Residential Construction Wages on the Rise

Wages for residential construction workers are growing at a 5 percent annual pace, nearly double the national private sector rate.

The rate is likely spurred by the increasing shortage of trade laborer, which is putting existing construction workers in high demand. Zillow Research reports that construction wages across all sectors is currently at a 3.9 percent annual rate, also well above the national average.

It would make sense that as construction activity picked up during the recovery, residential construction wages would also rise to some extent. But residential construction wages have picked up a lot more than construction starts. If the residential construction labor market today resembled the residential construction labor market of the mid-2000s, the country likely would be seeing substantially more new home construction than it current is.

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