A 24-month forecast of where skilled-trades labor is set to tighten across 3,144 U.S. counties, measured by the market’s own signal: wages rising faster than the national trend for the trade.
Each state is shaded by its workforce-weighted 24-month shortage probability: how tight its skilled-trades labor is set to become, weighted by the workers at stake. Hover a state for detail.
Across the markets forecast to tighten, the share showing each pressure. Demand outrunning local supply and thin apprentice pipelines dominate.
Skilled-trades occupations ranked by the workforce sitting in markets forecast to tighten.
County-by-trade markets with the highest 24-month shortage probability, weighted by the workforce at stake.
The shortage signal is wages rising faster than the national trend for the trade: when local supply cannot meet demand, the price of that labor accelerates. That is observable and testable in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, a near-census of U.S. employment from unemployment-insurance filings. A gradient-boosted model is trained on ten years of that history (2014 to 2025) at the county and industry level, then validated out-of-time: at each historical cut-off the model sees nothing after that date, forecasts 24 months forward, and is scored against what actually happened.
It separates real signal from noise. The naive guess, that a market’s recent wage spikes simply continue, scores 0.40 and does worse than a coin flip, because local wage spikes tend to revert. The model reaches 0.67 and is calibrated: when it says 70 percent, tightening follows about 70 percent of the time. A market is counted at risk at a 50 percent or higher 24-month probability.
Honest limits: this forecasts relative local tightening against each trade’s national trend, not an absolute headcount gap. Several mechanical trades (plumbing, HVAC, sheet-metal, sprinkler-fitting) share one industry wage series, so within a county their forecasts move together. Figures are as of the latest published quarter and refresh as new data lands.
Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (QCEW), and the American Trades Index skilled-trades license corpus. Figures are model estimates, not guarantees.