Toyota Texas Tops 4,000 Workers Ahead of the Tacoma Move

Toyota’s San Antonio plant passed 4,000 employees in October and has finished hiring the more than 400 people who will run its new rear axle plant.

The factory that builds every Tundra and Sequoia is growing into the biggest expansion in its history, and the headcount is the first measurable sign of it. More than 20 suppliers on the same campus employ another 5,600 people, and Toyota says hiring for the second vehicle assembly line it is building for the Tacoma will not begin until 2029.

The figures come from a release Toyota Texas issued on October 29 to close out what the industry calls Manufacturing Month. "Manufacturing is ultimately about people," said Frank Voss, who runs truck manufacturing for Toyota Motor North America and is president of the Texas plant, adding that the team had reached "a new high point in our operations" by passing 4,000 employees and completing hiring for the axle plant. The same release announced $250,000 in workforce grants split among three South Texas organizations.

The axle plant was announced in June 2024 as a more than 400-job addition to the campus, and Toyota said in July that it would start production this fall. It is the smaller of the two projects under way in San Antonio. On July 6 Toyota announced a $3.6 billion expansion that adds a second assembly line, 2.5 million square feet and 2,000 jobs, doubling the size of the plant by 2030. That line will build the Tacoma, which moves from Toyota’s plant in Baja California, Mexico over roughly four years, and it takes Toyota’s total investment in San Antonio to $8.3 billion since the company broke ground there in 2003. Toyota said then that the local workforce would climb to about 6,000, supported by 23 on-site suppliers.

The milestone shows how far there is to go. At just over 4,000 employees, the plant is two thirds of the way to that figure, and the 2029 start date for assembly-line hiring means the bulk of the remaining growth is still three years out. The existing line built more than 197,000 Tundras and Sequoias last year, and it remains the only source of both models. For buyers, the near-term change is the axle plant, which brings a major component in-house for the two trucks, while the Tacoma itself keeps coming from Mexico for now.

The grants go to programs that feed the plant its future hires. Goodwill San Antonio gets $100,000 for its Technical Career Pathways program, which includes a manufacturing boot camp and a reentry track for people with criminal records. Southwest Independent School District, whose boundaries surround the plant, gets $100,000 to expand its welding and industry education programs with equipment and hands-on training. Project QUEST gets $50,000 for a program that pairs career assessments and training with coaching and job placement in advanced manufacturing and other skilled trades.

Toyota employs about 48,000 people directly in the United States across 11 manufacturing plants, and the San Antonio operation is on track to become one of the largest of them once the Tacoma line is running.

The Toyota Report Take

A headcount is not usually news, but this one marks the point where the San Antonio expansion stops being a press conference and starts being payroll. The rear axle plant is staffed and about to run, which is the piece that had to come first, and the 2,000 assembly jobs that got the governor’s attention in July now have a date, even if it is a distant one.

The timing matters more for the Tacoma than for the Tundra. Three more years of Mexican production, with tariff policy still unsettled, is a long time to keep Toyota’s best-selling truck on the wrong side of the border, and the 2029 hiring date suggests the new line will not build its first Tacoma until close to the 2030 target. Until then, the plant’s job is to keep the Tundra and Sequoia line full, and the welders Southwest ISD is training now are the people Toyota expects to hire when it is time.

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