Table of Contents

Data compiled June 2026 from the latest federal, state, and regional sources. Labor market series run through April 2026 (preliminary), per the California Employment Development Department release of May 22, 2026. Wage figures use California EDD’s OEWS data for Orange County: May 2025 employment, with wages updated to the first quarter of 2026. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics no longer publishes OEWS wages below the metro-area level for the 11 largest metros, so the BLS wage figures here are for the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim MSA, the Inland Empire MSA, and the nation. Demographic data come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey. The Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine Metropolitan Division is the same area as Orange County, and that is what “Orange County” means throughout this report.

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Executive Summary

~1.69 million — Orange County nonfarm payroll employment (BLS CES, April 2026 preliminary)

3.7% — Orange County unemployment rate (California EDD, April 2026)

$1.47 million — Orange County median single-family home price (California Association of Realtors, April 2026)

The Orange County workforce enters mid-2026 with a paradox at its center. The county’s unemployment rate of 3.7% in April 2026 is among the lowest of any major California labor market, well below the state’s 5.0% and even below the national 4.0% for the same period. By the usual reading, that is a strong labor market. But the low rate is not the product of robust job creation. Total nonfarm employment stood at 1,686,700 in April 2026, down 11,200 jobs (0.7%) from a year earlier, and the civilian labor force contracted 1.9% over the same twelve months. Orange County’s unemployment rate is low because the supply of workers is shrinking faster than the demand for them.

That distinction matters enormously for hiring managers. Orange County’s contrast with the Inland Empire is structural: the IE offers a larger, more logistics-weighted, more affordable labor pool, while Orange County has lower unemployment, a shrinking resident labor force, higher wages, and heavier dependence on in-commuters. The county’s population has drifted below its 2020 Census peak, housing costs have pushed the median single-family home to $1.47 million, and only 16% of Orange County households can afford to buy the median home at current rates, per the California Association of Realtors’ affordability index. The workforce that staffs Orange County’s economy increasingly lives somewhere else: Census commuting-flow data show roughly 332,000 workers commuting into the county daily, including more than 113,000 from the Inland Empire, making Orange County a net importer of roughly 99,000 workers every working day.

The compositional picture beneath the headline numbers is sharply uneven. In the twelve months ending April 2026, only three sectors added jobs: Private Education and Health Services (+11,700), Leisure and Hospitality (+3,300), and Financial Activities (+500). Every other sector lost ground, led by a reported 16,800-job decline in Government, concentrated in local government and public education. Because benchmark revisions likely explain part of the published swing, that figure is best read as a mix of real contraction and statistical rebasing. Manufacturing shed 4,100 jobs, construction 3,500, and trade, transportation, and utilities 1,200. Health care is carrying nearly all of the region’s gross job creation. Unlike the Inland Empire, with its stronger long-run growth record, Orange County is doing this against a backdrop of demographic contraction rather than growth.

The region’s two university forecast centers agree on the direction. Chapman University’s Anderson Center, presenting its December 2025 forecast, projected “virtually no job growth” for Orange County in 2026 even as the U.S. economy grows 2.0%. Cal State Fullerton’s Woods Center forecast, presented with the Orange County Business Council, pencils in a gain of roughly 6,000 jobs (0.35%) for 2026 with unemployment averaging 4.4%, and projects Leisure and Hospitality as the fastest-growing sector at 3.0% annually through 2027. Both centers identify the same binding constraint: housing affordability, which suppresses labor force growth and forces employers to recruit from an ever-wider commute shed.

Wages reflect Orange County’s position at the high end of the Southern California market. Across all occupations, Orange County workers averaged $37.40 per hour per California EDD’s May 2025 OEWS estimates, roughly 12% above the national average and roughly 17–19% above Inland Empire benchmarks depending on source, and close to parity with Los Angeles County.

For hiring managers, Orange County is the high-wage, high-cost, low-slack corner of the Southern California labor market: a place where compensation strategy, commute logistics, and housing economics matter more to offer acceptance than they do almost anywhere else in the region.

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Key Orange County Workforce Benchmarks at a Glance (2026)

Workforce Size

Total nonfarm employment: ~1,686,700 (April 2026, preliminary) — EDD/BLS CES
Civilian labor force: ~1,605,600 (April 2026, preliminary; down 1.9% year over year) — EDD/BLS LAUS
Employed residents: ~1,546,600 (April 2026, preliminary) — EDD/BLS LAUS
Total population: ~3.17 million (2024) — U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2024; 3,163,696 as of January 1, 2026, down 0.4% year over year — California DOF E-1, May 2026

Labor Availability

Unemployment rate: 3.7% (April 2026, not seasonally adjusted) — California EDD
California unemployment rate: 5.0% not seasonally adjusted / 5.3% seasonally adjusted (April 2026) — EDD
National unemployment rate: 4.0% not seasonally adjusted / 4.3% seasonally adjusted (April 2026) — BLS
Unemployed Orange County residents: ~59,000 (April 2026), down 4.1% from a year earlier

Wage Benchmarks

Average hourly wage, all Orange County workers: $37.40 (May 2025 OEWS employment, wages updated to Q1 2026) — California EDD OEWS
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim MSA average wage: $37.15 (May 2025) — BLS OEWS
Inland Empire (Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA) average wage: $31.33 (May 2025) — BLS OEWS
National average hourly wage: $33.54 (May 2025) — BLS OEWS
Orange County premium to the national average: ~12%
OC-to-IE wage gap: ~17% using EDD same-vintage estimates; ~19% using the official BLS IE benchmark

Industry Composition

Office and administrative support: 11.2% of employment — EDD OEWS, May 2025
Food preparation and serving related: 10.0% of employment
Architecture and engineering: 2.0% of employment vs. ~1.7% nationally, one of the higher big-metro concentrations in the West
Transportation and material moving: 7.0% vs. 8.8% nationally — Orange County is notably less logistics-weighted than the Inland Empire’s 15.3%

Sectoral Employment Trends (year-over-year, April 2025 to April 2026)

Private Education and Health Services: +4.1% (+11,700 jobs) — EDD, April 2026
Leisure and Hospitality: +1.4% (+3,300)
Financial Activities: +0.5% (+500)
Trade, Transportation, and Utilities: −0.5% (−1,200)
Manufacturing: −2.7% (−4,100)
Construction: −3.3% (−3,500)
Government: −9.9% (−16,800)

Demographics

Foreign-born share of population: 30.3% (U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2024)
Average commute time: 26.7 minutes
Median property value: $962,600
Homeownership rate: 56.4%
Median household income: $116,289
Median age: 39.4

Housing and Commute Context

Median single-family home price: $1,470,000 (April 2026, +3.7% year over year) vs. $600,000 in the Inland Empire — California Association of Realtors
Share of households able to afford the median-priced home: 16% (Q1 2026), with a minimum qualifying income of $350,400 — CAR Housing Affordability Index
Daily in-commuters: ~331,900, including ~113,200 from Riverside and San Bernardino counties — Census ACS commuting flows
Net daily worker imports: ~98,700

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1. Overview of the Orange County Workforce

~1.69 million Total nonfarm payroll employment in the Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine Metropolitan Division (April 2026)

Orange County is one of the largest and most economically diverse county labor markets in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics covers it as the Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine, CA Metropolitan Division, a geography exactly coextensive with Orange County and nested inside the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim Metropolitan Statistical Area. The county recorded 1,686,700 nonfarm payroll jobs in April 2026 (preliminary), up 5,000 from March but down 11,200 jobs, or 0.7%, from April 2025, according to the California EDD release of May 22, 2026.

