L.A. County lost another major corporate headquarters in 2019.

After 75 years in the county — the last 40 in Pasadena — Parsons Corp. and CEO Chuck Harrington announced Feb. 28 that it would move its corporate headquarters to Centreville, Va., closer to its customer and employee bases in the Washington, D.C., metro area.

The engineering firm had $3.7 billion in revenue in 2018 and more than 16,000 global employees. It ranked No. 8 on the Business Journal’s private companies list for 2018, based on $3 billion of revenue in 2017.

As of the announcement, about 500 employees were working at the Pasadena headquarters, with about 1,300 more spread among other locations in California. The company said at the time of the announcement that no layoffs or employee relocations were planned.

Parsons became the second major engineering firm to move its headquarters from Pasadena in recent years. In 2016, Jacobs Engineering Group Inc., with $15 billion in revenue, shifted to Dallas. 

Several other Los Angeles-area companies have left for Northern Virginia in recent years, including Northrop Grumman Corp. in 2011, Hilton Hotels Corp. in 2009, and Vevey, Switzerland-based Nestlé’s U.S. headquarters in late 2017.

Despite moving its headquarters, Parsons kept busy in Los Angeles in 2019. It is the lead design company on the first phase of the $3.1 billion Metro Purple Line Extension from Koreatown to Beverly Hills and is also program manager for the $5.5 billion plan to improve rail and vehicular access to Los Angeles International Airport. That project includes construction of an automated people mover, connection to the Metro Crenshaw-LAX rail line and the construction of a consolidated car rental facility.

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