Original data reporting · July 2026

The state of SkillBridge 2026

By Dean Nemecek, SHRM-SCP, retired Army LTC · Veteran Bridge Solutions · Method below, replicable by anyone

DoD SkillBridge lets a company host a transitioning service member full time for up to 180 days while the military keeps paying them. It's the most direct pipeline an employer can hold into military talent, and the federal government publishes the list of every organization authorized to use it.

We pulled that entire registry on July 1, 2026, all 6,159 authorized organizations, and then did what nobody publishing SkillBridge lists appears to do: verified one state by hand, company by company, against it. Wisconsin was the test case because it's ours. What the check surfaced applies everywhere.

The findings

1. 6,159 organizations hold SkillBridge authorization.
Source: DoD SkillBridge Authorized Organizations registry, pulled July 1, 2026, at skillbridge.osd.mil.

2. The registry doesn't record where a company is headquartered. The question a CHRO or an economic development office actually asks, which companies in my state hold SkillBridge, has no official answer. Producing one requires checking headquarters by hand, which is why almost nobody has.
Source: registry fields are organization name, MOU expiration, and website. Nothing more.

3. The lists in circulation are wrong in both directions, and we proved it on our own. Our June list of Wisconsin-headquartered holders, built the way these lists usually get built, by checking known company names against the registry, carried 11 names. The hand audit found it missed 6 real holders, including Michels, a construction contractor with roughly 8,000 employees, and Milwaukee Tool. It also carried one company, Rockwell Automation, that isn't on the registry at all. A reader trusting the June list would have missed a third of the market and cited a phantom. And the checking did not stop there: a deeper pull in July caught even the corrected list missing H.J. Martin and Son, an active Green Bay holder, now added as the seventeenth. See finding 5.
Source: our published audit record at /skillbridge/wi, changes-this-cycle section.

4. Every MOU carries an expiration date, and nobody tracks them. Renewals also create duplicate registry entries: Trek Bicycle appears twice, an entry expiring December 2026 alongside its renewal running to June 2027. An employer planning a SkillBridge cohort around a partner's authorization, or a service member timing a separation, is working against dates no published list shows.
Source: registry mexd field per organization; the Trek entries are visible in the registry today.

5. Authorization and activity are different things, and the gap is easy to miss. Seventeen Wisconsin-headquartered companies hold MOUs. The DoD locations table holds 10,477 posting rows; Wisconsin returns 350, of which 19 are physically in-state, run by 12 organizations. A first-page pull of that table on July 1 saw only part of it and undercounted in-state hosts as eight. The deeper pull on July 2 found twelve, and it also caught our own list missing a holder: H.J. Martin and Son, a Green Bay contractor holding its own MOU and actively hosting in-state, was absent from our first sixteen. We added it as the seventeenth. In every slice of the table we could retrieve, none of the other sixteen headquartered holders had an in-state posting. An MOU can sit dormant for years while looking, to leadership and to candidates, like a running program.
Source: DoD locations table and organizations registry, pulled July 1 and re-pulled July 2, 2026, published at /skillbridge/wi. The locations API caps responses and does not paginate cleanly, so the in-state figure is a verified floor rather than a guaranteed ceiling.

6. The registry is not a peer list. Wisconsin's seventeen holders include two Fortune 500 companies, a children's hospital, a flour mill, and a residential pile contractor. Federal facilities hold MOUs. Talent-attraction intermediaries hold MOUs. Raw counts of "SkillBridge companies" flatten all of this, which is why our state pages publish a scope rule and a corrections record instead of a number.
Source: the verified holder table at /skillbridge/wi.

What this means for employers

Your competitive position in military hiring is now knowable. The registry says which of your competitors hold the authorization, when it expires, and, held against the locations table, whether they're actually using it. That works in reverse too: your absence from the list is equally visible to anyone who checks.

The dormant MOU pattern deserves a hard look inside your own walls. If your company holds an authorization and hasn't posted a position, leadership likely believes a program exists. What exists is paperwork.

What this means for transitioning service members

Treat published SkillBridge lists, including well-meaning ones, as leads rather than facts. Our own June list would have steered you wrong in both directions. The registry at skillbridge.osd.mil is the source; open positions live in its locations table, and an authorization means a company can host you, never that a seat is open today.

The useful question for a company you want to work for isn't whether it appears on someone's list. It's whether it holds a current MOU, and if it does, why it has no postings.

The method, so you can check us

Pull the full authorized organizations registry from the DoD SkillBridge site. Sweep it against a hand-built candidate list of the state's employers plus state place names. Verify the headquarters of every match before it publishes, because same-name companies in other states are common. Publish the removals and corrections alongside the results. Repeat quarterly.

Every claim above can be re-run by anyone with a browser and an afternoon. That's the point. Veteran hiring runs on assertions, and this corner of it can run on records instead.

The living version

This report is a snapshot. The data keeps moving at the state pages, starting with Wisconsin, each carrying its pull date, its corrections record, and its method. More states publish as they pass verification, and no page exists for data we haven't checked.

See where your company stands The Wisconsin data