The county is home to approximately 3.17 million residents per the 2024 American Community Survey, making it California’s third-largest county, and its 34 cities anchor distinct labor sub-markets: the Anaheim-Garden Grove tourism and convention corridor; the Irvine-Costa Mesa-Newport Beach professional, technology, and medtech cluster; the Santa Ana civic and services center; the Huntington Beach-Fountain Valley aerospace and manufacturing belt; and the South County communities that supply much of the region’s professional workforce. For workforce planning purposes the county is the cleanest available unit, but hiring managers should expect meaningful variation between these sub-areas in available talent, wage expectations, and commute tolerance.

The industry mix is broad in a way that distinguishes Orange County from its inland neighbor. Professional and Business Services is the largest supersector at 316,400 jobs in April 2026, followed by Private Education and Health Services at 295,000, Trade, Transportation, and Utilities at 253,600, and Leisure and Hospitality at 239,300. Government employed 153,500, Manufacturing 146,700, Financial Activities 103,100, and Construction 101,600. No single sector dominates the way logistics dominates the Inland Empire: where the IE’s three largest sector groupings account for more than half of regional employment, Orange County’s employment base is spread across professional services, health care, tourism, finance, advanced manufacturing, and trade in more balanced proportions. That diversification is a structural strength, and it is one reason the county’s unemployment rate runs persistently below state and national averages.

The labor force, however, is moving in the opposite direction from the Inland Empire’s. Orange County’s civilian labor force stood at 1,605,600 in April 2026, down 1.9% from 1,637,400 a year earlier, with employed residents down a parallel 1.9% to 1,546,600. The county’s population peaked around the 2020 Census at roughly 3.19 million and has drifted down since; the California Department of Finance’s May 2026 E-1 estimates put Orange County at 3,163,696 as of January 1, 2026, a 0.4% one-year decline, even as Riverside County grew 0.4% and San Bernardino County grew 0.1%. Cal State Fullerton’s Woods Center notes that Orange County’s labor force grew just 3.6% over the past decade, versus 8.6% nationally, and CSUF economist Anil Puri has framed the state’s internal dynamic plainly: “If you look within California, most jobs came from where housing is more affordable.”

The result is a labor market that depends structurally on imported workers. Census commuting-flow data show approximately 1,325,500 people who both live and work in Orange County, plus roughly 331,900 who commute in from outside, led by Los Angeles County (~196,200) and the Inland Empire (~113,200 combined from Riverside and San Bernardino counties). Against roughly 233,200 out-commuting residents, the county is a net importer of nearly 99,000 workers each working day. For employers, that means a meaningful share of the realistic candidate pool for any in-person Orange County role lives in another county, and offer competitiveness has to account for the commute those candidates are being asked to make.

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2. The Orange County Wage Picture: OC vs. Los Angeles vs. the Inland Empire vs. National

~12% Orange County average hourly wage premium over the national average (May 2025 OEWS)

Orange County sits at the expensive end of the Southern California wage market. Across all occupations, the county’s average (mean) hourly wage was $37.40 per California EDD’s OEWS estimates for the Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine Metropolitan Division (May 2025 employment, wages updated to Q1 2026). The official BLS May 2025 figures for the surrounding benchmarks: $37.15 for the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim MSA as a whole, $31.33 for the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA, $33.54 nationally, and $38.79 for California statewide, per the BLS OEWS release of May 2026. One caveat makes these gaps look wider than they are. The Orange County and Los Angeles County figures are updated to the first quarter of 2026, while the national, Inland Empire, and MSA figures are raw May 2025. That timing difference likely adds roughly two to three points to the comparisons below. It also means the two coastal divisions are not directly comparable to the MSA total that contains them, so treat the premiums as approximate. A technical note for benchmarking: BLS no longer publishes OEWS data for metropolitan divisions inside the 11 largest metro areas, so Orange County-specific wage data now comes from EDD’s state OEWS program rather than a freestanding BLS release.

Three comparisons frame compensation strategy for Orange County hiring managers. Against the national average, Orange County wages run roughly 12% higher, and the premium is broad-based. Against Los Angeles County (EDD’s comparable figure for the LA-Long Beach-Glendale division is $38.20), Orange County runs roughly 2% below, close enough to parity that LA and OC effectively function as one wage market for most professional occupations. Against the Inland Empire’s $32.03 (EDD, same vintage), Orange County pays roughly 17% more on average, which is the wage spillover documented from the other side in Amtec’s Inland Empire Workforce Report: the IE’s roughly 16% wage discount to the coastal market is Orange County’s roughly 16-17% wage premium, and it is the engine that pulls more than 113,000 Inland Empire residents over the county line each morning.

The premium is not uniform across occupational groups. Orange County management occupations averaged $77.92 per hour ($162,069 annually) against a national mean of $69.84; business and financial operations roles averaged $49.75 against $45.78 nationally; computer and mathematical occupations $63.33 against $57.73; architecture and engineering $58.33 against $51.36; and legal occupations $84.76 against $67.07. Construction and extraction occupations averaged $38.28 in Orange County versus $31.42 nationally, a roughly 22% premium that reflects the broader Southern California construction wage structure and union density. At the other end of the distribution, healthcare support ($20.96 vs. $19.62 national) and food preparation and serving ($21.20 vs. $17.86) carry smaller premiums in percentage terms, although California’s minimum wage floors keep even these categories above national norms.

The spread between mean ($37.40) and median ($27.19) hourly wages is also worth noting: Orange County’s wage distribution is top-heavy, pulled upward by large management, finance, software, legal, and healthcare-practitioner payrolls. For hiring managers benchmarking individual roles, the occupational detail matters far more than the all-occupations average, and the percentile bands (25th percentile $19.50, 75th percentile $44.96 across all occupations) give a more honest picture of the local market than any single number.

For roles that compete across the LA/OC line (engineering, finance, software, management) Orange County employers should assume near-parity with Los Angeles compensation and structure offers accordingly. For roles drawing on the Inland Empire commute pool (production, assembly, warehouse, field trades, much of office support) the OC premium over IE wages is the recruiting argument, but it has to clear the candidate’s commuting cost in time and money to actually convert. Section 3 quantifies why that math has become the central fact of Orange County hiring.

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3. Housing Costs, Affordability, and the Hiring Reality

$1,470,000 Median Orange County single-family home price (California Association of Realtors, April 2026)

Housing is the single most consequential constraint on the Orange County workforce, and it shapes nearly everything else in this report: the shrinking labor force, the in-commuting dependence, the wage premium, and the forecast of near-zero job growth.

The California Association of Realtors reported a median existing single-family home price of $1,470,000 for Orange County in April 2026, up 3.7% from a year earlier, against $845,410 in Los Angeles County (down 0.6%), $640,000 in Riverside County, $495,000 in San Bernardino County, and $600,000 for the Inland Empire as a whole. The Orange County median is roughly two and a half times the Inland Empire median. Census ACS 2024 data put the county’s median property value at $962,600 with a homeownership rate of 56.4%, nearly ten points below the Inland Empire’s 65.8%.

