The Electrician Shortage Index: Workforce Tightness by State, and Why It Isn’t a Shortage Count

Why a construction-era-style proxy is what’s available

Electrification coverage — heat pumps, EV chargers, panel upgrades — routinely asserts an “electrician shortage” without a number behind it, or with a number borrowed from a trade group’s press release with no published method. HYRE analysis. The federal government has the pieces to build a defensible proxy even though it has never assembled one: OEWS and QCEW measure supply (who is working and where), and Census measures the housing base that most of this trade’s work serves. Dividing one by the other is the same reasoning this desk used to measure hazard-era housing stock in a prior study — the closest honest measure available, published as a proxy rather than dressed up as the thing itself.

The result is a concentration measure, not a vacancy measure. A state can score low here because homeowners cannot find an electrician, or because the state genuinely needs fewer electricians per home — smaller houses, less renovation activity, more owner-performed work where code allows it. The index cannot tell these apart, and no dataset we found can.

Choosing the denominator, and why it isn’t neutral

Three candidate denominators fit this measure: housing units, population, and the electrical trade’s own establishment count. We ruled out establishment counts because they are already inside the numerator — dividing electrical-contractor employment by electrical-contractor establishments measures average firm size, not workforce tightness against demand, and would be circular. We chose housing units over population because this site’s audience is homeowners commissioning panel upgrades, EV chargers and rewiring — work billed per property, not per person — and because a housing unit is a closer proxy for the demand this trade actually serves than a population count that includes renters counted once per unit rather than once per household and dependents who commission no electrical work at all.

That choice is not neutral, and we show it isn’t. Swap the denominator to population and 8 states move by eight places or more; California is the largest mover of all 51, at a 19-place swing — 36th-tightest by housing-unit density but 17th-tightest by population density — because California has 2.71 people per housing unit, among the highest ratios in the country, against a 51-state average of 2.40. A denominator chosen for a renter-heavy, high-occupancy state understates its housing-unit tightness and overstates its population tightness relative to a state with more people per home. Recommendation. Read the housing-unit ranking as this page’s primary answer to a homeowner-facing question, and read the population-density column as a check on how much that framing decision matters — not as a tie-breaker for which is “more correct.”

Where the two measures agree, and where they don’t

HYRE calculation. Across all 51 jurisdictions, workforce density and location quotient correlate at r = 0.88 — states with fewer electrical-contractor employees per home also tend to have the trade as a smaller share of their overall job market. HYRE analysis. That is unsurprising on its own, but the exceptions carry the real information. Mississippi and Michigan rank in the density-only top 10 but fall out of the LQ-only top 10: their electrical-contractor workforce is thin relative to their housing stock, but the trade is still a roughly average-to-above-average share of a smaller overall economy. DC, New Jersey, New York and Kansas run the other way — an LQ that reads as tight, in states or districts where the trade is a below-average share of an unusually large or specialised job market, without density reading nearly as extreme.

DC is the case worth naming outright. Its composite score is the highest in the country almost entirely on the strength of a location quotient of 0.43 — the lowest of any jurisdiction — in an economy where federal government and professional services dominate total employment. A low LQ there measures DC’s job mix, not necessarily a harder search for an electrician than West Virginia’s genuinely low density presents. Both facts are real and sourced; only one of them is really about scarcity of hands.

Nationally, replacement outweighs growth as the demand driver

Source fact. Direct access to BLS’s own Employment Projections tables (bls.gov/emp) returned HTTP 403 on every attempt today, the same Akamai block the panel-upgrade-cost study logged for the Occupational Outlook Handbook pages. The figures below come instead from O*NET OnLine (onetonline.org), the Department of Labor-funded occupational database that republishes BLS Employment Projections data directly: 818,700 electricians employed in 2024 (this figure includes the self-employed, which is why it runs higher than OEWS’s 757,220 wage-and-salary count for May 2025), projected growth of 7% or higher through 2034 — BLS’s own “much faster than average” band, published as a category rather than an exact rate on the page we could retrieve — and 81,000 projected annual job openings, 2024-2034, combining growth and replacement need.

HYRE calculation. BLS does not publish the growth/replacement split for this occupation on any page we could reach today, so we bounded it from the two figures above. At the growth band’s own floor of 7% over ten years, growth accounts for about 5,730 of the 81,000 annual openings — roughly 93% of annual openings would be replacement, not growth. We ran the same arithmetic at higher assumed growth rates to test how much that number depends on the assumption, since actual growth could exceed the 7% floor.

HyreElectrical calculation from O*NET OnLine’s published 2024 base employment (818,700) and 2024-2034 projected annual openings (81,000) for SOC 47-2111, retrieved 6 September 2026. Growth openings/year = 818,700 × assumed rate ÷ 10. This is a bound built from a categorical growth band, not a BLS-published percentage, and is labelled as such throughout.

HYRE analysis. Even at 20% growth over the decade — nearly three times the published band’s floor — replacement work still accounts for roughly four out of five annual openings. The honest headline is not that the trade is shrinking or exploding; it is that most of the annual hiring need, in every scenario we tested, comes from electricians leaving the workforce, not from new positions being created.

What this means for a homeowner

Recommendation. A low tightness score for your state is a reason to plan further ahead and to expect quotes to take longer to arrive — not a reason to skip verifying the electrician you do hire. Check the licence before the price, in every state, regardless of how this index scores it: our licence-checking guide and the licence lookup route to each state’s own board. A thin measured workforce is exactly the condition in which unlicensed work becomes more tempting to hire and more important to catch.

If you are weighing whether to wait for a specific contractor or move down your list, our guide to hiring an electrician covers how to evaluate a quote and a contractor beyond price and availability. HyreElectrical does not perform, supervise or warrant electrical work, and takes no payment for placement, ranking or a favourable mention.