The industry has spent four years blaming escalation on labor. The pricing data has stopped supporting it. Cushman & Wakefield published its Summer 2026 Construction Insights on 2 September, and the divergence in it is stark: the ENR Building Cost Index rose 4.7 percent year over year in August while its skilled labor input rose 1.5 percent. The gap is metal.
National indexes are useless in a bid
Using Rider Levett Bucknall Q2 2026 data across 18 U.S. metros, metro-level construction costs rose 4.42 percent year over year on average, roughly 0.9 percentage points above BLS producer prices for nonresidential structures. Bid escalation is outrunning the national output-price index, which means anyone applying a national factor to a local bid is wrong in a direction they can’t predict.
The spread is the operational finding. Honolulu ran highest at 5.93 percent, Phoenix at 5.30, Miami at 4.99, Charlotte at 4.91 and Minneapolis at 4.82. Chicago came in lowest at 1.42 percent, down sharply from its own 3.56 percent the year before. Boston posted the fastest quarterly move at 2.22 percent, or 4.11 percent annualized. A contractor pricing work in Honolulu is escalating four times faster than one pricing in Chicago.
The metals are in the gear
Construction-related commodity prices rose 13.3 percent year over year as of June, 4.7 times the prior year’s increase. Aluminum base scrap led at 40.9 percent, copper base scrap at 39.3 and nonferrous metals at 38.5, with hot-rolled bars, plates and structurals at 16.0 percent and nonferrous wire and cable at 15.6. Nothing the report tracks declined. ENR’s materials index rose 1.0 percent month over month in August, a third consecutive month at or above that rate, with year-over-year growth climbing from 6.5 percent in June to 8.5 percent in August. Steel mill products moved 3.6 percent in a single month in June, the largest monthly step of 2026, while crude petroleum fell roughly 12 percent.
Follow the copper and it ends up in switchgear. Equipment prices rose 5.8 percent year over year in June, with electrical machinery and equipment at 13.0 percent and switchgear at 9.0. C&W forecasts transformers up 4.6 percent and switchgear up 4.8 percent by December, which is data center demand and a structural copper deficit showing up in a purchase order.
The labor number nobody expected
Construction employment reached 8.322 million in Q2 2026, up 0.6 percent and near record levels. Construction and mining wage growth fell from 5.7 percent in February to 4.6 percent in May, ticking back to 4.8 percent in June. Contractor pricing rose 4.3 percent overall, led by concrete contractors at 6.4 and roofing at 5.5. Structure prices rose 3.4 percent, with office at 3.7 and industrial at 3.6.
Every forward number in the report is a model output and should be read that way. The one-year metals and energy forecasts are Moody’s Analytics, as is a projected 1.0 percent decline in construction employment over the coming year. The 330,000-metric-ton 2026 refined copper deficit is J.P. Morgan’s estimate. The metro table is RLB’s data republished by C&W, and the report is branded Summer 2026 while most of its inputs are June figures.
Since January 2020, tracked construction commodities are up an average 45.0 percent for structures and 43.5 percent for contractor pricing. Roofing contractors are up 63.9 percent. That is the number to quote when somebody asks why a reclad prices the way it does, and it’s part of why keeping an existing frame, as Vornado did at PENN 2, keeps winning the comparison. The full report is on C&W’s site.