Greensboro, Guilford County seek incentives to land HondaJet plant

Greensboro and Guilford County are again trying to use incentives to keep HondaJet growth tied to Piedmont Triad International Airport, where Honda Aircraft Company already has its world headquarters and production facility. The stakes are plain: a new plant could bring construction work, supplier contracts, aviation manufacturing jobs and a bigger long-term tax base for the airport corridor.

Honda has been in Greensboro for years. In 2007, the company broke ground on a $100 million headquarters and manufacturing facility at PTI, a 369,000-square-foot project Honda said would bring more than 300 new jobs. Honda said the site would handle research, development, sales, marketing and manufacturing of the HondaJet, and that major assembly and testing of the prototype had already been done at its existing Greensboro facility, which opened in 2001. PTI’s airport history page says Honda Aircraft’s world headquarters and production facility opened at the airport in 2007.

The latest push follows a 2023 expansion that already deepened Honda’s footprint in Guilford County. State officials announced that Honda Aircraft would create 280 jobs tied to a new HondaJet 2600 model, with a $55.7 million investment and an average annual wage of $88,761. Guilford County approved more than $1 million in incentives for that expansion, and the North Carolina Department of Commerce’s Economic Investment Committee approved about $3.9 million. That project was framed as Greensboro and PTI winning out over Alberta, Alabama.

That history is what gives the new incentive effort its business significance. Honda Aircraft Company’s LinkedIn profile lists the Greensboro operation as an aviation and aerospace component manufacturer with 1,001 to 5,000 employees, making it one of the region’s major industrial employers. A fresh plant would likely extend the local aerospace supply chain and reinforce the airport-adjacent industrial land that Guilford County and the City of Greensboro have spent years promoting for high-wage manufacturing.

The public question is how much local support is justified. Guilford County’s economic development guidelines say assistance may be offered at the discretion of the Board of County Commissioners, including for companies making substantial capital investments in buildings and equipment. The county also says economic development can include using public resources to attract, retain or support private companies or projects that improve financial health and quality of life.

That framework has already been used to keep Honda growing in the Triad. A new HondaJet facility would test whether another round of incentives can deliver measurable returns in jobs, payroll and tax revenue, or whether Greensboro and Guilford County are simply paying again to protect an industrial base Honda already put in place at PTI.