Oregon construction employment is near record highs — but the housing numbers tell a more complicated story
Oregon’s construction industry is riding one of its strongest employment stretches in decades. The sector has hovered close to 117,000 jobs for the past 24 months and reached a near-record 118,200 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the Oregon Employment Department’s QualityInfo research division. At 5.9% of total nonfarm payroll jobs, construction’s share of Oregon’s workforce is essentially tied with the peaks of 2006 and 2007 — the last time the industry was this concentrated relative to the state’s population.
How Oregon got here
The current run follows a familiar boom-bust pattern. Construction employment slumped near 70,000 jobs for several years after the 2008-09 recession, then began climbing steadily and rapidly from 2013 through 2019. The COVID recession knocked employment down to about 100,000 jobs by April 2020, but the rebound was fast — 2022 was one of the state’s fastest-growing years for construction employment, and the industry has stayed close to its current elevated level ever since.
Over the past 30 years, construction has typically made up 4% to 6% of Oregon’s total nonfarm employment, bottoming out around 4% in 1992 and again during 2010-2012. The current 5.9% share puts the industry back near the top of that historical range.
The housing permit disconnect
Here’s where the picture gets more complicated. Residential building permits — a key leading indicator for the industry — stagnated at an average of about 600 per month from 2009 through 2011, climbed above 1,500 by 2016, and have since declined to roughly 1,200 per month. Even with that nearly tripled climb from the post-recession trough, permitting activity remains well below the peaks Oregon saw during multiple periods in the 1990s and mid-2000s, and far below the housing boom of the late 1970s.
That gap between strong overall employment and comparatively soft residential permitting suggests the current job numbers are being carried by something other than a housing boom — likely a mix of commercial, public works, and semiconductor-linked industrial construction (Oregon’s Department of Administrative Services has kept CHIPS Act-related investment intact in its most recent forecast, which points to continued upside in nonresidential construction in the years ahead).
A workforce warning sign underneath the strong numbers
Oregon’s own Housing Production Workforce Assessment, prepared for the state workforce board, adds a caution flag to the record employment headline: residential construction employment has actually declined slightly since a 2022 peak, even as the state needs sustained, unprecedented growth in housing starts and construction employment to meet its housing production goals over the next several years. The assessment explicitly flags proposed tariffs and immigration policy changes as potential headwinds to that goal.
The training pipeline isn’t currently sized to close that gap either. Average annual completions in Oregon’s postsecondary construction-trades credential programs are small relative to the workforce the state’s housing goals would require — with HVAC and refrigeration maintenance technicians, building inspectors, and construction site managers among the most needed but least-supplied credentials.
What this means for contractors
The takeaway isn’t that Oregon’s construction market is weak — overall employment numbers say otherwise. But the strength is concentrated outside of housing, and the pipeline of new workers into residential trades specifically appears to be tightening even as the industry sits near its most employed point in almost two decades. For contractors weighing where to expand capacity, that’s a meaningfully different signal than the top-line jobs number alone would suggest.
Source URL: https://qualityinfo.org/-/oregon-construction-employment-near-record-high-for-the-past-24-months