The affordability arithmetic is stark. CAR’s traditional Housing Affordability Index for Q1 2026 shows just 16% of Orange County households able to afford the median-priced home, with a minimum qualifying income of $350,400, almost exactly three times the county’s median household income of $116,289. The comparable affordability shares: 18% in Los Angeles County, 29% in Riverside County, 35% in San Bernardino County. Renting offers only partial relief: USC’s Casden Multifamily Forecast puts average Orange County apartment rent on track for roughly $2,786 per month by mid-2026, the highest of any Southern California region, against roughly $2,211 in the Inland Empire.

These costs have demographic consequences that are now visible in the official data. Orange County’s population declined 0.4% in 2025 per the Department of Finance, even as the county added housing units, and the state demographers note that California’s recent growth has concentrated in the Central Valley and the Inland Empire, the affordable interior, rather than the coast. The Orange County Business Council has separately warned that the county faces a housing shortfall of 100,000 units by 2040. Meanwhile the county is aging: the OC Office on Aging projects the share of residents under 60 will fall from 76% in 2025 to 68% by 2040. Fewer working-age residents, costlier housing, and a static housing pipeline are the slow-moving forces behind the 1.9% one-year labor force contraction.

For hiring managers, the practical implication runs in two directions. First, for any role paying under roughly $100,000, the realistic candidate pool increasingly lives outside the county, and the commute (75,900 daily workers from Riverside County alone, per Census commuting-flow data) is part of the total compensation conversation whether or not it appears in the offer letter. Schedule flexibility, compressed weeks, shift-start times that dodge the SR-91 and SR-55 peaks, and hybrid arrangements function as real compensation for in-commuting candidates. Second, for retention, Orange County employers are exposed to the mirror-image risk documented in Amtec’s Inland Empire report: an IE-resident employee commuting into Orange County can recapture 10–15 hours a week by taking an Inland Empire job at a 16% discount, and as IE employers in health care and advanced manufacturing grow, that trade gets offered to your workforce more often. The employers most insulated are those who treat housing geography as a workforce-planning variable rather than an HR afterthought.

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4. Hiring Pressure and Labor Availability

3.7% Orange County unemployment rate, April 2026

Orange County’s unemployment rate of 3.7% in April 2026 was down from a revised 3.8% in March and below the year-ago 3.8%, per the EDD release. It compares with 5.0% for California and 4.0% for the nation on the same not-seasonally-adjusted basis. Roughly 59,000 county residents were unemployed, 4.1% fewer than a year earlier.

Read alone, those numbers describe one of the tightest major-county labor markets in California. Read together with the labor force data, they describe something more specific: a market tightening from the supply side. Over the same twelve months the civilian labor force fell 1.9% (roughly 31,800 fewer participants) and employed residents fell 1.9%. The unemployment rate edged down not because the county created jobs (payrolls fell 11,200 over the year) but because the count of available workers fell faster. The Inland Empire and Orange County are opposites in a structural sense: the IE is larger, more affordable, and more logistics-weighted, while Orange County is higher-wage, housing-constrained, and increasingly dependent on workers who live outside the county.

The sectoral composition of the year’s job change sharpens the picture. Per EDD, only three sectors added jobs in the twelve months ending April 2026: Private Education and Health Services (+11,700, with health care and social assistance up 4.0% and social assistance alone up 7.1%), Leisure and Hospitality (+3,300), and Financial Activities (+500), a combined +15,500. Every other sector contracted, led by Government at −16,800 (−9.9%), with manufacturing −4,100, construction −3,500, trade, transportation, and utilities −1,200, and information −800. The government figure deserves its own treatment (Section 5), but the pattern across the private economy mirrors the national one documented in Amtec’s U.S. Manufacturing Workforce Report: health care carrying gross job creation while goods-producing sectors slowly shed.

Within the month of April itself the signal was more positive: total nonfarm payrolls rose 5,000, led by leisure and hospitality (+2,700, split between accommodation and food services and arts, entertainment, and recreation) and construction (+2,000) as the spring season and the county’s major-project pipeline took hold. Manufacturing was April’s largest decliner at −700, 71% of it in durable goods.

One data caveat for anyone tracking these series: the federal government shutdown of late 2025 left a hole in the official record (October 2025 county labor force data were never published, per BLS, “due to the 2025 lapse in appropriations”), and the annual benchmark revision arrived a month late, in April 2026. All figures in this report reflect the March 2025 benchmark. April 2026 figures are preliminary and will be revised.

For hiring managers, the operational meaning of 3.7% unemployment with a shrinking labor force is that passive-candidate recruiting, not posting-and-waiting, is the default condition for most skilled roles. There is genuine availability in the niches the contractions have created (displaced government and education workers, manufacturing workers from the durable-goods decline, construction workers between projects) and Section 5 through Section 9 map where those pools are. But the aggregate backdrop is the tightest of any market Amtec covers in Southern California.

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5. The Compositional Story: Health Care Carries Growth While Government Contracts

−16,800 Year-over-year change in Orange County government employment, April 2025 to April 2026 (EDD)

The single most dramatic line in Orange County’s 2026 employment data is the public sector. Government employment fell from 170,300 in April 2025 to 153,500 in April 2026, a 9.9% contraction. EDD’s detail shows 89% of the loss in local government (−14,900), overwhelmingly in local government educational services, which fell 19.5%, from 79,100 to 63,700 jobs. Non-education local government held roughly flat to slightly positive over the year, up about 500 jobs, which is what lets the 15,400-job education decline exceed the 14,900-job local government total it sits inside. State government shed 1,000 and federal government 900, including a 20% drop in federal Department of Defense civilian employment in the county.

The drivers are the same ones flagged on the other side of the county line in Amtec’s Inland Empire report, where local government employment was revised sharply downward in early 2026: California’s fiscal pressure, declining K-12 enrollment as the school-age population shrinks, and, new in this cycle, federal workforce reductions that cut several hundred thousand positions nationally between January 2025 and January 2026. Some portion of the published swing also reflects the March 2025 benchmark revision rebasing previously over-estimated public payrolls, so the year-over-year figure is best read as the combination of genuine contraction and statistical correction. Either way, the level is real: Orange County’s public sector is materially smaller than the published data said it was a year ago.

On the growth side, health care has become Orange County’s employment engine to a degree that now resembles the Inland Empire’s dependence on the same sector. Private Education and Health Services accounted for +11,700 of the +15,500 jobs added by growing sectors over the year, and in the December 2025 data the pattern was even starker, with private education and health up 16,600 year over year against a county total of just +2,200. Health care and social assistance reached 254,800 jobs in April 2026, up 4.0% year over year, with social assistance up 7.1%.

The expansion is anchored in physical capacity that is still coming online. UCI Health, Irvine, a seven-story, 144-bed acute care hospital with a 24-hour emergency department, opened December 10, 2025 on the new Irvine medical campus. Hoag’s Sun Family Campus in Irvine (a $1 billion-plus expansion adding 155 inpatient beds, 11 operating rooms, and 120,000 square feet of ambulatory space across six buildings) reaches its first-phase completion in July 2026 and is adding roughly 1,000 jobs, with hiring that began in early 2026 and an explicit emphasis on bilingual clinicians. CHOC opened its new pediatric outpatient tower in October 2025. The Orange County Community Foundation’s inaugural 2026 Economic Opportunity Report projects health care will add 49,771 jobs in the county by 2035, the largest of any sector, including nearly 17,000 middle-skill roles such as medical assistants, licensed vocational nurses, and technicians.

