Average contractor labor rates: what the official data says
Search for contractor labor rates and you will find plenty of confident numbers with nothing behind them. There is one figure that is genuinely official, published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it is worth knowing precisely because of what it does not say.
| What | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Average hourly earnings, construction | $41.46July 2026, preliminary | U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics |
| Production and nonsupervisory employees | $39.24July 2026, preliminary | U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics |
| Same figure a year earlier | $39.73July 2025, so about +4.4% | U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics |
| Five years earlier | $32.92July 2021, so about +26% since | U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics |
What this does and does not tell you
- ·This is what workers are PAID. It is not what you are BILLED. A billed rate has to cover payroll taxes, insurance, equipment, vehicles, unbilled time and the company's margin on top of the wage.
- ·It is a national average across all of construction. Trades, regions and metro areas vary enormously around it, and this figure cannot tell you about yours.
- ·The most recent months are marked preliminary by BLS and get revised.
- ·An hourly figure says nothing about how many hours a job should take, which is usually where the real money in a quote sits.
The number, and what it actually counts
Average hourly earnings in construction were $41.46 in July 2026. That comes from the BLS Current Employment Statistics program, series CES2000000003, and it is a payroll measure: it counts what employers pay employees.
For production and nonsupervisory employees specifically, the figure is $39.24. The gap between the two is supervisors and management being included in the first number.
Wages have moved steadily rather than dramatically: $39.73 in July 2025 and $32.92 in July 2021, so roughly 4.4% over the year and about 26% over five years.
Why your bill is higher, and why that is not automatically wrong
If a contractor bills you well above $41 an hour, that is expected rather than suspicious. The wage is one input into a billed rate. On top of it sit payroll taxes, workers' compensation and liability insurance, vehicles and fuel, tools, licensing, office time, warranty work and travel between jobs, plus the margin the business runs on.
You will find plenty of sources confidently stating the multiple between the two. We are not going to add another, because we could not find one published with a method behind it, and a made-up multiplier is exactly the kind of number this site exists to help you question.
What you can do is compare like with like. If two bids on the same job carry very different hourly rates, that difference is real and worth asking about, whatever the national average happens to be.
The question that matters more than the rate
Hourly rate is the number everyone checks, and it is rarely where the surprise is. The bigger variable is hours: how many people, for how many days, doing what.
A modest hourly rate attached to a generous estimate of hours costs more than a high rate attached to a tight one. That is why comparing two bids on headline price alone tells you so little, and why the useful comparison is line by line.
That is the comparison Negoti8 runs for you. Upload the quote and you get each line assessed against market rates, plus a message you can send about the lines that stand out.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics, July 2026 (preliminary), series from 2021 (national, all construction employees)Average hourly EARNINGS of employees in construction: what workers are paid, which is not what a customer is billed. Series CES2000000003, retrieved via the BLS public API.
Last updated: 2026-08-16
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