WSJ News Exclusive | Boeing Plans to Move Headquarters to Arlington, Va., From Chicago

The Arlington region is already home to many of the largest U.S. military contractors, and the local property and labor market has been fueled further by

Amazon.com Inc.’s

decision to locate one of its satellite headquarters there.

Boeing has for months been in talks with the office of Virginia Gov.

Glenn Youngkin,

who has been working to woo the plane maker and other businesses to the commonwealth, according to a state official. While details of Boeing’s agreement with the state aren’t final, they aren’t expected to involve significant financial enticements but may include workforce-related incentives, the official said.

Many of Boeing’s senior executives have increasingly been working out of its Washington, D.C., area offices in recent years. Boeing in 2017 said it would move its defense unit’s headquarters to Arlington from St. Louis to be nearer lawmakers and Pentagon procurement officials, with government affairs and other staff also working from the office complex opened in 2014.

Boeing’s decision to move its corporate headquarters to Chicago from Seattle in 2001 was symbolic of its desire at the time to be seen as more than just a maker of commercial jets. The company acquired rival McDonnell Douglas in 1997, adding military jets and other military equipment to its portfolio.

Chicago beat out competition from Dallas and Denver, aided by a package of city and state incentives and tax breaks.

The move to Chicago created geographic distance between the company’s top corporate leaders and its commercial-jet hub in the Puget Sound region. Since then, the company has shifted all of its 787 Dreamliner production to a factory in North Charleston, S.C., while situating its recently formed services arm in Plano, Texas.

Write to Andrew Tangel at [email protected] and Doug Cameron at [email protected]