UC Davis Health California Tower

The California Tower at UC Davis Health is the largest hospital construction project ever undertaken in California by dollar value and one of the most consequential seismic-compliance builds in the country. The 14-story, $3.7 billion tower topped out in February 2026 and will deliver hundreds of new inpatient beds in a single seismically updated facility on the academic medical center’s Sacramento campus.

Project Scope

The full build-out pairs a 14-story hospital tower with an adjacent five-story pavilion for diagnostics, support and procedural functions, totalling close to one million square feet. SmithGroup is leading design and McCarthy Building Companies is the general contractor under a CMAR delivery model. Siegfried Engineering is providing civil and structural support.

The seismic driver behind the project is California’s SB 1953 standard, which requires acute-care hospitals to meet a stringent post-event functionality threshold. The existing 1960s-era UC Davis Medical Center building cannot be retrofitted to that standard cost-effectively, and the California Tower is the consolidated replacement. The tower’s structural system includes a base-isolated mat foundation and a stiffened core that lets the facility remain operational immediately after a major event, rather than the older “life-safety” performance level that lets a hospital stand but go offline.

Steel erection on the primary structure began in May 2025 and topped out in February 2026, about nine months of vertical work, which is fast for a hospital of this size and reflects both an aggressive prefab program and McCarthy’s deep healthcare bench in the region.

Why It Matters

California’s hospital owners have been wrestling with SB 1953 for two decades. Most academic medical centers have responded with phased retrofits and piecemeal additions; UC Davis took the harder path of building an entirely new clinical tower in parallel with continued operations. The California Tower is the proof case for what a from-scratch SB 1953-compliant replacement looks like at $3.7B.

The facility is also a model for how a major academic medical center solves bed-capacity constraints in a market where suburban patient demand has grown faster than urban infill capacity. UC Davis Health’s catchment now stretches across Northern California’s 33-county region, and the existing center has been running at structural capacity for years. The tower’s inpatient program is sized to absorb roughly a decade of demand growth.

For other California hospital systems with 1960s and 1970s buildings still on the books, the California Tower’s cost basis and schedule will set the planning baseline for the next round of SB 1953 replacements.

Project Team & Details