Construction job openings jumped to 305,000 in June, up 14,000 from May and up 36% from a year earlier, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey data analyzed by the National Association of Home Builders in a post published Tuesday. The construction job openings rate climbed to 3.5% in June from 2.6% a year earlier, even as the residential side of the industry continues to shed momentum.
The BLS survey, released the same day, also showed a construction layoff rate of 2.0% and a quits rate of 1.8% for June. A rising quits rate typically signals workers feel confident enough to leave one job for another, while the job-openings rate measures unfilled positions as a share of total jobs plus openings — both point to employers competing harder for construction labor than they were a year ago, even with overall building activity mixed.
NAHB’s analysis ties the increase directly to the same divide showing up across other construction data this summer: nonresidential building, and data centers in particular, is absorbing labor that a slower housing sector no longer needs. “Recent gains for nonresidential construction have increased demand for construction labor,” the NAHB post said, even as residential building activity has weakened since 2024. Data center construction specifically was up 46% year over year as of the most recent Census Bureau reading, a pace NAHB cited as a significant driver of the labor-demand shift.
That divide has shown up across nearly every construction indicator released this summer. Census Bureau data released this week put private residential construction spending at an $877.1 billion seasonally adjusted annual rate in June, down 0.3% from May and down 4.7% from a year earlier, while private nonresidential spending held roughly flat at $745.3 billion, up 0.1% for the month — a split RealtyWire covered in detail this week. Nonresidential construction starts hit a one-month record in June, driven substantially by office-category projects that include data centers. And homebuilders have said data center developers are outbidding them for land in fast-growing corridors, pushing up acquisition costs before a single housing unit gets built.
The labor data suggests that divide is no longer just about where the dollars are going — it is starting to show up in where the workers are going, too. A jump in the openings rate from 2.6% to 3.5% year over year, even as residential building activity has weakened, is consistent with employers on nonresidential and data-center projects competing harder to staff up than the housing side of the industry is competing to hold onto or add workers. A 1.8% quits rate is not unusual on its own for construction, a historically high-turnover trade, but combined with rising openings it points to more tradespeople having options to move between employers than they did when residential construction was shedding jobs most aggressively over the past two years.
What it means: The JOLTS numbers add a labor-market dimension to a story that, until now, has mostly been told through construction-spending and land-price data. Rising openings alongside rising quits suggest contractors working on data centers and other large nonresidential projects are having to compete on pay and conditions to hold onto skilled tradespeople, a dynamic that can pull labor away from homebuilding at a time when new-home affordability is already stretched. NAHB’s analysis frames this as a demand-side story — more work chasing a roughly fixed pool of skilled labor — rather than evidence of a broader hiring boom across all of construction.
What to watch: Whether elevated openings translate into faster wage growth for construction trades in the BLS’s separate Employment Situation and Employment Cost Index releases, and whether homebuilders begin reporting labor shortages as a distinct headwind alongside land costs in their own quarterly disclosures.
JOLTS is one of the BLS’s core monthly labor-market indicators, tracking openings, hires, quits, layoffs and other separations across the economy roughly five weeks after each reference month closes. The construction figures are a subset of that broader release rather than a standalone report, meaning industry-specific detail like the openings rate by trade or region is not broken out at the same granularity as the headline national numbers. NAHB’s Eye on Housing, the trade group’s economics blog, publishes its own read of the construction-specific figures each month, typically within hours of the full BLS release.
