Roughly 115,000 construction job openings disappeared from the government’s accounting last month, suggesting the labor shortage that has dogged the construction sector is waning. The on-the-ground reality, however, indicates something else.
Not only do workers remain in short supply, but so do new developments. The construction industry continues to busily work through its long backlog of projects, but new additions to the pipeline are coming less frequently.
“The whole economy is in a holding pattern right now,” said Zack Fritz, an economist for the Associated Builders and Contractors. “Nobody’s quitting, nobody’s hiring, nobody’s doing layoffs. Projects aren’t going forward. They’re kind of in a wait-and-see mode.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said there were 188,000 open construction roles in August, down from 303,000 the prior month.
Nearly a quarter of ABC’s members say that the fog of tariffs, an ever-changing melange of regulations that could yet still be ruled unconstitutional, has led to at least one project delay or cancellation.
The steep decline in job openings came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ notoriously noisy Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary released on Sept. 30.
JOLTS data swings broadly from month to month, but a three-month moving average eliminates some noise and reveals that construction job openings have largely stagnated in 2025 in the range of a quarter million, down from a peak of 439,000 openings in December 2023.
ADP’s monthly jobs data, released on Oct. 1, also reflected a market in contraction, with a loss of 32,000 private sector jobs compared to the prior month, including 5,000 fewer construction roles.
“There’s just so little appetite to hire that the fact that it’s hard to find workers doesn’t matter so much right now,” Moody’s Analytics labor economist Dante DeAntonio said.
Nonresidential construction spending also peaked along with jobs in December 2023 and has been on a slow decline since. The sector is being squeezed by the same macroeconomic headwinds — a trade war, stubborn inflation and elevated debt costs — that are weighing on the broader economy.
Developers and investors looking for a more predictable economic landscape to emerge have been left wanting. Nonresidential building starts fell 30% in July compared to the prior year, according to Dodge Construction Network.
“It’s uncertainty about policy, but it’s also what seems like a big looming threat of a recession,” DeAntonio said. “You don’t really want to start a big project and then see the economy roll over and go into recession. That’s your worst possible timing.”
But the slowdown in new starts hasn’t eased the construction labor shortage. The Associated General Contractors of America’s annual workforce survey found that only 9% of members felt that it had gotten easier to find workers.
It’s the third consecutive year that more than 90% of respondents to the AGC survey said they struggled to fill open roles. Specialized roles remain the hardest to fill, and just over 400 of the 1,342 respondents to the survey had projects delayed in 2025 because of a shortage of labor.
“We still have more people retiring than entering the trades after getting strong training, so there’s still going to be that loss of talent,” AGC Chief Economist Ken Simonson said. “Even if fewer firms are hiring, they still may have trouble replacing that supervisor with 30 years’ experience.”
While 57% of firms said they had roles that remained open because the available candidates were unqualified, other reasons for roles staying empty cited in the survey suggest that potential hires are having trouble meeting minimum standards or staying on the job.
ABC said the construction industry had an 8.5-month backlog of work in August, down 30 basis points from July but up by the same amount from a year ago. Waning commercial and institutional demand has been offset by increases in heavy industry and infrastructure projects.
August’s decline was entirely attributable to firms with less than $30M in revenue, while ABC said the work backlog for the biggest contractors had reached its highest level in two years.
“We thought last year was a record year. This year, we blew through it by 25% to 30%. Next year is going to be the same,” said Abrar Shar, president at New York-based Turner Construction Co., the largest general contractor in the U.S.
As the commercial development landscape cooled, Turner has kept busy with infrastructure and civil projects. It is part of the joint venture that won a $2.4B contract earlier this month to build a new stadium for the NFL’s Cleveland Browns. The same joint venture is also building a $2.1B stadium for the Tennessee Titans.
Turner directly employs 15,000 people and has more than 120,000 workers at its construction projects, Shar said. It is working on a concourse at Washington Dulles International Airport and is helping build a $1B medical center in Memphis.
The capital environment has led the projects that have advanced to be megaprojects, and billion-dollar developments have become the norm, said Shar, who is also CEO of Turner International.
“The billion-dollar projects are like the old $350M projects,” he said.
“When I talk to my partners across the industry, they are seeing the same thing,” Shar said. “The space we play in right now, we can’t grow fast enough, we can’t build fast enough, because that’s what is needed. The only thing that will hold us back is finding the right workforce.”
Turner has the benefit of scale, frequently moving hundreds of employees to job sites and shuffling other resources as needed. Larger firms tend to have longer backlogs of work, according to ABC. Firms with at least $100M in revenue had a 13.5-month backlog, but that falls to 7.1 months for contractors with less than $30M in revenue.
Smaller firms are still hiring even as the volume of new projects thins, with 62% of respondents to the AGC survey saying they expected to increase their headcount over the next year. But whether those plans translate into job openings is dependent on shovels getting into the ground.
“The industry is finding the market softer than it had been,” Simonson said. “Most firms still expect to add headcount over the next year, but right now, they’re finding many owners are putting projects on pause.”
