I love reading stats. It doesn’t matter what those stats are about; I’m fascinated by them. Things like the average number of pickle slices in a jar, how long people watch a video before they turn it off, and the number of people texting the wrong person every day are real joys for me.
So when I saw some of the latest stats about the construction industry, I dove right into them and commented on some.
Approximately 7.5 million people are employed by the construction industry, as of January 2022 — that’s about 4.8% of the U.S. workforce. Now I wish I had a stat for how many of those are employed in the offsite construction industry.
1,337,800 new housing units were completed in 2021, a 4% increase from 2020. I can remember 10-12 years ago, we saw numbers in the 500.000-600,000 range for new starts.
The average annual turnover rate in the construction industry is 68% as of 2020. A fun stat…offsite housing construction is about half that rate!
In one study spanning three years, only about 31% of construction projects finished within 10% of their original budgets. I wonder who eats the loss? Now that would be an interesting stat to know.
Women account for about 10.9% of all construction workers in the U.S. In contrast, women make up about 57.4% of the whole U.S. workforce. Offsite construction could solve its labor shortage problem if women wanted to work in our factories.
Construction laborers are at the low end of this spectrum, earning an average of $20.92 an hour, and construction managers are at the top, earning an average of $51.02 an hour, or $106,120 annually. Sounds like a disparity that needs attention.
There were 1,737,000 single-family housing building permits granted in 2021. Now that stat just blew me away.
One thing we all need to remember, 50% of all stats are not accurate, not even the governments. That’s another stat, by the way…LOL!
Gary Fleisher, Contributing Editor
