for someone who turned up because of an industry filter, not because of anything they did. It leans on the sector rather than pretending to know them, and it asks for a connection rather than a meeting.

Hi {{firstName}},

Your profile came up while I was reading about how {{industryLabel}} teams handle {{problem}}. {{observation}} is the part I keep hearing about from people doing that work.

I write up what teams in your sector try, and what they drop. Happy to connect and send the next one your way, no pitch attached.

{{senderName}}

Frequently asked questions