LinkedIn Industries: How to Choose the Right Category

LinkedIn industries are a single fixed field drawn from LinkedIn’s Industry Codes V2 taxonomy, which holds 434 industries arranged under 20 top-level sectors. Every company page and every personal profile carries exactly one industry, set in two separate places, and the field works as a filter in search, recruiter tools and advertising rather than as a description of what you do.

Picking a category your buyers never filter by removes your page from the results they see, which is why the setting affects reach more than most businesses expect. Microsoft, LinkedIn’s parent company, publishes the full reference list and states that it cannot currently accept requests for new industries. For a company page, select the industry your customers and target recruits filter by, not the one matching your Companies House filing.

What Are LinkedIn Industries, and What Does the Field Do?

LinkedIn industries are a structured filter, not a description. You select one entry from a closed list that LinkedIn calls Industry Codes V2, and that selection becomes machine-readable data attached to your page or profile. Recruiters, buyers, Sales Navigator users and advertisers all filter by it, and a page outside the expected category never appears in those results.

That makes it one of the cheapest corrections available in an organic social media strategy, and one of the settings most commonly left on whatever LinkedIn guessed at sign-up. Changing it takes two minutes and costs nothing in followers or page authority.

Three things trip people up repeatedly. It is one choice, with no multi-select. Pages and profiles are set separately and do not sync. And the list is closed for now, because Microsoft’s documentation states it is unable to accommodate updates to the industry codes or the list of industries, so a sector with no entry is a limit of the taxonomy rather than something you have missed.

The Specialities field is the usual workaround for a business spanning more than one sector. Being free text rather than a controlled category, it will not put you into a filtered search result, but it does give LinkedIn’s index more terms to work with.

How Many LinkedIn Industries Are There?

There are 434, organised under 20 top-level sectors, according to the Industry Codes V2 reference that Microsoft publishes for LinkedIn. The hierarchy runs up to six levels deep: 20 first-level sectors, 145 second-level, 227 third-level, 37 fourth-level, 4 fifth-level and a single sixth-level entry. This replaced an older flat list of roughly 149 categories when V2 rolled out.

Lower figures quoted elsewhere, usually around 289, count only the LinkedIn industries surfacing in the profile dropdown rather than the full tree exposed through Sales Navigator, Recruiter and the API. Two points matter when you go looking for your own category: the useful entry is often two or three levels below the obvious parent, and the labels are American, because the taxonomy follows the North American Industry Classification System rather than UK SIC or Irish NACE codes.

The Full List of LinkedIn Industries: All 20 Sectors

The table below lists every top-level sector in the current LinkedIn industries taxonomy, how many sub-industries sit beneath each one, and the entries UK and Irish businesses most often land on. Labels are reproduced exactly as LinkedIn spells them, in American English, because that is what appears in the dropdown.

Two placements in the LinkedIn industries list surprise people often enough to be worth calling out. IT Services and IT Consulting sits under Professional Services, alongside Accounting and Legal Services, while Software Development sits under Technology, Information and Media. A managed service provider and a product software company therefore belong in different top-level sectors, even though both call themselves tech businesses.

The second trap is Health and Human Services. It sounds like the home for a care provider, but it sits under Government Administration and covers public bodies administering human resource programmes. Private clinics and care providers belong under Hospitals and Health Care.

How Do You Choose Between LinkedIn Industries for a Company Page?

Pick the category your buyers and target recruits filter by, then check that a more specific entry does not exist two levels further down. Your selection does not need to describe what you do. It needs to match the professional context in which the people you want will come across you.

That reframing solves most difficult cases. A consultancy selling into food manufacturing gets more from being visible where food manufacturers look than from a label describing consultancy work precisely. A law firm chasing commercial clients should look at Legal Services, while the same firm hiring junior solicitors might do better under Law Practice. Separate categories, different audience pools, and the right answer depends on what the channel is for.

Work Through It in Four Steps

• Write down the three categories closest to your business, using the table above as a starting point.
• Filter LinkedIn company search by each. Where your competitors, partners and target clients cluster is the category your buyers use.
• Check whether a narrower entry sits beneath that parent, searching with a short root word.
• Set it, note the date, and review your visitor analytics four to six weeks later.

Where two categories are genuinely viable, use primary revenue as the tie-breaker. Select the industry reflecting where most turnover comes from today, and review it once a year.

Why Do LinkedIn Industries Affect Your Reach?

