Kicking off the annual budget discussion in January, Santa Clarita City Manager Ken Striplin once again shared optimism about the city’s economy, which saw a 4% increase in the number of local jobs, according to numbers shared by its finance department.
On Tuesday, the city received an updated report on what sectors are seeing the most growth in the region, along with an update on the jobs marketplace.
The number of total jobs hit six figures for the city, according to Striplin, increasing from 98,594 to 100,605 according to the preliminary figures shared by the city recently.
Tyler Pledger, economic development manager with the city, said locally that the number of jobs by industry are tracked using the quarterly data available from the Labor Market Information Division of the state’s Employment Development Department.
“The 4% job increase represents year-over-year data provided by the state of California Employment Development Department, from (the second quarter of the 2024-25 fiscal year),” Pledger wrote in a Feb. 6 email. “The data reflects broad-based growth across Santa Clarita’s major industries, including manufacturing (4%), health care (11%), education (6%), and hospitality (4%). Because employment is reported to the state in aggregate, we’re not able to attribute that growth to specific employers, but the trend reflects steady expansion across multiple parts of the local economy.”
The city also relies on research and information from the SCV Economic Development Corp., Pledger said, and the organization’s CEO, Ondre Seltzer, reported to the City Council on Tuesday with its latest information.
On top of sharing some of the city’s biggest gains in its target clusters, or areas where the city would really like to add more jobs, the numbers give the overall jobs picture.
In a recent phone conversation, Seltzer touted double-digit gains in some of those targets, which include aerospace, medical devices, digital media and manufacturing.
The largest gain by individual employers from the last year, Seltzer said was Logix Federal Credit Union, which added 160 jobs last year, after moving its headquarters out here in 2019. But Logix was one of several, he said.
Shield Healthcare grew by 63 jobs to 305; Knowles, which is located off De Anza Drive, added 36 jobs; Adept Fasteners increased its number by 28 to 277; and Vallarta, the supermarket chain that moved its headquarters to the SCV almost two years ago, added nearly 50 positions to put it number at 497, according to figures provided by the EDC.
“SCVEDC was able to support the retention or expansion of 896 jobs in SCV,” according to its annual report presented Tuesday, which noted that figure was 732 more than what had been expected as the area’s net gain for 2025.
The largest employment sectors in the SCV, or sectors that employed at least 10,000 people, were the following: health care and social assistance, which provided 14,402 jobs; followed by retail trade (11,184); accommodation and food services (10,999); and then manufacturing (10,985).
The biggest area that grew over the last year from those sectors was health care, which gained more than 1,200 jobs based on the preliminary figures. Manufacturing saw a gain for more than 400 jobs.
The Santa Clarita market’s overall unemployment rate for the most recent period available, December 2025, was listed as 4.8%, which is traditionally within what is considered full employment for an area, based on financial definitions.
“As of the end of 2025, there were 1,866 jobs in active in the attraction, retention and expansion pipeline efforts to sustain growth into 2026,” according to the EDC’s report.
