Key trends impacting the skilled trades, measured nationally and by trade and state.
Supply and demand don't always line up. Nine states face both high demand and low supply.
Explore supply and demand by state, and the indicators underlying them.
On routing young people into the skilled trades, as it stands fine words are not matched by actions. A new national survey from the Ad Council Research Institute (ACRI) tells the story: parents are proud of the trades, counselors call them credible, teens respect the work. Then nearly everyone steers the next generation somewhere else. The problem here is not perceptions of skilled trades, but knowledge in how to navigate them.
Teens, parents and school counselors alike hold the trades in high regard while rarely recommending them or planning to go into them. The counselors say it plainly about their own institutions: 83% report that trade options are not presented to students as often as they should be.
Every trade has a typical way in: registered apprenticeship for 33 of the 124 occupations here, a college or CTE credential for 36, and for the remaining 55, simply starting the work.
That is not an argument against training investment. It is a map of where training policy has direct leverage and where it does not, and the map varies by state: the same occupation can have an apprenticeship route, a college program, both, or neither depending on where you stand.
The bad news: most people who begin training for trades do not complete it. The good news: most of those who do complete go on into trades jobs - but there are real leaks at both stages. Rates differ by trade, but the broad pattern is consistent.
Both routes leak the same way: the big loss is people who start and do not finish, not people who finish and walk away. Career records under-count trade work, so the end of each lane is a floor.
Across the US, we have more workers aging out than we have entering the labor market. The age profile of skilled trades workers is largely in line with the national workforce - but that other parts of the economy are facing the same problem only makes the challenge more acute. In some key trades, more than one in three workers will likely retire over the next decade.
Interstate movement can help employers and projects meet immediate local demand, but movement does not create additional national workforce capacity. It redistributes existing workers, relieving pressure in some states while potentially intensifying shortages in others. These flows matter because major economic investments increasingly compete for overlapping pools of electricians, HVAC technicians, industrial mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, and other tradespeople.
Most trades have seen realized growth in recent years, with projections for further expansion across the next decade. Growth is uneven: most skilled trades occupations are projected to add jobs while a meaningful minority shrink. But even a shrinking trade still hires every year, because replacement demand outweighs headcount change almost everywhere.
5,292 state-by-occupation records, published wherever the data supports one and marked as unpublished wherever it does not.