Northampton County has historically been a national leader in heavy manufacturing, especially of cement, steel, and other industrial products.

The executive, controller, district attorney, and five of the nine council members are elected at large by all voters in the county.

In November 2019, municipal elections were in Pennsylvania in November 2019, and the county's result tabulations were plagued with problems caused by newly purchased voting machines, known as ExpressVoteXL, which were manufactured and sold to the county by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), an Omaha, Nebraska-based company, as representing a luxury one-stop voting system.

According to The New York Times and other media, a few minutes after polls closed in the county in 2019, panic began to spread through the county's election offices as it became evident that vote totals in one judge's race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had received just 164 votes out of 55,000 ballots across more than the 100 precincts in the county; Some precinct machines reported zero votes for him.

[14] The ES&S voting system, which is used in other Pennsylvania jurisdictions, features a touch screen with a paper ballot backup.

The county's director of administration, Charles Dertinger, attributed the problem to the summary display and not the actual ballots.

[16] Air transport to and from Northampton County is available through Lehigh Valley International Airport (IATA: ABE, ICAO: KABE) in Hanover Township, which is located approximately 4 miles (6.4 km) northwest of Bethlehem and 11 miles (18 km) west-southwest of Easton.

Northampton County was once served only by the 215 area code from 1947 (when the North American Numbering Plan of the Bell System went into effect) until 1994.

[19] There are two Pennsylvania state parks in Northampton County: The following cities, boroughs, and townships are located in Northampton County: Census-designated places are unincorporated communities designated by the U.S. Census Bureau for the purposes of compiling demographic data.