Manufacturing jobs in Cortland County paid an average of $1,553 a week in the fourth quarter of 2025, the highest of any industry in the county and $415 more than the countywide average of $1,138, according to the Cortland County Job Trends report the New York State Department of Labor released on July 15. The report comes out of the department’s Central New York office at 450 South Salina Street in Syracuse, where labor market analysts Karen Knapik-Scalzo and Diana Pena are the named contacts for the county’s numbers.

The same week that report landed, a door into those jobs opened. Ithaca Area Economic Development began taking applications for Advance 2 Apprenticeship, a free month long pre-apprenticeship course that runs August 17 through September 16 at Tompkins Cortland Community College and ends with guaranteed job interviews at participating manufacturers. Applications are due August 3.

Put the two announcements side by side and the math gets simple. The best average paycheck in Cortland County belongs to the sector that a free four day a week class is now training people to enter, and the clock to apply runs out in less than three weeks.

The best paycheck in the county

The state’s numbers, drawn from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, put manufacturing at the top of every industry in Cortland County for the fourth quarter of 2025. The $1,553 weekly average works out to roughly $80,756 a year at 52 weeks, a CNY Signal calculation from the state figure, and runs 36 percent above the all industry county average of $1,138.

The rest of the field trails behind. Professional and business services averaged $1,439 a week, construction $1,394, government $1,378, and financial activities $1,371. Private education and health care, the county’s second largest private employment block, averaged $1,248. At the bottom sits leisure and hospitality at $475 a week, less than a third of the manufacturing figure, with trade, transportation and utilities at $903.

Manufacturing earns that money with a comparatively small workforce. The sector accounted for 12 percent of Cortland County employment in the fourth quarter of 2025, behind government at 24 percent, leisure and hospitality at 18 percent, private education and health at 17 percent, and trade, transportation and utilities at 13 percent. In other words, roughly one county worker in eight collects the county’s biggest average paycheck.

One manufacturing niche made the state’s list of the county’s top 12 growth industries for the fourth quarter of 2025 against a year earlier: fabricated metal product manufacturing, with average annual pay of $61,057. Merchant wholesalers of durable goods, the distribution layer that moves factory output, also made the growth list at $79,295 a year.

A free month, then a guaranteed interview

Advance 2 Apprenticeship is a pre-apprenticeship, the on ramp that comes before a registered apprenticeship. The cohort running August 17 through September 16 meets Monday through Thursday from 1 to 5 p.m. at the TC3 campus at 170 North Street in Dryden, in neighboring Tompkins County, a short drive from the Cortland County line. Tuition is free.

The program page lists the terms plainly. Applicants must be 18 or older and authorized to work in the United States. A high school diploma or GED is preferred but not required. Participants can earn up to $1,250 in stipends for hitting program milestones, and the program offers help with transportation and child care, two of the barriers that most reliably keep working age adults out of training classes. Graduates get the chance to sit for the Certified Manufacturing Associate exam, a nationally recognized credential, and every graduate is guaranteed interviews with participating employers.

Those employers currently include BorgWarner, Precision Filters, Lansing Enclosures, Knickerbocker, Transonic, Stork, Therm and C&D Assembly, a list that leans toward the Tompkins County side of the two county area TC3 serves. Cortland County residents are eligible on the same terms as anyone else, and the wage table above is the argument for making the drive.

Ithaca Area Economic Development runs the course with TC3 and the Manufacturers Talent Institute, the talent development arm of MACNY, The Manufacturers Association. Funding comes through a federal Workforce Opportunities for Rural Communities grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, with additional support from Empire State Development and the NSF Energy Storage Engine in Upstate New York. Applications are at ithacaareaed.org/direct-to-work, and the program line for interested participants is 607.273.0005.

