www.electricalmarketing.com<\/a> for details.<\/p>\nEmployment data<\/p>\n
While electrical contractor data was down fractionally in the most recent data, it\u2019s still on a historic run by registering another month over 1 million employees. It hasn\u2019t been below this mark since January 2022, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.<\/p>\n
Electrical manufacturers\u2019 orders and shipments<\/p>\n
Shipments and new orders are both solidly in the green in July, with shipments up a healthy +4.2% YOY to $4,685 million and new orders up +3.3% to $4,628 million. They were both up comfortably in the YOY data, too. Electrical manufacturers have got to be reasonably pleased with these numbers.<\/p>\n
Single-family housing construction<\/p>\n
While the challenges homebuilders are facing with high interest rates, a smaller cohort of first-time home buyers because of demographic realities and issues with local building restrictions are well known, the latest housing start data swung down again in August with a -7% decline from July to 890,000. That\u2019s also -11.7% below the August 2024 data.<\/p>\n
Despite the slowdown in residential construction activity, building permits are still a reliable indicator of future residential and light-commercial building. Home builders typically don\u2019t purchase building permits unless they are serious about breaking ground, and once new housing developments go in, light-commercial construction follows.<\/p>\n
Summary<\/p>\n
Although the 15 business indicators covered here paint a mixed picture for the electrical construction industry, the slow-but-steady scenario they sketch out to a large degree mirror the business conditions in the U.S. economy as a whole. If the U.S. economy is still growing at the +3.8% pace for national GDP (gross domestic product), it was through 2Q 2025, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, business conditions in the electrical market should remain tolerable. And if the U.S. Federal Reserve cuts the federal funds rate as expected over the next few months, lower rates could juice up construction lending and investment and cut residential mortgage rates, giving homebuilders and the contractors that work on their housing developments reason to cheer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Electrical market & construction forecasts There is a real mix of indicators in these forecasts. The least-bullish of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241704,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[28,112],"class_list":["post-241703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-markets","tag-business","tag-markets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}