Latest County-Level Contractor Data Points to Growth Metros

While the national construction market showed many signs of cooling off in 2019, several large counties enjoyed double-digit year-over-year increases in an important economic indicator for the electrical market — electrical contractor employment.

Maricopa County, the largest county in the Phoenix metropolitan area, led all counties with a 2,118 new electrical contractor employees and a 13% YOY increase, according to the 2Q 2019 employment data released earlier this month by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Rounding out the Top 5 counties were the Denver metro’s Jefferson County, up +30% with 1,041 new electrical contractor employees; Loudoun County in suburban Washington, D.C. with a 21% increase and 947 new employees; Clark County in the Las Vegas metro with a 12% increase and 912 new workers; and the Salt Lake County in the Salt Lake City metro with a 14% and 813 new contractor employees.

Electrical contractor employment is highly concentrated at the county level. BLS employment data showed that 1,494 of the 3,007 counties in the United States had electrical contractor employees, and that only 200 of those 1,494 U.S. counties account for 66% of all contractor employment.

Electrical contractor employment is an important resource to use when estimating the contractor sales potential for any geographic area, because each contractor employee represents $65,617 in sales potential. That means an increase of just 100 employees adds $6.6 million in contractor sales potential to a market area, according to Electrical Wholesaling’s 2020 Market Planning Guide.

You can see data for individual counties by clicking on the map below.