Looking at Contractor Job Losses
Residential trades hemorrhage jobs in 2025
Construction Trend Tuesday covers one (hopefully) interesting industry trend in a quick, two minute read. You can access the archive of CTT posts here.
The construction industry added just 14,000 jobs in 2025. Excluding 2020, that’s the worst year for construction employment since the Great Recession in 2010.
That weak performance was almost entirely due to a sharp drop in residential specialty trade contractor (STC) employment, though the residential building category also lost a few jobs for the year.
[The categories are defined by the primary activity of the employer, not by what the employee actually does.]
The cause here is pretty simple: the number of new homes under construction has fallen sharply from the 2022-23 historical peak.
As you can see below, remodeling employment has actually held up pretty well over the past year, with losses concentrated in the new residential STC subsegments (data by subsegment lags by a month, so this is Nov-24 to Nov-25).
What’s Next
Next week’s Construction Trend Tuesday will look at what’s happening with nonresidential STC employment.
Our next post will be 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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