Who is hiring in Cortland County

The July 15 state report includes a page the Labor Department headlines with an exclamation point: a roster of Cortland County companies it flags as growing. The manufacturing entries run the gamut. Cortland Plastics makes bottles. Crown Industrial Corp. builds transmissions for industrial equipment. Forkey Construction and Fabrication makes steel parts. Pyrotek builds custom equipment for holding and transporting molten metal. Redding-Hunter makes ammunition reloading equipment, and iSpice manufactures spices.

The list reaches past the factory floor. Byrne Dairy appears for its yogurt plant and visitor center, BIO365 for soil production, Suit-Kote for road paving, and Cortland Beer Company and McGraw Box Brewing for brewing. Aspen Dental, Cortland ENT, Guthrie Cortland Obstetrics and Gynecology and WellNow Urgent Care carry the health care side.

The report also sketches the shape of the county those employers operate in. Cortland County counted 46,809 residents in the April 2020 census, down 2,527 people, or 5.1 percent, from 2010. Its median establishment employed 6 people in the fourth quarter of 2025, the largest median in Central New York and double the New York State median of 3, a signature of a county where mid sized shops, not corporate towers, carry the payroll. The county seat wears the investment visibly: the state awarded Cortland a $10 million Downtown Revitalization Initiative grant in October 2017, and one of its priority projects is rebuilding the infrastructure and streetscape of Main Street in downtown Cortland.

TC3’s adult wave

The training cohort arrives at a college already in the middle of an adult student surge. Under SUNY Reconnect, the state program launched in fall 2025 that offers free community college to New York residents ages 25 to 55 who never earned a degree, TC3’s adult enrollment jumped 21 percent between spring 2024 and spring 2025. Adult students made up 48.9 percent of TC3’s spring 2025 enrollment, up from 31.5 percent a year earlier, and the college offers 15 Reconnect eligible programs.

“We are actually launching a new adult learner and Reconnect center on our campus,” Robert Palmieri, TC3’s vice president of enrollment management and student affairs, told the Cortland Standard in a story published July 2.

A five week manufacturing class with afternoon hours, stipends and child care support is built for exactly that returning adult student. It asks for a month, not a semester.

The bigger money behind the classroom

The course sits on top of two much larger workforce bets. MACNY holds a $6 million U.S. Department of Labor grant for the New York Registered Apprenticeship Manufacturing Partnership, a program built to move more than 800 New Yorkers from underrepresented backgrounds into advanced manufacturing careers, with its first phase covering Central New York among other regions. Pre-apprenticeships like the TC3 cohort are the front porch of that pipeline.

The second funder is newer and bigger. The NSF Energy Storage Engine in Upstate New York, led by Binghamton University, launched in 2024 with $15 million from the National Science Foundation and won a $45 million second phase over three years, announced March 23, 2026, with the potential to reach $160 million over 10 years. Empire State Development is matching phase two with up to $16 million. The Engine serves a 27 county upstate region, and workforce development, including battery and advanced manufacturing training, is one of its four program areas. When a battery economy needs technicians, a pre-apprenticeship 40 minutes north of Binghamton is where some of them will start.

The backdrop: a labor market with slack in it

The timing matters because Cortland County’s labor market has loosened. The county’s unemployment rate hit 4.1 percent in May 2026, up from 3.3 percent in May 2025, and touched 5.8 percent in February, the highest monthly reading of 2026 so far. The state report carries an unusual footnote: October 2025 county data does not exist because of the federal government shutdown that fall.

The June to June job comparison in the same report shows total nonfarm employment in the county slipped year over year, with private education and health services posting the only sizable gain and manufacturing employment holding flat. A flat line is not growth, but paired with the sector’s top of the table wages and a documented training pipeline, it reads as a floor, not a ceiling.

For a county that lost 5.1 percent of its population between 2010 and 2020, the arithmetic of one $1,553 a week paycheck is not abstract. It is a family that stays.

The application window closes August 3. The first class meets at 1 p.m. on August 17 at 170 North Street in Dryden.