AECOM’s headquarters move from L.A. to Dallas, cementing North Texas as an engineering hub

Engineering giant AECOM is following the lead of two of its biggest rivals by moving its headquarters from the Los Angeles area to the Dallas area. Chief executive officer Troy Rudd and an undisclosed number of other corporate executives will make the move to the company’s existing Dallas office beginning Oct. 1, the company announced Tuesday. They’ll join more than 1,200 employees already in the state. AECOM’s headquarters move won’t involve a new campus or a major presence in a downtown Dallas skyscraper, like other corporate migration to North Texas. But it will give the region the headquarters of the three largest U.S. engineering design firms — Jacobs, AECOM and Fluor, according to a ranking compiled by industry publication Engineering News-Record.

Fluor led the California migration when it moved from Aliso Viejo in 2005 and built a new campus in Las Colinas in Irving. Jacobs moved its headquarters from Pasadena to downtown Dallas in 2016. Flour and Jacobs are the 11th and 13th largest public companies in D-FW in The Dallas Morning News’ annual ranking. Based on its 2020 revenue of $13.2 billion, AECOM would have been the 14th largest public company in the region. California-to-Texas relocation is a common economic development theme in Texas, with Dallas-Fort Worth benefiting from an influx of jobs and corporate talent in recent years. In North Texas, there already have been nearly 50 corporate relocation or expansion announcements this year, according to Dallas Regional Chamber data. That number more than doubled from the same time period in 2019. Although the North Texas region was already experiencing business growth at the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic created the perfect opportunity for companies looking to exit more expensive metro areas like New York, L.A. and San Francisco. There were almost 70 relocation and expansion announcements last year, a number that the region is on track to beat in 2021.