Who carries the city tax base, and who only looks like they do.
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Methodology
This directory answers a question the city financial reports do not answer directly: which firms supply most of Burbank tax revenue. The honest answer has two layers.
The published layer is the July 2025 principal-employer table, the city description of its retail centers, and the citywide tourism tax total of 31.2 million dollars for 2024. The inferred layer says a headquarters studio lot and a 456,000-square-foot store are where property tax and sales tax concentrate. Inference is labeled on every tax row.
California Revenue and Taxation Code section 7056 restricts disclosure of sales and use tax records. A missing dollar is not a zero and it is not a guess.
Public submissions for a new business or a closed one sit in a queue. An investigation compares the claim with the directory, the city, and any source link. A person accepts or rejects it. Until then it is not a directory record.
Who is left out on purpose
NBCUniversal and Universal Studios sit in Universal City, outside Burbank city limits. They are part of the regional media economy and they are not Burbank taxpayers. Older city narratives sometimes name them in the same breath as Warner Bros. and Disney. This directory does not.
Counts that disagree
The FY2024-25 ACFR and the July 2025 risk assessment agree on the private top employers. They disagree on the city headcount: 1,564 versus 1,536. The Los Angeles Business Journal counts valley employees, a wider map. The Chamber page has no as-of date and tracks an older strategic-plan list that still includes Netflix and Deluxe in the top ten. All of those rows are stored. The current city table is the one marked current.
On September 3, 2026 the Los Angeles Times, citing the community development director, reported more than 1,000 media and entertainment companies and about 66,000 entertainment jobs. That jobs figure is the entertainment slice. It is not the 165,000 all-industry workforce in the earlier city report.
The FY2023-24 economic development report describes more than 1,000 media and entertainment companies and a workforce of 165,000 jobs in the city economy.
Burbank does not publish a ranking of taxpayers. Sales and use tax records are confidential under California Revenue and Taxation Code section 7056. Employer counts in this directory are employment statistics. A tax role is labeled published or inference.
The FY2024-25 Popular Annual Financial Report names four major retail centers: Burbank Town Center, Burbank Empire Center, Magnolia Park, and Downtown Burbank.
Tourism produced 31.2 million dollars in local tax revenue in 2024. The economic development report ties that contribution to the General Fund through the transient occupancy tax and related visitor spending. The figure is citywide. It is not one hotel bill.