Porter Stanley
I built American Trades Index and I compile The Skilled Trades Index, a public count of every active skilled-trades license in the United States, rebuilt every night from the state licensing registers.
Why this exists
Almost everything published about the skilled-trades workforce is a survey or a projection. Surveys ask contractors how hiring feels and report a percentage. Projections model an occupation forward a decade. Both are useful and neither is a count, so the simplest question in the field, how many people are licensed to do this work right now, has had no good public answer.
The registers hold that answer already. They are just spread across fifty-odd authorities that publish in different formats, use incompatible words for the same credential, and disclose location to wildly different degrees. Putting them together and keeping them together is unglamorous work, and it is most of what I do.
How the Index is made
- Every state register is re-read on its own schedule and the result is dated, so a figure can always be traced back to the night it was collected.
- Each register's own credential labels are mapped onto one ladder, apprentice through contractor, so states can be compared at all. Anything without a defensible equivalent is left unmapped rather than guessed at.
- Every published figure carries the computation that produced it and the reason it might be wrong, in the same block as the number.
- What cannot yet be defended is not published, and the Index says so in the open. It names the one series being held back and explains why.
What American Trades Index does
The Index is the public face of a much larger dataset. ATI sells research access to it: licensed supply at county grain, the construction demand already heading for a market, wage and employment detail, tightness forecasts, and finished studies written for a particular decision, delivered through a dashboard, an API and an MCP server.
The Index itself is free, free to cite and free to reuse with attribution. It is built from the same nightly collection that runs for the product, which is why it can stay current without anyone maintaining it by hand, and why it can stay free.
Write to me
If a figure on the Index is wrong, it matters more to me than to you. Write to [email protected] and I will correct it and say what changed.
The same address reaches me for reporters and researchers who need a cut the Index does not publish, by county, by trade or over time. I would rather run it for you than have the number guessed at.