Construction Trend Tuesday
What labor shortages?
Construction Trend Tuesday covers one (hopefully) interesting industry trend in a quick, two minute read. You can access the archive of CTT posts here.
Construction activity increased at a healthy clip from 2019 to 2023, and the pool of available workers couldn’t keep pace. As a result, contractors had a tough time finding workers. Wages rose rapidly. Projects stalled. The share of construction jobs unfilled rose above 5% for the first time on record.
That all changed in 2024. Construction spending growth flattened beneath the weight of high interest rates and expensive materials, a surge of foreign labor filled out the industry’s labor supply, and softening labor demand—both in construction and other industries—slowed the rate at which workers were switching jobs.
This has caused a rapid decrease in the share of construction jobs that are unfilled. Just 2.8% of of industrywide positions were open in February, the lowest percentage since early 2017.
What’s Next
We get March Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (the source of job openings data) later today. We’ll cover that and a whole lot more in Week in Review, our every-Friday post that covers all the economic news and data in a breezy, five minute read.
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