Because the field feeds three separate systems rather than sitting on the page as a label, and getting it wrong costs visibility in all three at once.

Filtered search and recruiter tools. When someone filters a company or people search by sector, anything outside that category is excluded from the result set. LinkedIn’s own Recruiter documentation is blunt about the harshest version: members without an industry set do not appear in industry-filtered searches at all. Blank is worse than imperfect.

Advertising. Company industry is a standard targeting attribute in Campaign Manager. When a competitor builds an audience around your sector, your page and your employees are either in that pool or they are not, based on how the company is classified.

Feed distribution. Engagement from people in the same category carries more weight than engagement from outside it. A page in the wrong sector reaches an audience with no commercial interest in what it sells, which shows up as low engagement, slow follower growth and poor paid performance.

Broad Versus Narrow: What You Trade

A broad parent such as Technology, Information and Media puts a company in a pool of several million pages. Software Development narrows that considerably. For organic visibility, narrower usually wins, because recruiters and procurement managers rarely filter at parent level. They pick the specific sub-industry, and a page sitting in the parent never shows up in those results. Paid campaigns run the other way: broad categories buy cheaper impressions and weaker conversion, narrow ones fewer impressions and better-qualified enquiries.

The video below covers how the category setting fits alongside the rest of a company page, which is worth watching before you change anything.

How Do LinkedIn Industries Map to UK SIC and Irish NACE Codes?

They do not map cleanly, and any mapping you use is an approximation rather than a lookup. LinkedIn industries are aligned to the North American Industry Classification System, and Microsoft publishes a separate NAICS crosswalk while noting that LinkedIn’s own industry IDs differ from NAICS codes. UK SIC 2007 and Irish NACE Rev. 2 are separate systems again.

Worth stating plainly, because a lot of published guidance describes the LinkedIn list as SIC-based. It is not. The table below is a starting point for businesses working from a Companies House SIC code. Irish businesses registered with the CRO under NACE Rev. 2 can use it too, since NACE and UK SIC align closely at the two-digit level.

The fit column is a judgment about how closely the two definitions overlap, not an official correspondence. Where it reads Medium, expect the LinkedIn category to cover a broader or narrower set of activities than the SIC code does.

The Spelling Trap That Hides Half the LinkedIn Industries List

Search the dropdown with American spellings and short root words. The search is string-based, so a UK defence contractor typing “defence” finds nothing, because the entry is spelled Defense and Space Manufacturing. Typing “defen” surfaces it immediately. The same applies to “recruitment”, where the platform uses Staffing and Recruiting. Roots such as “recruit”, “market”, “consult” and “manufactur” avoid the problem entirely.

What If Your Business Spans More Than One Sector?

Choose where the majority of revenue comes from today, and use the Specialities field to name the activities the category misses. One choice from 434 LinkedIn industries is a real constraint for hybrid businesses. A fintech is both a software company and a financial services company. A firm building renewable energy infrastructure could sit under Manufacturing or Professional Services depending on which part of the work dominates.

Where your statutory code is a catch-all, such as SIC 74909 for other professional, scientific and technical activities, ignore it and pick Business Consulting and Services. The goal is visibility to the right audience, not taxonomic accuracy, and whatever the category misses belongs in your page description and your content marketing.

How Do You Change the Industry, and How Do You Know It Worked?

On desktop, go to your company page, select Edit page, then Details, and find the industry field under company details. Open the dropdown search, type a root word, select and save. On mobile, tap the edit icon near the top, scroll to company details and tap Industry. Changes take effect immediately, though the index can take a day or two to catch up. LinkedIn industries are set separately on personal profiles, under the pencil icon on the intro section, and where several employees match the company page, the platform treats the organisation as a stronger signal for that sector.

Check your visitor analytics four to six weeks later, looking at the industry and job function breakdowns rather than the headline count. If the mix has moved toward your target sectors, the change is working. If it has not, the problem is more likely your content than your category. The data sits under the Analytics tab and needs no Premium subscription. Businesses treating LinkedIn as a serious B2B channel usually get more from a full page audit, where category, content and paid targeting are reviewed together as part of a wider digital strategy.

Where to Start

Open your company page and ask whether a buyer searching for a supplier like you would filter by the category currently set. If not, change it, searching the LinkedIn industries dropdown with American spellings and drilling past the obvious parent, then diary a check of your analytics for six weeks’ time. If you want help building a LinkedIn presence that pulls its weight, get in touch with the ProfileTree team about a page audit or a social media review.

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