For hiring managers, two implications follow. In health care itself, the labor market is and will remain the county’s most supply-constrained: registered nurses already average $68.94 per hour ($143,386 annually) in Orange County per EDD OEWS data, and the simultaneous ramp-up of UCI Irvine and Hoag Irvine is concentrating demand for the same clinical talent in the same few square miles of the county. Outside health care, the public-sector contraction is quietly creating one of the county’s few genuine available-talent pools: administrative, clerical, facilities, food service, and para-professional workers displaced from school districts and government agencies, many with years of process discipline and clean work histories, are entering a private labor market that rarely sees experienced candidates arrive in volume. Employers willing to translate public-sector experience into private-sector role requirements have a sourcing advantage in 2026.

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6. Tourism, Leisure, and Hospitality: The Anaheim Engine

239,300 Orange County Leisure and Hospitality employment, April 2026 (EDD/BLS CES, preliminary)

Tourism is to Orange County something like what logistics is to the Inland Empire: the signature industry that shapes the labor market well beyond its own payrolls. Leisure and Hospitality employed 239,300 in April 2026, up 1.4% year over year, and led all sectors in April’s monthly gain at +2,700. Cal State Fullerton’s forecast projects it as the county’s fastest-growing sector through 2027 at 3.0% annually.

The anchor is the Disneyland Resort, Orange County’s largest employer with roughly 36,000 cast members across two theme parks, three hotels, and the Downtown Disney district. A June 2025 economic impact study commissioned by Disney put the resort’s annual Southern California impact at $16.1 billion, supporting 102,000 jobs. Anaheim as a whole drew a record 26.5 million visitors in 2025, generating $6.8 billion in direct spending and supporting nearly 68,000 tourism-related jobs. Visit Anaheim has confirmed 142 conventions, meetings, and events for 2026, including NAMM’s 50th anniversary show and the return of BlizzCon, projected to fill roughly 600,000 hotel room nights at the West Coast’s largest convention center.

The forward pipeline is the real workforce story. DisneylandForward, the expansion framework Anaheim approved in 2024, commits Disney to a minimum $1.9 billion first-phase investment within ten years and is projected to create up to 4,584 new operations jobs and 8,960 construction jobs. Work on the east-side parking structure is underway, the multi-year “Eastern Gateway” arrival project is slated to begin construction in fall 2026, and the first major themed-land groundbreaking is expected around late 2026 or early 2027. Next door, the $4 billion, 92-acre OCVibe district around Honda Center opens its first phase in early 2027, including a 5,000-capacity concert hall and food hall. And the global-event calendar bends toward Orange County over the next 24 months: the 2026 FIFA World Cup brings eight matches to SoFi Stadium up the I-405 this summer, and the LA28 Olympic Games will stage indoor volleyball at Anaheim’s Honda Center and surfing at Lower Trestles in San Clemente.

The sector carries near-term fragility alongside the long-term pipeline. After the May 2025 immigration enforcement actions, UCI researchers documented an $58.9 million loss to Orange County businesses over eight weeks, with hotels near Disneyland reporting occupancy down 8–10% and spending in heavily immigrant neighborhoods down 20–25%, a reminder that the sector’s labor supply and its customer demand are both sensitive to immigration policy. Hospitality wages also remain the county’s lowest (food preparation and serving occupations average $21.20 per hour), which in a $2,786-average-rent county effectively guarantees that much of the tourism workforce commutes in.

For hiring managers outside hospitality, the sector matters as competition: a sustained DisneylandForward and OCVibe construction cycle will absorb thousands of trades workers (Section 9), and the operations hiring that follows will compete for the same entry-level and customer-facing labor pool that staffs warehouses, clinics, and front offices across the county.

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7. Manufacturing Workforce in Orange County

146,700 Orange County manufacturing employment, April 2026 (EDD/BLS CES, preliminary)

Orange County remains one of the largest manufacturing counties in the United States, with 146,700 manufacturing jobs in April 2026 (more than half again the Inland Empire’s 90,500) but the trend line points the same direction as the national series documented in Amtec’s State of the U.S. Manufacturing Workforce Report. County manufacturing employment fell 4,100 jobs (2.7%) over the year ending April 2026, with non-durable goods down 5.1%, and April’s monthly decline of 700 was the largest of any sector, 71% of it in durable goods.

What distinguishes Orange County manufacturing is its composition: this is a high-mix, high-value industrial base (medical devices, aerospace components, RF semiconductors, precision instruments, specialty electronics) rather than the metals, food, and plastics profile of the Inland Empire. The medtech cluster centered on Irvine is the emblem. Edwards Lifesciences opened its Building 8000 manufacturing expansion at University Research Park in late 2024, a $100 million investment projected to add roughly 600 production and advanced-engineering roles by mid-2026, even as it cut more than 500 positions following the sale of its critical care unit. Masimo cut 75 Irvine headquarters roles and about 12% of its legacy hardware manufacturing while growing software engineering headcount roughly 25%. The pattern across the cluster is consistent: expansion in advanced manufacturing and software-adjacent engineering, contraction in legacy hardware production, churn, not collapse.

The semiconductor corner of the base is consolidating upward. Irvine-headquartered Skyworks Solutions announced a merger with Qorvo to create a roughly $22 billion U.S.-based RF and analog semiconductor leader, with the combined company to be headquartered in Irvine. The deal is not settled. The Federal Trade Commission issued a Second Request in February 2026, so closing now depends on antitrust clearance, and a completion that had been guided toward early 2027 is contingent on that review. If it clears, the combined company would be a long-run anchor for the county’s semiconductor workforce, though the deal’s $500 million synergy target implies consolidation risk in overlapping functions. National context for that industry is covered in Amtec’s Semiconductor Manufacturing Workforce Report.

On compensation, EDD’s OEWS data for the county (May 2025 employment, Q1 2026 wages) provides the role-level benchmarks Amtec uses in placement work: machinists average $27.47 per hour (median $26.49), CNC tool operators $27.53, CNC programmers $42.08, miscellaneous assemblers $23.88, electrical and electronic assemblers $22.83, inspectors and testers $27.42, welders $28.86, industrial machinery mechanics $35.92, first-line production supervisors $38.23, and industrial production managers $68.93 ($143,365 annually). Notably, Orange County production wages run close to national averages, the production major group averages $25.39 versus $24.81 nationally, which means the county’s 12% all-occupations wage premium largely does not extend to the factory floor, even as its housing costs do. That mismatch is precisely why so much of the production workforce commutes from the Inland Empire, and why shift schedules that accommodate the 91-corridor commute are a retention tool in their own right.

The contraction also has a sourcing upside: workers displaced from durable-goods and legacy-hardware roles in 2025–2026 are available to expanding employers, and many carry exactly the regulated-industry quality and documentation experience (ISO 13485, AS9100, IPC) that the county’s medtech and aerospace shops require. The pool is thinner than the Inland Empire’s, but it is better credentialed.

