When Caterpillar moved its global headquarters from Deerfield, Illinois to Irving, Texas in 2022, it did so without any disclosed incentive package. The same was true for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, AECOM and NRG Energy, all of which relocated corporate headquarters to Texas between 2020 and 2024. In a state with no corporate income tax, low operating costs and central geography, the structural case was compelling enough on its own.
But Texas is an outlier. In most states, major headquarters relocations attract significant incentive packages. The more interesting pattern, and the one with the clearest implications for companies evaluating a move, is what happens in the midsize markets. Firms investing $15 million to $250 million and creating 100 to 1,000 jobs are arguably the best-positioned to extract outsized value from the incentive system. Their projects are large enough to command serious attention from state and local officials, yet small enough to consider locating to secondary or even tertiary markets — a combination that produces packages unthinkable for a Fortune 50 company choosing between two Tier 1 cities.
For international companies establishing their first U.S. or North American headquarters, the opportunities are even more compelling.
The Landscape Behind the Headlines
Across the United States, more than 1,600 active incentive programs are available to corporate office and headquarters projects. Of these, roughly 350 operate at the state level, while over 1,270 are local programs administered by cities and counties. Property tax abatements account for approximately 44 percent of all office-eligible programs, followed by cash grants at 13 percent and income tax credits at 10 percent.
The result is a layered, often overlapping system in which a single headquarters project might qualify for a state-level jobs tax credit, a county property tax abatement and a city cash grant simultaneously. This complexity is precisely where mid-market companies hold an advantage. While the value of a 500-job headquarters relocation may be taken for granted by New York City or Los Angeles, its transformative economic impact matters deeply to a midsize metro.
Many states offer incentives specifically designed for headquarters operations, from dedicated tax credits to named tracks within broader programs. But the existence of a dedicated program and its actual use are very different things.
What the Deal Data Actually Shows
When Honeywell relocated its global headquarters from Morris Plains, New Jersey to Charlotte, North Carolina in 2018, state legislature passed Senate Bill 820 just three days before the announcement, raising the per-job cap on its flagship Job Development Investment Grant (JDIG) program from $6,500 to $16,000 in a move widely understood to have been tailored for this single deal.
The complete package created a $42.45 million state JDIG over 12 years, a $28.9 million Mecklenburg County Business Investment Grant over 15 years and a $17.1 million City of Charlotte Business Investment Grant over 15 years, for a total of $88.45 million. Honeywell committed to 750 jobs but ultimately created more than 1,050, with an average wage of $315,328 — more than four times the state average. The company had left New Jersey despite having accepted $40 million in Grow NJ tax credits just years earlier.
That is the power of a well-assembled mid sized market package: nearly $90 million in performance-based incentives for a project that, in the context of Amazon HQ2 or a semiconductor fabrication plant, would barely register as a blip on the radar.
The pattern holds in Nashville. When AllianceBernstein relocated its global headquarters from Manhattan in 2018, Tennessee assembled a $20.83 million FastTrack grant — the second largest in state history at the time — plus $6 million in business development funds and a local Nashville incentive of approximately $3.7 million. The state also passed HB2112, reducing franchise and excise taxes for publicly traded financial asset management companies, a category that essentially described only AllianceBernstein. The exact value of that tax reduction was redacted from public documents, but the total disclosed package exceeded $30 million.
Nashville beat Charlotte’s competing offer of nearly $30 million, not by outspending it but by combining cash with structural advantages: no state personal income tax, lower cost of living and a targeted legislative accommodation. AllianceBernstein reportedly saves $80 million per year from the move. By mid-2022, the company had already exceeded 1,000 Nashville hires against a target of 1,250 by the end of 2024.
Case Study: Kempower’s Leap from Lahti to Durham
The midsize market advantage is perhaps most visible when international companies enter the picture. Finnish electric vehicle charging manufacturer Kempower announced in early 2023 that it would establish its manufacturing facility and North American headquarters in Durham, North Carolina, committing $41.2 million in capital investment and 306 new jobs at an average salary of $88,440.
The incentive structure was performance-based: a JDIG worth up to $3.01 million over 12 years, with disbursements tied to verified job creation milestones. The state estimated the project’s twelve-year economic impact at $726 million.
For Kempower, a company with 2024 revenues of approximately $260.6 million, the decision to locate in North Carolina was not driven by incentives alone. Access to the Research Triangle’s engineering talent, proximity to major automotive OEMs along the I-85 corridor and a cost of living dramatically lower than comparable Nordic metros all factored in.
This is the calculus that site selectors increasingly encounter when advising international clients. The U.S. incentive ecosystem is radically decentralized compared to what most foreign companies are accustomed to. In many Latin American and European markets, a single national agency administers investment incentives under a unified framework. In the United States, a 500-job headquarters project may trigger offers from three or four competing metros, each assembling packages from a different combination of state credits, county abatements and city support.
