States along the East and West coasts, with pockets in the Midwest, are posting the highest construction wages nationally this year, according to a new study.
The report, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows that putting all the 50 states together, the average construction worker wage as of this spring came in at $39 dollars per hour. That figure represents a 3.6% gain over the spring of 2024.
States coming in on the high end of the spectrum include Massachusetts, New Jersey, Illinois, and Washington at anywhere from $47 to $50 an hour. Low end states include a broad swath of the South, with averages running between $29 and $32 and Oklahoma at $30 an hour.
The picture was mixed in the West: Arizona posted an average of $37 an hour, while Colorado was on the higher end of the scale at $41. The New Mexico average was just shy of $33 an hour.
The officially named Current Employment Statistics notes that while “differences in regional hourly rates reflect variations in the cost of living across states among other things, the faster growing wages are more likely to indicate specific labor markets that are particularly tight.”
Overall, almost every state saw an increase in construction wages compared to last year, with the population and development boom state of Nevada registering a 10.5% gain, followed by Alaska with 9.6%, Colorado at 9.2%, and Texas at 8.1%.
A perhaps surprising outlier is seen in Mississippi, which recorded an average wage of $32, but saw its wage growth increase by a substantial 9.7%. Last year Amazon announced that it was committing $10 billion to building up Amazon Web Services data center campuses in the state.
June 17, 2025
By Garry Boulard
Image courtesy of Pixabay