Related: Read Amtec’s State of the U.S. Manufacturing Workforce for national context on the manufacturing dynamics shaping Orange County employers.

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8. Engineering and Technical Workforce in Orange County

~34,200 Architecture and engineering employment in Orange County (EDD OEWS, May 2025)

Engineering is where Orange County’s labor market differs most from the Inland Empire’s. Where the IE is structurally under-supplied with engineers and loses them daily to coastal employers, Orange County is one of those coastal destinations: architecture and engineering occupations make up roughly 2.0% of county employment against about 1.7% nationally, with 34,240 engineers and technical professionals on county payrolls, plus 53,620 in computer and mathematical occupations including 17,890 software developers.

Demand-side momentum is led by the defense-technology boom. Costa Mesa-headquartered Anduril Industries, valued at $61 billion after its May 2026 funding round, employs roughly 7,000 people across its locations with about half in Southern California, operates a 640,000-square-foot Costa Mesa campus, and in January 2026 announced a $1 billion, 1.18-million-square-foot second Southern California campus in the Long Beach area expected to create roughly 5,500 direct jobs when it opens in mid-2027. Parker Aerospace grew its Irvine operation from 1,242 to 1,716 employees with the Meggitt integration and holds a $444 million U.S. military actuation contract that could support further hiring, per the Orange County Business Journal. Boeing Huntington Beach maintains an engineering-heavy requisition load. Against that, Irvine-based Rivian has run repeated reductions, 600-plus roles (about 4.5% of its workforce) in October 2025, ahead of its 2026 R2 launch, and the medtech cluster’s engineering demand has tilted toward software and systems roles.

Compensation benchmarks from EDD OEWS (Q1 2026 wages): aerospace engineers average $79.62 per hour ($165,602 annually), electronics engineers $74.83, electrical engineers $69.66, mechanical engineers $61.16, industrial engineers $59.85, civil engineers $57.13, and software developers $78.06 ($162,351). Engineering technician benchmarks run $37–$43 per hour. These figures sit at or above Los Angeles MSA averages for the same occupations, confirming that OC competes at the top of the Southern California engineering market rather than beneath it.

The strategic challenge for Orange County engineering employers is therefore not coastal wage competition, they are the coast, but three other forces. First, the defense-tech expansion is absorbing cleared and clearable engineers at premium compensation, and the national cleared-talent shortage means every Anduril and Parker requisition tightens the pool for everyone else. Second, housing: a $160,000 engineering salary qualifies for less than half the income needed to buy the median Orange County home, which complicates relocation offers and pushes mid-career engineers toward south Riverside County addresses and long commutes, or toward fully remote employers. Third, the AI-driven national software market repriced senior talent upward through 2025–2026, and Orange County firms compete with remote offers from outside the region entirely. Employers who can pair competitive compensation with genuine flexibility (hybrid schedules, commute-shaped hours) consistently outperform those competing on salary alone.

For engineering employers who cannot match defense-tech compensation, the county’s university pipeline is the long game: UC Irvine, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State Long Beach collectively graduate thousands of engineers annually into the regional market, and early-career cohorts remain the most cost-effective entry point into a market where senior talent is both scarce and expensive.

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9. Construction and Skilled Trades

101,600 Orange County construction employment, April 2026 (EDD/BLS CES, preliminary)

Orange County construction employment tells a two-part story: a cyclical contraction in the rearview mirror and an unusually deep project pipeline through the windshield. Construction employment stood at 101,600 in April 2026, down 3,500 jobs (3.3%) year over year, specialty trade contractors fell 4.4%, but April itself added 2,000 construction jobs, the second-largest monthly gain of any sector. The year-over-year decline mirrors the national pattern in Amtec’s State of the U.S. Construction Workforce Report and is milder than the Inland Empire’s 7.2% contraction.

Residential construction is the soft half. Orange County multifamily starts fell roughly 38% in 2025 to about 2,900 units, with single-family starts down 12%, as elevated rates and tariff-driven materials uncertainty dented builder confidence. The hard-project half is the opposite: DisneylandForward’s projected 8,960 construction jobs as its decade-long buildout begins in earnest in fall 2026; the $4 billion OCVibe district driving toward an early-2027 first-phase opening; FivePoint’s Great Park Neighborhoods in Irvine, where ten new home programs were slated to begin sales by early 2026 and an additional 1,300 homes are being sought on top of the 10,500 entitled; and John Wayne Airport’s $700 million-plus capital improvement program. Hospital construction adds another layer, with Hoag’s Irvine campus continuing past its July 2026 first phase.

Trade-level wage benchmarks from EDD OEWS (Q1 2026 wages): electricians average $40.74 per hour (median $36.45, 75th percentile $50.70), plumbers and pipefitters $41.04, HVAC mechanics and installers $37.99, carpenters $37.77, construction laborers $31.32, first-line supervisors of mechanics and installers $47.96, and construction managers $68.60 ($142,684 annually). The construction and extraction major group averages $38.28 versus $31.42 nationally, a 22% premium that reflects Southern California’s union wage structure and the regional market’s chronic scarcity of licensed trades.

As in the Inland Empire, the trades labor market is bifurcated. The 2025 contraction loosened availability for entry-level and general construction labor, but licensed electricians, journeyman plumbers, certified HVAC technicians, and experienced superintendents remain scarce, because Southern California’s trades pool moves fluidly across county lines to wherever the major projects are. Orange County’s coming project cycle (theme park, arena district, airport, hospitals, master-planned housing) will pull regional trades labor in from Los Angeles and the Inland Empire, and employers with mid-sized commercial and industrial work should expect wage pressure to build through 2027 as the megaprojects staff up. Locking in skilled-trades pipelines before the DisneylandForward and OCVibe peak is the clear strategic move of 2026.

Related: Read Amtec’s State of the U.S. Construction Workforce for national context on the construction labor dynamics shaping Orange County employers.

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10. Aerospace, Defense, and Medtech: Orange County’s Advanced-Industry Cluster

Orange County sits inside the Southern California aerospace and defense cluster in a way the Inland Empire does not, and in 2026 it hosts one of the most-watched defense-technology stories in the country.

The marquee name is Anduril Industries, headquartered in Costa Mesa, which closed a $5 billion raise in May 2026 at a $61 billion valuation and has grown to roughly 7,000 employees company-wide, workforce data provider Revelio Labs counted 58% year-over-year headcount growth into 2025, with several hundred open Costa Mesa requisitions at any given time. Its planned $1 billion Long Beach-area campus (roughly 5,500 direct jobs, opening mid-2027) sits just across the county line and is likely to recruit heavily from the Orange County talent pool. The established primes and suppliers remain: Boeing’s Huntington Beach operation with its engineering-heavy hiring profile, Parker Aerospace’s expanded 1,716-person Irvine campus, and a tier of specialty suppliers (precision machine shops, electronics assemblers, ITAR-compliant processors) spread through Anaheim, Santa Ana, Brea, and Garden Grove that feeds both the OC primes and the El Segundo-Long Beach-Hawthorne corridor.

