Safety departments can tell you exactly how many falls, struck-bys, and caught-betweens they had last year. Ask which trades are losing the most people to suicide and nobody has the data.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) introduced the Constructing the Path to Suicide Prevention Act on Aug. 7. It would authorize the Secretary of Health and Human Services to run a national study through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on suicide risk factors specific to construction workers, and report policy recommendations to Congress within three years of enactment.
What the study would actually code
The bill names its variables: demographics, the specific type of construction work, union membership, health plan coverage, and history of substance abuse, mental health diagnoses, or physical injury. That last cluster is the one that matters most operationally, because it links the injury record a contractor already keeps to an outcome nobody currently tracks. The industry counts fatal falls to the citation; it has never counted this.
Construction’s suicide fatality rate was 43.2 per 100,000 workers in 2024, according to North America’s Building Trades Unions and CPWR, the Center for Construction Research and Training. That’s among the highest of any U.S. industry, and it has been for as long as anyone has been measuring it at the sector level. What’s never existed is a breakdown that would tell a mechanical contractor whether its pipefitters are at different risk than its sheet metal crews, or whether workers coming back from a recordable injury are the population to watch.
Cortez Masto: “work in this industry presents distinct mental health risks, and we owe it to construction workers to find solutions.” Cosponsors are Sens. Mark Warner, Jeanne Shaheen, Ben Ray Lujan, Mark Kelly, and John Hickenlooper.
The industry got there first
The Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York launched its Building Trades Peer Support Network in March, training 1,000 rank-and-file members across 15 member unions under the line “It’s not weak to speak.” Bechtel pledged $7 million to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in 2024, the largest donation in that nonprofit’s history at the time; the resulting Hard Hat Courage partnership reported reaching 165,000 workers during Construction Suicide Prevention Week 2025, against a target of 500,000 within six years.
Construction Suicide Prevention Week 2026 runs Sept. 14 to 18, and OSHA listed it in its Aug. 6 QuickTakes.
What contractors should expect
A dataset coded this way gives the industry its first actuarial basis for mental health spending, which is the argument peer-support programs have never been able to make to a CFO. It will also become the evidentiary foundation for whatever comes after: rulemaking, owner prequalification questions, or insurer requirements. Firms already running peer support should assume they’ll be asked to contribute their numbers.