Los Angeles information-sector employment, September 2026
The Los Angeles metro’s information sector employed 187,000 people in September 2026, down 5.7% from a year earlier. That is 3.0% of every payroll job in the metro, against 3.2% a year before.
The two charts answer different questions. The head count says whether the sector is hiring. The share says whether it is hiring faster than everyone else — a sector can add jobs every month and still shrink as a part of the economy. The count peaked at 300,700 in November 2000; the share peaked at 5.4% in November 2000, up from 4.0% when the series opens in January 1990.
‘Information’ is not ‘tech’, and the gap is large. It is the BLS sector covering software publishers, telecoms, broadcasting and publishing. Here it also holds the motion picture and sound recording industries, so this line moves with entertainment as well as with technology. A great deal of Los Angeles technology work is booked elsewhere — hardware makers are classified under manufacturing, cloud infrastructure lands under several other headings, and contract engineering sits in professional services — so read this line as a floor on tech employment rather than a measure of it. What it is good for is the trend: the classification has been applied consistently since 1990, so the shape is right even where the level is low.
Not seasonally adjusted, which is why both lines have an annual wobble on top of the trend; compare a month with the same month a year earlier. The share is computed at read time from two series in the same BLS release, so it stays consistent when the levels are revised.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, information sector and total nonfarm payrolls, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SMU06310805000000001, SMU06310800000000001). The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.