Case Study: Maersk Charts a Course to Charlotte
When Danish shipping and logistics giant Maersk selected Charlotte for its North American headquarters in late 2025, the deal underscored a different dimension of midsize market strategy. At $16 million in capital investment and 520 new jobs averaging more than $100,000 in wages, Maersk’s state incentive package totaled approximately $10.6 million; a $7.9 million JDIG reimbursement over 12 years, with an additional $2.6 million directed to the state’s Industrial Development Fund. The City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County added a combined $530,000 in local grants.
But the incentive was almost beside the point. Charlotte’s value proposition for Maersk was structural: the city had already attracted Honeywell’s global headquarters, Siemens Energy’s Americas hub, Lowe’s corporate campus and a growing cluster of financial services and logistics operations. Maersk had been operating in Charlotte since 2006. The incentive served as a signal of partnership rather than a decisive financial factor.
This clustering dynamic is reshaping how midsize market headquarters decisions are made. Companies are not simply chasing the largest check. They are evaluating which smaller metros have assembled the ecosystem — talent, infrastructure, peer companies and quality of life — that will sustain a headquarters operation over decades.
The Dedicated Headquarters Programs: More Paper Than Practice
Among the dozen-plus states with headquarters-specific incentives, only a handful see meaningful activity.
Tennessee is the clear leader. Its Headquarters Tax Credit has been used by AllianceBernstein, Mitsubishi Motors and likely several other firms that relocated to Nashville and Franklin in recent years. The state reports that since 2019, it has secured approximately 4,500 new headquarters job commitments.
Indiana and South Carolina show genuine traction. Elanco Animal Health and Corteva Agriscience both relocated global headquarters to Indianapolis with substantial state incentive packages, though Indiana’s confidentiality laws make it difficult to confirm how much flowed through the HQRTC specifically versus other credit programs. South Carolina recently lowered its headquarters credit job threshold from 75 to 40, an implicit signal that the state is actively competing for even smaller headquarters deals.
Arkansas is the newest entrant. Act 881, part of the state’s IMPACT economic development package, took effect on January 1, 2026, and offers an income tax credit of up to 50 percent of payroll for new full-time employees at a relocated corporate headquarters, with an additional investment tax credit of up to 10 percent of eligible project costs available through the Arkansas Economic Development Commission. Unlike some other states’ single-company programs, the Arkansas credit appears designed as a genuine recruitment tool, with broad eligibility and no industry restrictions. Whether it attracts meaningful deal flow remains to be seen, but the structure suggests Arkansas is serious about competing.
The broader point is that dedicated headquarters programs are mostly symbolic. The real competition happens through general-purpose tools — performance-based grants, property tax abatements, business investment grants and workforce training funds.
The International Dimension
Across the Americas, the U.S. incentive landscape presents both opportunity and confusion for international firms considering their first headquarters on American soil.
Beyond Kempower and Maersk, Siemens Energy chose Charlotte for its Americas hub. CARsgen Therapeutics, a Shanghai-based biotech company, committed $141 million and 180 jobs to a Durham manufacturing facility. The pipeline of international companies planting flags in U.S. metros is accelerating, driven by nearshoring strategies, tariff considerations and access to the world’s largest consumer market.
However, international companies rarely have in-house teams familiar with the idiosyncrasies of U.S. state and local incentives. They may not know that Ohio abolished its business personal property tax in 2009, making the state’s property tax abatements apply only to real property. They may not realize that Texas Chapter 312 abatements cover only the sponsoring jurisdiction’s tax levy — not the combined rate that appears on a property tax bill. They almost certainly will not anticipate that a single project could require navigating applications with a state commerce department, a county economic development authority, a city council and a school district simultaneously.
This is where professional guidance pays for itself many times over. Many headquarters projects involve significantly less capital expenditure than a manufacturing facility — often limited to leasehold improvements and technology infrastructure in developer-built and financed Class A office space. As a result, a well-structured incentive negotiation can yield benefits that represent a remarkably high ratio to the company’s direct investment, particularly for projects that bring high-wage jobs to these secondary markets.
Looking Ahead
The corporate headquarters incentive landscape is not contracting. Charlotte, Nashville, Columbus, Durham, Austin and a handful of other markets have demonstrated that aggressive, well-structured incentive programs can attract headquarters that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
But the data tells a nuanced story. The recent exodus of corporate headquarters in many states shows that structural advantages can outweigh any incentive package. The dedicated headquarters programs in most states are largely unused. Additionally, the companies that extract the most value from the incentive system are not the Fortune 50 names that grab headlines, but the mid-market firms planting several hundred jobs into metros where their arrival genuinely changes the economic landscape.
For those companies, the math has never been more favorable. T&ID
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