Amtec’s State of the U.S. Aerospace & Defense Workforce Report details the national backdrop: FY2026 defense budget acceleration, more than 70,000 unfilled cleared positions nationally, and industry attrition near 15%. Orange County feels that tension directly. Aerospace engineers average $79.62 per hour in the county per EDD OEWS, aircraft structure and systems assemblers $35.29, and the cleared-talent premium runs above both. The county’s A&D employers compete for cleared engineers not only with each other but with the LA-side primes, with San Diego’s defense economy to the south, and now with a defense-tech entrant whose compensation structure includes equity in a $61 billion company.

Medtech is the cluster’s twin, and its 2025–2026 pattern is a barbell. Edwards Lifesciences is adding roughly 600 production and advanced-engineering roles at its Irvine manufacturing expansion by mid-2026 while cutting elsewhere; Masimo trimmed legacy hardware manufacturing while growing software engineering 25%; Johnson & Johnson Vision, and a long tail of device startups, anchor demand for quality engineers, regulatory specialists, and cleanroom production staff. For Amtec’s placement verticals, the practical read is that Orange County’s advanced-industry demand is strongest in exactly the roles where supply is thinnest: cleared engineers, regulated-industry quality professionals, and experienced precision-manufacturing technicians. Sourcing strategies that reach into the Inland Empire’s loosened manufacturing pool, documented in Amtec’s Inland Empire report, and that treat clearance sponsorship and certification training as pipeline investments rather than costs are the realistic countermeasures in 2026.

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11. Office, Admin, Financial Services, and the Professional Workforce

~187,900 Office and administrative support employment in Orange County, the county’s largest occupational group (EDD OEWS, May 2025)

Orange County’s white-collar economy is proportionally the largest in Southern California. Professional and Business Services is the county’s biggest industry supersector (316,400 jobs), Financial Activities employs 103,100 (the county is a national center for mortgage, title, and insurance operations, home to loanDepot, Pacific Life, and First American) and office and administrative support is the largest occupational group at roughly 187,900 workers, 11.2% of county employment. Business and financial operations occupations are meaningfully over-represented versus the nation (7.5% of employment vs. 6.8%), as are management occupations.

The sector’s 2026 condition is stabilization after a long correction. Professional and Business Services employment was essentially flat year over year (−100 jobs), while Financial Activities added 500, modest, but one of only three growing sectors. The real estate signal has turned: Cushman & Wakefield put Orange County office vacancy at 15.7% in Q1 2026, down 250 basis points year over year, with leasing volume back to historical norms, and return-to-office mandates have firmed across the county’s larger employers, Pacific Life’s Newport Beach headquarters among the cited examples, with 55% of Fortune 100 companies now requiring full-time attendance. A potential tailwind: Chapman University’s forecast expects mortgage rates to dip below 6% in 2026, which would directly support the county’s large mortgage and title employment base.

Compensation benchmarks from EDD OEWS (Q1 2026 wages): executive assistants average $42.19 per hour, HR specialists $43.35, accountants and auditors $49.14, bookkeeping and accounting clerks $29.33, customer service representatives $26.59, general secretaries and administrative assistants $27.46, general office clerks $24.82, and first-line office supervisors $39.91. The office and administrative support major group averages $28.35 versus $24.79 nationally, a 14% premium.

The remote-eligibility bifurcation documented in the Inland Empire report operates in reverse here. Orange County’s admin and professional wage levels are the benchmark that Inland Empire remote workers price against; the county’s own in-office employers, meanwhile, compete against fully remote alternatives at similar or higher pay and against the housing mathematics that make a $58,000 admin salary difficult to live on west of the 55 freeway. The firming of return-to-office policy is, on net, a tailwind for OC employers’ culture and collaboration goals but a headwind for their applicant flow, particularly from the IE-resident segment that filled these roles remotely from 2020 to 2024. Employers holding firm on five-day attendance should expect to pay visibly above the EDD medians or accept longer time-to-fill; the marginal candidate has alternatives.

The one genuine supply-side gift of 2026 is the public-sector contraction discussed in Section 5: thousands of experienced administrative, clerical, and operations workers displaced from school districts and government agencies are entering the private market, and they represent the county’s best-credentialed available admin talent pool in years.

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12. Local Economic Sentiment and the Orange County Forward Indicators

“Virtually no job growth” Chapman University Anderson Center forecast for Orange County employment in 2026 (December 2025)

Orange County is unusually well-served by local forecasting institutions, and in 2026 they agree with each other to a degree that itself constitutes a signal.

Chapman University’s Anderson Center for Economic Research, whose December 2025 forecast was presented by President Emeritus Jim Doti, projects U.S. real GDP growth of 2.0% in 2026, driven by record AI infrastructure investment and a $55 trillion surge in household wealth since 2020, but “virtually no job growth” for Orange County, with housing affordability the binding constraint and tariffs, “the highest in nearly a century,” the chief macro headwind. Doti’s framing of recession risk: a downturn would come only with “a major correction in AI.”

Cal State Fullerton’s Woods Center for Economic Analysis and Forecasting, in its “Winds of Change” forecast presented with the Orange County Business Council, projects Orange County nonfarm employment up roughly 6,000 jobs (0.35%) in 2026 and 9,300 (0.55%) in 2027, with county unemployment averaging 4.4% in 2026. Co-director Mira Farka’s summary: “We don’t expect a recession. We’ll call it resiliency amidst anxiety”, with a coined risk scenario of “snagflation,” modest inflation paired with a soft labor market. The center’s Orange County Business Expectations Index recovered to 74.4 in Q4 2025, and its April 2026 spring update held the outlook: very small increases in both jobs and unemployment through 2027, with inflation drifting toward the high-3% range.

The structural and civic indicator layer adds depth. The Orange County Business Council’s 2026 Community Indicators Report centers workforce readiness, housing affordability, and infrastructure investment as the county’s defining challenges. The Orange County Community Foundation’s inaugural 2026 Economic Opportunity Report projects sector demand through 2035 (health care +49,771 jobs, tourism and outdoor recreation +29,736, aerospace/defense/clean-economy/life-sciences roughly +8,000 combined) and concludes, in COO Cathleen Otero’s words, that “the educational pipeline is Orange County’s most valuable infrastructure.” At the state level, the UCLA Anderson Forecast projects California unemployment holding near 5.5% into 2026, a full point above the nation, with deportation policy and tariffs the identified drags, both of which land directly on Orange County’s hospitality, construction, and trade sectors.

Two trade-flow indicators round out the dashboard. The Port of Long Beach, the county’s logistics gateway next door, posted a record 9.9 million TEUs in 2025 but projects roughly 9 million for 2026 with import softness front-loaded, a freight signal that touches OC’s 253,600-job trade, transportation, and utilities sector. And the UCI immigration-enforcement research cited in Section 6 functions as a live indicator of how federal policy shocks transmit into county-level consumer spending and labor supply within weeks.

For hiring managers, the consensus reading is straightforward: plan for a flat-growth, supply-constrained 2026 in which sector selection matters more than the cycle. The forecasters’ divergence is measured in tenths of a percent; none projects either a recession or a hiring boom. In that environment, workforce planning is less about timing the macro and more about positioning against the specific sectoral currents (health care expansion, public-sector contraction, the trades-absorbing megaproject cycle) that this report maps.

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13. Future Workforce Outlook (2026 and Beyond)

−1.9% One-year change in the Orange County civilian labor force, April 2025 to April 2026 (EDD/BLS LAUS)

Orange County’s workforce challenge through the rest of the decade is structural, and it is the inverse of its inland neighbor’s. The Inland Empire’s question is whether its economy can diversify fast enough to employ a still-growing labor force. Orange County’s question is whether it can house, import, and develop enough workers to staff an economy whose demand is intact.

