Safety-net employers · federal health center file read 11 August 2026
57 county plans, 218 health center organizations, and four things this list is not.
In short
Which California employers are in the Medi-Cal safety net?
All 218 health center organizations by name, with sites, counties and links that were checked before publication
218 organizations, 3,038 sitesThe public mental health employers in California, by name: the county behavioral health plans that run Medi-Cal specialty mental health, and the federally designated health centers. Every link was fetched before it shipped. It is not a list of employers in any loan repayment program, and not a list of jobs.
What this is notWhy they count twiceThe 57 countiesThe 218 health centersSources
Read this before you read the list
A list of organizations. Not of jobs, and not of eligibility.This is a list of organizations operating federally designated health center sites in California, taken from HRSA’s bulk file on the date in the hero. That is all it is.
It is not a list of employers who take part in the loan repayment program. Participation is not a public fact, the award is applied for by you rather than by the employer, and no employer on this list has told anyone it will support an application. It is not a list of open jobs, and it is not an eligibility determination.
Absence from this list means nothing. Three of the four qualifying setting categories cannot be listed from public data at all — including the broadest one, which is any setting where at least 40% of the population is on Medicaid or uninsured. The job you are looking at may well qualify and not be here.
And none of it can be guaranteed current. Sites open and close, organizations merge, and the federal file changes daily. Verify with HCAI’s own eligibility checker and with the employer before you act on anything here.
The four settings
One of them is public. Three are not.
MBH-SLRP names four kinds of setting where the 4-year service obligation can be completed. This page can enumerate exactly one of them, and the honest thing is to show you which.
| Qualifying setting | Listed here? | Why, or why not |
|---|---|---|
| Federally qualified health centers, and look-alikes | Yes — all 218 organizations below | HRSA publishes every designated site in the country and updates the file daily. |
| Community mental health centers | No | There is no equivalent public list. Many are county-operated or county-contracted, and you find them through the county rather than through a federal file. |
| Rural health clinics | No, and here is why | 108 carry a live mental health shortage-area designation, under 62 distinct names — and the county attribution on those rows does not hold up. One clinic is filed under three counties at once and another under five, and two appear twice under different spellings. Publishing that as a directory would put wrong addresses in front of people making employment decisions, so it is counted here and not listed. |
| Any setting at least 40% Medicaid or uninsured — 30% for rural hospitals | No | This is a fact about an employer’s own patient mix. It is not published anywhere, and it is the category most likely to include the job you are actually looking at. |
Which is why this page is a starting point and not an answer. If the job you are considering is not on the list, the question to ask the employer is whether their patient mix crosses the Medicaid threshold — not whether they appear in a federal file.
Why these employers are worth knowing
A health center can matter to you twice.
A federally qualified health center is named in the program’s own list of safety-net settings, and the associate-level tier of that program goes up to $180,000 over 4 years. The next application window opens 1 May 2027.
Health center program awardees are public entities or private non-profits, which is the shape PSLF’s employer definition asks for — and PSLF asks nothing about your license. Several organizations on this list are counties outright. That does not make any of them qualifying: run the employer through the federal employer search and certify, rather than assuming from a category.
The billing question is the one that decides whether an associate gets hired at all, and it is answered on its own page. The three questions overlap heavily, which is why the same handful of settings keeps appearing in all three answers.
The county plans
The 57 agencies that run Medi-Cal specialty mental health.
This is the list an associate most needs, and it is not the same as the list of counties. Sutter and Yuba share one plan; Alameda’s covers the City of Berkeley. These are the agencies the state contracts with, they are local government employers, and they are where volume hiring of pre-licensed clinicians happens — because Medi-Cal names registered associates as a billable staff type, which is the reason half an associate’s applications never get a reply.
What checking every link on the state’s own page turned up
23 of 57 state-published links no longer point where they say.DHCS publishes a website for each plan. Fetching all of them found that 23 of the 57 resolve somewhere other than the address the state prints — counties have moved their sites and the directory has not followed. 3 did not answer at all, and one, Santa Cruz, now lands on a login page rather than a public one.
The links below are the addresses that actually answered, after redirects. Where a site refused an automated request but the server answered — which is ordinary bot protection on a government site and not a fault — the state’s address is kept. Tulare is listed by DHCS with no website at all.
| County behavioral health plan | Link status |
|---|---|
| Alameda, and the City of Berkeley | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Alpine | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Amador | As published |
| Butte | As published |
| Calaveras | As published |
| Colusa | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Contra Costa | As published |
| Del Norte | As published |
| El Dorado | As published |
| Fresno | As published |
| Glenn | As published |
| Humboldt | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Imperial | As published |
| Inyo | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Kern | As published |
| Kings | As published |
| Lake | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Lassen | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Los Angeles | As published |
| Madera | As published |
| Marin | As published |
| Mariposa | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Mendocino | As published |
| Merced | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Modoc | No working address |
| Mono | No working address |
| Monterey | As published |
| Napa | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Nevada | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Orange | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Placer | As published |
| Plumas | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Riverside | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Sacramento | No working address |
| San Benito | As published |
| San Bernardino | As published |
| San Diego | As published |
| San Francisco | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| San Joaquin | As published |
| San Luis Obispo | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| San Mateo | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Santa Barbara | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Santa Clara | As published |
| Santa Cruz | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Shasta | As published |
| Sierra | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Siskiyou | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Solano | As published |
| Sonoma | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Stanislaus | As published |
| Sutter and Yuba | As published |
| Tehama | As published |
| Trinity | As published |
| Tulare | Not listed by DHCS |
| Tuolumne | As published |
| Ventura | Moved since DHCS listed it |
| Yolo | As published |
Transcribed from DHCS’s county mental health plan page and checked 11 August 2026. A plan appearing here says only that the state contracts with it. It is not a job listing, and whether it is a qualifying employer for anything is a question for the program, not for this page.
The directory
All 218, by name.
Every link below was fetched before it was published. 189 answered. The 29 that did not are shown without a link — that means the check failed, not that the organization has no website, and several of them are simply behind bot protection. A wrong link is worse than no link.
Organizations running an active health center service delivery or look-alike site in California, aggregated from HRSA’s site-level file read 11 August 2026. A look-alike meets the health center program requirements without receiving the grant funding; both are named settings for the state program. Site counts include administrative locations.
To search by address rather than by employer, HRSA runs a health center finder over the same data. How crowded each county already is with therapists is on the county atlas, and what associate roles in these settings pay is on the pay page.
Where every figure came from
Sources.
The county plans
The health centers
The program the list is for
This page lists organizations, not jobs, and not eligibility. No employer here has said it will support a loan repayment application, absence from the list does not mean a setting fails to qualify, and the federal file behind it changes daily. Verify with the program and with the employer before you act. Nothing here is legal, financial or career advice.
