Sacramentoruns on a handful of strong industries. If you’re job-hunting or weighing a move, here’s where the opportunities (and the big-name employers) are.
Top industries & employers
State government & the public sector
The State of California, the Legislature, CalPERS, CalSTRS, the Judicial Council, Sacramento County, the City of Sacramento
The state is by a wide margin the largest employer in the region, and the concentration of departments, agencies, boards and the two pension funds gives Sacramento an unusually stable and unusually bureaucratic employment base. Around it sits a whole industry of lobbying, policy consulting, associations and government affairs — the closest thing California has to a Washington economy.
Health care
UC Davis Health, Sutter Health (headquartered in Sacramento), Kaiser Permanente, Dignity Health, Shriners Children's Northern California
UC Davis Medical Center is the region's academic hospital and runs the only Level I trauma centre — adult and paediatric — for a very large inland catchment, so serious cases from across northern California route here. Sutter Health, one of the largest non-profit systems in the state, is headquartered in the city. Health care is the largest private employment sector in the metro.
Technology & aerospace
Intel's Folsom campus, L3Harris (formerly Aerojet Rocketdyne) at Rancho Cordova, Centene and Health Net, Oracle's regional operations, a large Bay Area-remote workforce
Intel's Folsom site is its largest in California and is a genuine engineering centre rather than a satellite office. Aerojet Rocketdyne built rocket propulsion at Rancho Cordova for decades and is now part of L3Harris. The fastest-growing part of this sector is people employed by Bay Area companies who live here — a migration pattern that reshaped the housing market from 2020 onward.
Agriculture, food & beverage
Blue Diamond Growers (headquartered here), Raley's, Nugget Markets, Pacific Coast Producers, the rice, tomato, almond and wine industries of the Sacramento Valley and Delta
Sacramento sits in one of the most productive agricultural regions on earth, and Blue Diamond — the world's largest almond processor — is headquartered in the city. The Farm-to-Fork designation is downstream of a real supply chain: this is one of the few American cities where the restaurants and the growers are in the same county.
Higher education & research
UC Davis and UC Davis Health, California State University Sacramento, the Los Rios Community College District, McGeorge School of Law
UC Davis is twenty minutes west and is a global centre for agricultural, veterinary and viticultural science, with its medical school and health system in Sacramento itself. Sacramento State and the four-campus Los Rios district make higher education one of the larger employment blocks in the metro and the main pipeline into the state civil service.
Clean energy & utilities
SMUD, the California Energy Commission, the California Air Resources Board, the Independent System Operator, a regional EV and battery supply chain
SMUD is one of the largest community-owned electric utilities in the United States and has committed to an aggressive decarbonisation timetable, which makes it a genuine employer of energy engineers rather than just a billing entity. Because the state's energy and air regulators are headquartered here, Sacramento carries an unusual concentration of energy and climate policy jobs for a city its size.
Some of this may be out of date. Spotted something inaccurate? Help us keep it right for the next newcomer.