There is more work on the books than there are hands to do it, which is the best problem a first year electrician has had in a generation.
What happened
Sebastian Obando at Construction Dive reported on September 16 that contractor backlog rebounded to 8.5 months in August, and that roughly one in six members of Associated Builders and Contractors is now under contract on a data center, the highest share the group has ever recorded. A day earlier, Bryan Gottlieb at Engineering News-Record set the same survey next to the federal payroll data: construction firms added 22,000 jobs in August and the industry unemployment rate fell to 3.1 percent, the lowest reading on record.
Backlog is a plain idea with a technical name. It is the work a contractor has already signed but not yet finished, counted in months. Nine months of backlog is nine months of payroll that is already spoken for. Firms doing data center work reported 9.9 months. Firms without it reported 8.3.
That gap of a month and a half is the whole story. It is the difference between a shop that is bidding to stay busy and a shop that is calling the hall for more journeymen.
Why it counts
The constraint on this buildout is not steel or switchgear. It is people, and the people who see it most clearly are the ones running hiring for the firms doing the work.
A few days before the backlog numbers landed, Obando reported on the 2026 workforce survey from the Associated General Contractors of America and the National Center for Construction Education and Research, fielded across 1,830 firms in July and August. Eighty seven percent of firms had craft openings. Eighty eight percent of those said filling them was as hard as a year ago or harder. Fifty eight percent said data center construction had increased competition for skilled workers, and 49 percent said it had pushed wages up.
Read that last number from the other side of the table. Half the industry is reporting upward pressure on craft pay. For a journeyman wireman in Georgia or a pipefitter in Texas, that is not a shortage. That is leverage.
Firms are responding the way they do when they cannot buy their way out. Fifty five percent raised pay for hourly craft workers. Thirty five percent put more money into training. At Ace Electric in Valdosta, Georgia, human resources director Mindy Bates told Construction Dive the math had already settled the question.
"You cannot hire your way out of this situation. We got to grow it from within as well."
Poaching moves a worker from one job site to another. It does not add a single pair of hands to the trade.
Holder Construction in Atlanta is playing the same hand on a longer clock. Aja Gower, the firm's senior workforce development manager, framed the payoff in career terms rather than quarterly ones: "We're hopefully solving that problem five years from now. The people entering these programs today are going to be our foremen in five years." Boyd Worsham, who runs NCCER, described the pipeline more bluntly: "We take young people who have never walked on a construction job in their life, and we put them on the biggest projects in our country."
Utilities have run this play for years, and their version has a clearer on ramp than most people realize. Georgia Power said in April that it hired more than 200 lineworkers in 2025 and expects to bring on roughly 200 a year going forward, part of about 700 annual hires across its Power Delivery organization. More than 60 percent of its new lineworkers come out of Electrical Lineworker Apprentice Certification programs at seven Georgia technical colleges and the ELITE Lineman Training Institute, courses that run eight to 12 weeks and are close to free for students who qualify for a HOPE Grant. Lindsay Hill, the company's senior vice president of human resources, called lineworkers and the teams behind them "the backbone of our grid."
Eight to 12 weeks at a technical college, then a multi year apprenticeship, then a career. That is a shorter distance from a high school parking lot to a substation crew than almost anyone outside the industry assumes.
The numbers
Backlog, from the ABC survey reported by Construction Dive and ENR:
- 8.5 months of backlog in August, up from 8.0 in July and level with August 2025
- 9.9 months for contractors with data center work, against 8.3 for those without
- Infrastructure backlog at 10 months, up from 8.8 in July
- About one in six ABC members under contract on a data center, a record share
Labor, from the federal payroll data and the AGC and NCCER survey:
- 22,000 construction jobs added in August
- 3.1 percent construction unemployment, the lowest on record
- 87 percent of firms with craft openings, and 88 percent of those finding them as hard or harder to fill than last year
- 55 percent raised craft pay, 35 percent increased training spending
- 42 percent said workforce shortages delayed a project
It is not a uniform picture, and the survey does not pretend otherwise. ABC chief economist Anirban Basu noted that 12.3 percent of contractors expect to cut staffing over the next six months, the highest share since December, while staffing confidence slipped to 59.5 from 62.3. ABC economist Zack Fritz described a haves and have nots split: the firms on data center work cannot find enough specialty trades, while firms in softer segments watch demand cool. Basu put the top line simply: "Data centers continue to keep contractors busy even as activity softens in other segments."
What comes next
The hiring is happening now. The capacity to train is the thing that gets decided elsewhere, and mostly not by the contractors.
Seats in a lineworker or electrical program are set by state technical college systems and their boards. Credentials that travel from one job site to the next are set by bodies like NCCER. Apprenticeship ratios are set in registered programs and in agreements between contractors and the trades. Sammi Morrill, a vice chancellor at Alamo Colleges District in San Antonio, sits on exactly that seam, matching a college system's output to what San Antonio's job sites actually need.
Watch whether technical college systems in Georgia, Texas and the Carolinas expand cohort sizes for the 2027 school year, whether the 35 percent of firms increasing training budgets turn that money into registered apprentices rather than short orientations, and whether the wage gains of the last year hold for the specialty trades that data center work runs on.
The Bottom Line
One in six contractors in the country is now building data centers, the work on their books runs a month and a half longer than everyone else's, and construction unemployment has never been lower. The bottleneck has moved from money to people. The firms that figure out how to grow their own, the way Ace Electric and Holder and the utility apprenticeship programs are trying to, will be the ones still staffed in 2028. Everybody else will be bidding against them for the same journeyman.
Sources: Construction Dive, Sebastian Obando, September 16, 2026 | Engineering News-Record, Bryan Gottlieb, September 15, 2026 | Construction Dive, Sebastian Obando, September 14, 2026 | AGC and NCCER 2026 Workforce Survey | Associated Builders and Contractors, September 15, 2026 | AGC of America, September 4, 2026 | Georgia Power, April 8, 2026
Positive Current