The supply-side arithmetic frames everything. The county’s population has slipped 0.4% in a year and sits roughly 23,000 below its 2020 Census level; the labor force is down 1.9% year over year; the under-60 share of the population is projected to fall from 76% to 68% by 2040; and at Q1 2026 affordability levels, a household needs $350,400 of income to buy the median home that the median $116,289 household plainly cannot. Absent a housing-supply breakthrough (and OCBC projects a 100,000-unit shortfall by 2040) the county’s workforce will keep tilting toward in-commuters, older workers, and the segments of the labor market that can pay coastal housing costs.

Demand, meanwhile, is concentrated and visible. Health care’s projected 49,771 added jobs by 2035 is the single largest block of future demand, and its near-term ramp (UCI Irvine, Hoag Irvine) is already hiring. The tourism investment cycle (DisneylandForward’s up-to-4,584 operations jobs and 8,960 construction jobs, OCVibe’s 2027 opening, the LA28 Olympic events at Honda Center and Lower Trestles) gives Leisure and Hospitality the strongest sectoral forecast through 2027. Defense technology is scaling on venture timelines, not federal ones, with Anduril’s growth and the regional cleared-talent shortage pulling engineering compensation upward. Against these, the contracting blocks (public education employment, legacy hardware manufacturing, tariff-exposed goods movement) will keep releasing experienced workers into the market in modest but useful volumes.

Macro risks sit on both tails. The forecasters’ central case is flat-to-slightly-positive: Chapman’s near-zero, CSUF’s +0.35%. The downside scenarios run through an AI-investment correction (Doti’s stated recession trigger), tariff escalation feeding costs into construction and retail, and immigration enforcement shocks of the kind that measurably cut county business revenue in 2025. The upside scenarios run through sub-6% mortgage rates unlocking housing turnover and mortgage-sector hiring, the megaproject cycle hitting full staffing, and the 2026–2028 global event calendar lifting tourism above forecast.

For hiring managers, the planning posture that fits this outlook combines three elements: durable pipelines for the structurally scarce skills (clinical, cleared-engineering, licensed trades) where waiting for applicants is not a strategy; deliberate commute-shed recruiting that treats the Inland Empire and north San Diego County as the county’s de facto labor reserve, with schedules and differentials designed accordingly; and flexible staffing capacity to absorb the demand volatility that flat-growth, event-driven economies produce. The county’s educational infrastructure (UC Irvine, Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Long Beach on its border, and one of the state’s strongest community college systems) remains the highest-leverage long-term investment for employers willing to build rather than buy.

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What This Means for Orange County Hiring Managers

Orange County’s distinctive workforce dynamics produce a set of practical implications that apply across most Amtec verticals operating in the county.

Treat the 3.7% unemployment rate as a scarcity signal, not a strength signal. It reflects a shrinking labor force more than expanding employment, and it means most skilled hiring in 2026 is passive-candidate recruiting against incumbent employers, not selection among applicants.

Benchmark compensation at Los Angeles parity for professional roles and at a deliberate premium over Inland Empire rates for production and trades roles. Orange County’s roughly 17% average wage premium over the IE is the recruiting argument that fills OC production floors, but it has to survive the candidate’s commute math, and EDD occupational medians, not all-occupation averages, are the right starting point for any specific role.

Make the commute a designed part of the offer. With roughly 332,000 daily in-commuters and the realistic candidate pool for sub-$100K roles increasingly living in Riverside, San Bernardino, and north San Diego counties, shift-start times that dodge corridor peaks, compressed weeks, and hybrid arrangements function as compensation. Employers who design for the commute outcompete employers who ignore it.

Recruit the public-sector outflow. The 16,800-job government contraction, concentrated in school district and local government roles, is releasing experienced administrative, operations, facilities, and para-professional workers into the private market. This is the county’s best-credentialed available talent pool of 2026 and most employers are not systematically targeting it.

Plan trades hiring ahead of the megaproject peak. DisneylandForward, OCVibe, John Wayne Airport, hospital campuses, and Great Park housing will progressively absorb the regional skilled-trades pool through 2027–2028. Mid-sized commercial, industrial, and facilities employers should lock in electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, and supervision before that absorption pushes premiums higher.

In health care, assume structural shortage and act accordingly. The simultaneous UCI Irvine and Hoag Irvine ramps are concentrating demand for the same clinical talent; pipeline partnerships, training sponsorship, and retention investments will outperform reactive requisitions for the rest of the decade.

In engineering and defense technology, expect compensation set by the best-funded competitor. Anduril’s growth, Parker’s contract-driven hiring, and the national cleared-talent shortage mean cleared and senior engineering compensation in OC is repriced from above. Where matching it is impossible, compete on flexibility, scope, and speed of hiring decisions, and build early-career pipelines from the county’s universities.

Watch the regional indicator set, not just the federal releases. The Chapman and CSUF forecasts, OCBC’s indicators, the OCCF opportunity report, EDD’s monthly county releases, and port volumes together give Orange County employers a faster and more compositional read than BLS data alone, and the 2025 shutdown gap in the federal series is a reminder not to rely on a single source.

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Key Takeaways for Orange County Hiring Managers

• Orange County pairs one of California’s lowest unemployment rates (3.7%) with a shrinking labor force (−1.9% year over year), a scarcity market, not a slack one, and the structural opposite of the neighboring Inland Empire.
• Total nonfarm employment fell 0.7% over the year to April 2026; only Private Education and Health Services (+11,700), Leisure and Hospitality (+3,300), and Financial Activities (+500) added jobs.
• Government employment contracted 9.9% (−16,800 jobs), concentrated in local public education, a planning risk for the public sector and a sourcing opportunity for private employers.
• Orange County wages average roughly 12% above the national mean and 17% above the Inland Empire, at near-parity with Los Angeles; the premium is largest in management, legal, finance, engineering, and construction occupations and nearly absent on the production floor.
• Housing is the binding constraint: a $1.47 million median home price, 16% affordability, and a $350,400 qualifying income suppress labor force growth and make the county dependent on ~332,000 daily in-commuters, including 113,000+ from the Inland Empire.
• Health care is the county’s employment engine (+11,700 jobs in a year, a projected +49,771 by 2035) with UCI Health Irvine open and Hoag’s Irvine campus adding ~1,000 jobs from 2026.
• The tourism investment cycle (DisneylandForward, OCVibe, LA28 events at Honda Center and Lower Trestles) underwrites the strongest sectoral growth forecast and a multi-year construction labor draw.
• Manufacturing (146,700 jobs) is contracting modestly but upgrading: medtech and defense-adjacent advanced manufacturing are hiring even as legacy hardware production sheds, keeping regulated-industry quality and precision-machining skills scarce.
• Defense technology, led by Costa Mesa-based Anduril at a $61 billion valuation, is repricing the county’s engineering and cleared-talent market from above.
• Chapman (“virtually no job growth”) and Cal State Fullerton (+0.35%) agree on a flat 2026: sector positioning, commute-shed recruiting, and pipeline building matter more than macro timing.

