Construction barely added workers in April, and the flat headline hides the real story underneath. The sector gained 9,000 jobs for the month and finished essentially even with where it stood a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Step inside the construction jobs data and the split is sharp. Nonresidential specialty trade contractors added 12,600 jobs. Residential specialty trades lost 8,900. One side of the industry is hiring as fast as it can staff up; the other is letting people go.
A split inside the construction jobs numbers
The divide tracks where the work is. Factories, power projects, and data centers are pulling trades onto nonresidential sites, while higher rates keep a lid on homebuilding. April’s broader report showed total payrolls up 115,000 and unemployment holding at 4.3%, so this isn’t a sinking economy dragging construction down. It’s demand sorting itself by sector.
That sorting has been building for months. The same data-center and manufacturing boom filling contractor backlogs is also where the new hires are going, even as residential crews thin out.
Where the construction hiring is
For workers and firms, the signal is to follow the nonresidential pipeline. Megaprojects like hyperscale data centers and large factory campuses such as Ford’s BlueOval City are absorbing trades that homebuilders can no longer keep busy. The catch is geography. The hot projects cluster in a handful of states, and a residential framer in a cooling metro can’t always relocate to a nonresidential boom three states away.
A near-flat year of construction employment usually reads as stagnation. This one reads as a handoff. The question for the back half of 2026 is whether housing steadies before the nonresidential surge tops out. Full figures are in the BLS Employment Situation, with industry analysis from the AGC.