California Led February 2025 Federal Job Location Signals

California was the largest state-level location signal in the February 2025 FederalHiringData archive. The state appeared in 2,706 archived federal announcement location records, ahead of Virginia at 2,344, Texas at 2,041, and Florida at 1,456.

Those are location mentions, not unique hires. A single federal announcement can list multiple duty stations, and some announcements list broad or variable locations. Even with that limitation, the top-state pattern gives applicants and researchers a useful map of where the February 2025 posting footprint was most visible.

Top state-level signals

California's lead was not narrow. It had 362 more location mentions than Virginia and 665 more than Texas. Large states such as California, Texas and Florida often rise in location lists because they contain many federal facilities, military installations, health-care sites, ports, prisons, parks and field offices.

Virginia and D.C. also stayed prominent because many headquarters, defense, intelligence, policy, contracting and regional office roles concentrate in the Washington region. Maryland appeared in the top ten as well, reinforcing the broader capital-region pattern.

City and installation pattern

Washington, D.C. was the largest city-level label at 720 mentions. Several installation-heavy locations followed: Fort Belvoir, Fort Meade, Pentagon/Arlington, Fort Bragg, Quantico and Fort Sam Houston all appeared in the top fifteen. San Diego was the most visible California city label in the list, with 174 mentions.

The city list explains part of the state ranking. California's total was not driven by only one city. The state includes federal civilian, defense, health-care, border, public-land and transportation activity across many locations. Virginia's high count, by contrast, was closely tied to Northern Virginia, defense installations and capital-region job labels.

What this does and does not show

This is not a measure of where federal employees lived. It is not a count of hires. It is also not a complete map of every possible telework arrangement. It is a close-date archive of announcement locations.

For applicants, the practical takeaway is that the February 2025 archive was geographically broad but concentrated. Searching by state, region, installation name and remote/telework indicators would have produced different results. A state can rank highly even when no single city dominates, and a city can rank highly because many separate agencies use the same duty-station label.

Methodology and limitations

This article uses FederalHiringData historical USAJOBS archive records with close dates from Feb. 1 through Feb. 28, 2025. The analysis includes 18,991 archived announcements available in the February 2025 reconstruction.

The unit is an announcement record, not a hire, an application, or an onboarded employee. Agency, department, occupational series, salary and location fields reflect normalized announcement data where the underlying posting supplied enough information. Salary maximums are advertised maximums, not guaranteed pay. Location counts are location mentions and can exceed announcement counts when a posting lists more than one place.

The article is a historical snapshot as of February 28, 2025. It should not be read as a complete full-year trend or as a list of currently open jobs.

Sources: FederalHiringData HistoricalJobArchive; USAJOBS; USAJOBS API documentation. Photo: Josh Miller via Unsplash, used under the Unsplash License.