In February, Michelle Obama announced more than 100 companies in the construction industry committed to hiring over 100,000 veterans in the next five years. To help understand where the US has the greatest need for contractors, we began investigating areas with the greatest supply/demand imbalances.
To better understand supply, we calculated contracting businesses per capita for the top 250 US cities based on our database of over 3.5 million contracting businesses.
Here is how the top 25 US cities (by population) stacked up:
Seattle has the most contractors per capita out of the top 25 cities while the city with the fewest contractor per capita was New York.
Out of all cities with a population great than 100k, here are the cities with the most contractors per capita:
And here are the US cities with over 100,000 residents with the fewest contracting businesses per capita:
In a future post, we’ll look at the largest supply/demand imbalances in large US cities.
A few notes about the data:
- The analysis was performed using information on approximately 3.5 million unique contracting businesses, collected from an overall set of nearly 4.6 million unique licenses. This is because a large segment of the population of contracting businesses has multiple licenses.
- Licenses analyzed included both general license classifications (e.g. general contractors) as well as specialty license classifications (e.g. HVAC, electrical).
- In this article, “contractor” is defined as “contracting business.” Many contracting businesses have multiple employees who might be considered contractors. This is not intended to be an account of “construction workers” per capita; rather, “contractors” per capita.
- Some states (e.g. New Hampshire) do not enforce license standards and cities in these states were not included in the analysis.
- There is some variation from state-to-state in license standards between different classes of licensing.
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