Related:

• Amtec’s State of the Inland Empire Workforce Report
• Amtec’s State of the U.S. Manufacturing Workforce Report
• Amtec’s State of the U.S. Construction Workforce Report
• Amtec’s State of the U.S. Aerospace & Defense Workforce Report
• Amtec’s State of the U.S. Semiconductor Manufacturing Workforce Report

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Methodology & Sources

This report consolidates publicly available federal, state, and regional data sources to provide a comprehensive view of the Orange County workforce as of mid-2026.

The report was compiled in June 2026 using the most current data available at the time. Employment, labor force, and unemployment series are current through April 2026 (preliminary), per the California EDD release of May 22, 2026, on the March 2025 benchmark. Occupational employment and wage figures reflect California EDD’s OEWS file for the Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine Metropolitan Division: May 2025 employment estimates with wages updated to Q1 2026 via the Employment Cost Index. Comparative wage figures for the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim MSA, the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA, California, and the nation are official BLS OEWS May 2025 data released May 15, 2026. Demographic data reflect the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2024 1-year estimates and California Department of Finance E-1 estimates released May 2026. Housing data reflect California Association of Realtors April 2026 sales and Q1 2026 affordability reports.

Limitations

This report draws on data series with different scopes, vintages, and methodologies. Several limitations warrant explicit acknowledgement:

BLS and EDD employment data are subject to ongoing revision. April 2026 figures are preliminary; the March 2025 annual benchmark (released a month late, in April 2026, after federal shutdown disruptions) materially revised prior estimates, and a portion of the published year-over-year government employment decline likely reflects benchmark rebasing alongside genuine contraction. October 2025 county labor force data were never published due to the 2025 federal lapse in appropriations. Where headline figures are central to a hiring or planning decision, readers should verify against the most current EDD or BLS release.

BLS no longer publishes Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for metropolitan divisions within the 11 largest metropolitan areas, including the Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine MD. Orange County-specific occupational wage figures in this report therefore come from California EDD’s OEWS program; EDD notes that its Q1 2026 wage updates are produced by applying the Employment Cost Index to May 2025 OEWS wages and have not been validated by BLS. Occupational-share comparisons to the national distribution are Amtec calculations from the EDD and BLS files, not published location quotients.

Census county-to-county commuting flows reflect the 2016–2020 American Community Survey, the most recent published vintage; post-pandemic remote-work shifts mean current daily flows likely differ, though the directional pattern (large net in-commuting from Los Angeles and the Inland Empire) is corroborated by current wage and housing differentials.

Compensation figures reflect occupational means, medians, and percentiles and do not capture role-specific premiums for skill, certification, security clearance, or industry experience. Employer-specific figures (Disneyland Resort employment, Anduril headcount, Hoag hiring) come from company statements, commissioned studies, or press reporting as cited, and have not been independently verified.

Some regional sources cited in this report (Chapman University, Cal State Fullerton, OCBC, OCCF, Visit Anaheim, commissioned economic impact studies) produce analysis in connection with their respective institutional missions. Readers should evaluate individual data points in the context of their original source, timeframe, and institutional perspective.

Scope

Geography: Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine, CA Metropolitan Division (BLS designation), exactly coextensive with Orange County, California; part of the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Workforce: All employees, with emphasis on production, trades, engineering, technical, administrative, clinical, and skilled occupational categories relevant to Amtec’s staffing focus.

Time period: Most series current through April 2026 (EDD/BLS, preliminary). OEWS data reflect May 2025 employment with Q1 2026 wage updates. Demographic data reflect 2024 ACS and January 2026 DOF estimates.

Primary Sources

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and California Employment Development Department (EDD)

Official labor market data used for employment, wages, and labor force statistics throughout this report. County-level CES and LAUS estimates are produced by EDD in cooperation with BLS.

• Orange County Economy at a Glance (BLS regional summary):
  https://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.ca_santaana_md.htm
• EDD Orange County (Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine MD) monthly press release, April 2026 data, released May 22, 2026: labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov (PDF)
• EDD statewide release, April 2026: https://edd.ca.gov/en/about_edd/news_releases_and_announcements/unemployment-april-2026/
• BLS OEWS national release, May 2025 data: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm
• BLS OEWS regional releases, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim: occupationalemploymentandwages_losangeles.htm; Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario: occupationalemploymentandwages_riverside.htm
• California EDD OEWS employment and wages (Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine MD file, 2026 edition): https://labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/data/oes-employment-and-wages.html

U.S. Census Bureau and California Department of Finance

Population, demographic, housing, commute, and county-to-county flow data.

• ACS 2024 1-year estimates referenced via Data USA, Orange County, CA
• Census county-to-county commuting flows (ACS 2016–2020): census.gov commuting flows
• California DOF E-1 population estimates, May 2026: DOF E-1 press release (PDF)
• CSUF Center for Demographic Research, Orange County Facts & Figures (March 2026): fullerton.edu/cdr (PDF)

California Association of Realtors (CAR)

Median home price and housing affordability data for Orange County and comparison regions.

• April 2026 home sales and price report: car.org April 2026 sales release
• Traditional Housing Affordability Index, Q1 2026: car.org HAI

Chapman University Anderson Center for Economic Research

Semi-annual Orange County and U.S. economic forecast, presented December 2025.

• Forecast summary: news.chapman.edu; OC jobs coverage: Orange County Business Journal

Cal State Fullerton Woods Center for Economic Analysis and Forecasting

Annual “Winds of Change” Orange County forecast (October 2025) and spring 2026 update, produced with the Orange County Business Council.

• Forecast release: news.fullerton.edu; full report: CSUF 2026 Economic Forecast (PDF); spring update: OCBJ, April 2026

Orange County Business Council (OCBC) and Orange County Community Foundation (OCCF)

Regional civic and workforce indicator reporting.

• 2026 OC Community Indicators Report: ocbc.org; housing shortfall analysis: ocbc.org
• 2026 OC Economic Opportunity Report: oc-cf.org

UCLA Anderson Forecast and USC Lusk Center

• UCLA Anderson Forecast, December 2025: newsroom.ucla.edu
• USC Casden Multifamily Forecast (SoCal rents): lusk.usc.edu

Additional References

• Orange County Business Journal, “Disneyland Generates $16.1B Economic Impact on SoCal” (June 2025)
• The Points Guy, DisneylandForward expansion approval and projected jobs (2024)
• Visit Anaheim, 142 conventions, meetings, and events confirmed for 2026
• UCI Health, UCI Health Irvine hospital opening (December 2025)
• Orange County Business Journal, “Hoag’s $1.2B Irvine Expansion Continues”
• GO-Biz, Anduril Industries $1 billion Southern California expansion (January 2026)
• Orange County Business Journal, “Parker Aerospace Boosts Irvine Ops”
• Skyworks Solutions, Skyworks-Qorvo merger announcement
• CNBC, Rivian October 2025 workforce reduction
• MedTech Dive, Edwards Lifesciences restructuring
• City of Anaheim, OCVibe district
• John Wayne Airport, Capital Improvement Program
• Cushman & Wakefield, Orange County MarketBeat reports
• UCI School of Social Ecology, OC businesses lose $58.9M following immigration enforcement (2025)
• LA28, Honda Center Olympic venue
• Long Beach Post, Port of Long Beach record 2025 volumes