California is the richest state of the United States. The state’s trade volume is currently about 58 billion U.S. dollars, with imports making about 75 percent of this value. Compared to Texas, the second-largest state after itself, California exported less goods to the rest of the world over this period. California’s economic contribution California’s economic output places the state at the top in the United States. Measured by GDP, California contributed 3.2 trillion U.S. dollars to the U.S. economy, 50 percent more than that of Texas. On a per capita basis, California’s GDP corresponds to almost 83 thousand U.S. dollars in real terms. Tech companies and wages in California California is the home to technology powerhouses of the United States. The world’s highest capping tech companies such as Apple and Google were founded and headquartered in California. According to a 2023 study, Silicon Valley was also the leading hub that offered the highest wages to tech workers. On average, a tech employee earned around 142 thousand dollars working for a Silicon Valley company.

In 2024, the real gross domestic product (GDP) of California was 3.37 trillion U.S. dollars. This is a slight increase from the previous year, when the state's GDP stood at 3.25 trillion U.S. dollars.

The gross domestic product (GDP) of California was about 4.1 trillion U.S. dollars in 2024, meaning that it contributed the most out of any state to the country’s GDP in that year. In contrast, Vermont had the lowest GDP in the United States, with 45.71 billion U.S. dollars. What is GDP? Gross domestic product, or GDP, is the total monetary value of all goods and services produced by an economy within a certain time period. GDP is used by economists to determine the economic health of an area, as well as to determine the size of the economy. GDP can be determined for countries, states and provinces, and metropolitan areas. While GDP is a good measure of the absolute size of a country's economy and economic activity, it does account for many other factors, making it a poor indicator for measuring the cost or standard of living in a country, or for making cross-country comparisons. GDP of the United States The United States has the largest gross domestic product in the world as of 2023, with China, Japan, Germany, and India rounding out the top five. The GDP of the United States has almost quadrupled since 1990, when it was about 5.9 trillion U.S. dollars, to about 25.46 trillion U.S. dollars in 2022.