SoCal Aerospace & Defense Hiring Report

What’s inside this issue

• The SoCal A&D Openings Index — a same-date count of 2,721 on-site A&D roles across all 16 tracked employers, the highest reading in the series — sourced from official career systems, not aggregators.
• Growth that survives the caveats — strip out every job-board and counting effect behind the +10.9% headline and the market is still up 2.8% to 5.2%, led by GA-ASI (+68) and RTX (+46).
• An expanded 19-employer sample — three large SoCal employers the Index has never tracked, reported alongside it: Aerospace Corporation, Castelion, and NASSCO.
• The quarterly federal contract census — $29.4B in FY26 obligations across the three counties and the series’ first year-over-year comparison, up 18.9%.
• Monthly Spotlight — why job-board counts move when hiring does not, and how to read a posting count that changed for reasons other than demand.

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