Utilities cooperatives provide electric, telephone, and water services. Table 4-5 shows that the U.S. has 4,525 utility cooperatives; 1,970 provided us with data. These “reporting” cooperatives have nearly 20 million memberships that account for $119B in assets, $36B in revenue, 118,244 jobs and >$4B in wages. Cooperatives that provide electric utility services dominate this aggregate sector in terms of total economic activity, but many water cooperatives provide valued services to their communities.

We report only on firms for which we have collected economic data (some firms did not respond to our requests for information), so these numbers represent lower bounds regarding the full economic footprint of cooperatives in this aggregate sector. As described in the previous section, we extrapolated to the full population for the purpose of conducting our impact analysis. As a consequence, the sum of direct impacts in following subsections will be larger than the corresponding aggregate variables reported here.

Figure 4-5: Combined Distribution of Utility Cooperatives