Fernando de Querol Cumbrera
Research expert covering construction, loans, leasing, savings, and debt
Construction industry in the U.S. - statistics & facts
The market size of the U.S. construction sector was valued at nearly two trillion U.S. dollars in 2023, and it was expected to keep rising in the next couple of years. By 2027, the overall value of construction put in place in the United States, which includes the residential, non-residential, and non-building segments, is forecast to reach nearly 2.24 trillion U.S. dollars. During the past decades, U.S. spending on private construction has fluctuated more than public construction. The construction industry has been, in general, on an upward trend throughout the past decades, except for the years following the financial crisis of 2007.
Overall, the outlook for the industry as a whole is positive, but there are still serious challenges ahead. Apart from shortages and rising costs, which are issues that have improved in 2024, there was also a need to keep investing in the construction and rehabilitation of infrastructure.
Challenges of the construction industry
Construction costs for non-residential buildings continued growing in 2024, yet at a slower pace than in previous years. Nevertheless, construction contractors in some segments are still under stress due to the still high costs of certain inputs. Looking particularly at one of the most important components of those costs, the price change of construction materials, very significant differences can be observed, with the prices of copper-based building materials being at least ten percent higher in late 2024 than a year earlier, while there were several materials with stark price falls. In addition to those challenges, labor shortages are also an issue for many construction companies. Even though the number of unfilled job openings in the U.S. construction industry has fallen in 2024, they still were significantly higher than several years ago.Infrastructure in need of more public construction investment
Although, in general, most of the spending on construction comes from the private sector, most of the investment in the construction of infrastructure actually comes from the government. However, despite public spending on segments such as highways and streets amounted to 143 billion U.S. dollars in 2024, measured in relative terms, the U.S. was still among the countries with the lowest inland transportation infrastructure investment per capita in 2022. This is visible in the state of the infrastructure, with the U.S. having a lot of it in disrepair. For example, even if the number of bridges in need of replacement or rehabilitation has been decreasing slowly in the past years, they still made up over a third of all bridges in the country as of 2024.Overall, the outlook for the industry as a whole is positive, but there are still serious challenges ahead. Apart from shortages and rising costs, which are issues that have improved in 2024, there was also a need to keep investing in the construction and rehabilitation of infrastructure.
