Original research · Workforce
The Electrician Shortage Index: Workforce Tightness by State, and Why It Isn’t a Shortage Count
No federal survey counts unfilled electrician jobs. What can be measured is how thin the electrical trade’s workforce is against the housing stock it mostly serves. Every weight and three alternative rankings are published below.
Written by HyreElectrical Research Desk Primary-source research and fact checking
The finding, and the caveat that goes with it
“Shortage” is not a quantity any federal survey measures. BLS OEWS and QCEW report employment and wages among people already working, never unfilled demand.
What follows is a HyreElectrical-built proxy, a Workforce Tightness Index that ranks the 50 states and DC on electrical-contractor employment (BLS QCEW, NAICS 23821, 2025) per 10,000 housing units and the same industry’s BLS-computed location quotient, equally weighted, 0-100 scale.
West Virginia is the most consistent case, tightest or second-tightest on every version of the measure we ran, at 41.4 electrical-contractor employees per 10,000 housing units, the lowest of any state.
The District of Columbia tops the equal-weight composite, but on a location quotient of 0.43, the lowest of any jurisdiction, which reflects its economy rather than a harder search for an electrician.
Utah anchors the loose end at 183.9 per 10,000 housing units, the highest measured concentration in the country.
Nationally, BLS Employment Projections data puts 2024 electrician employment at 818,700 and projects roughly 81,000 annual openings through 2034, the large majority of them workers leaving the trade rather than new positions.
Change the denominator from housing units to population and the ranking moves: California alone shifts 19 places. A full 51-state check against BLS OEWS electrician counts (May 2025, added October 2026) agrees on the broad order, with South Carolina lowest on electricians per home.
HyreElectrical’s own contractor store was not used anywhere in this index; every figure below is federal.
Read this before you use any number on this page
No federal survey measures a shortage. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program and the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW).
Both count people who are currently employed and what they earn. Neither counts a job an employer could not fill, a homeowner who could not get a callback, or a license held but not worked.
There is no federal dataset of unfilled electrician demand, by state or otherwise. If there were, this page would report it directly instead of building a proxy.
What we built instead is a workforce CONCENTRATION index — how many people work in the electrical trade relative to the number of homes in a state, and whether that trade is a larger or smaller share of the state’s economy than the national pattern.
A low score is consistent with a thinner-than-average measured workforce for the housing stock.
It is not proof of a shortage, because it says nothing about how much work is being demanded, how quickly jobs get filled, or how many hours a licensed electrician actually works.
Every chart, table and score below carries this label because the distinction cannot survive being stated once and then dropped.
HyreElectrical’s own contractor store — five states, 74% of it Florida — was not used anywhere in this study. A national or 51-state ranking built on our own listings would be a Florida map wearing a national label. Every figure below comes from BLS or the Census Bureau.
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 rather than per person.
A housing unit is also 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.”
How the index is built, in order
QCEW annual-average employment for NAICS 23821 (Electrical and wiring contractors, private ownership, 2025 annual file) divided by each state’s housing units (in ten-thousands).
Min-max normalized across all 51 jurisdictions to a 0-100 scale, where 100 is the lowest observed density — West Virginia, at 41.4 per 10,000 — and 0 is the highest — Utah, at 183.9.
The same QCEW file publishes a location quotient for employment (lq_annual_avg_emplvl): each state’s share of its own jobs that are NAICS 23821, divided by the national share. Min-max normalized the same way — 100 for the lowest LQ (DC, 0.43) and 0 for the highest (Utah, 1.75).
Composite = 0.5 × density score + 0.5 × LQ score. We declare this equal by default rather than fitting weights to produce a preferred ranking, per this network’s standing rule against unjustified composite indexes.
The two inputs correlate at r = 0.88 across the 51 jurisdictions — related, not redundant — so the weighting choice does move real states, and the sensitivity section below shows exactly which ones.
Density-only and LQ-only rankings are shown next to the equal-weight composite specifically so a reader who distrusts the blend can read either input on its own. A composite that hides its components is not reproducible; one that publishes them is.
Housing units come from this desk’s own prior ACS retrieval for /research/hazard-era-electrical-panels/ (5 September 2026) rather than a fresh pull of the same public table, because the figures have not changed and re-dating them would misstate when they were actually verified.
All 50 states and DC, ranked tightest to loosest
HyreElectrical calculation. Rank 1 is the tightest measured workforce concentration on the equal-weight composite; rank 51 is the loosest. Employment and establishments are QCEW NAICS 23821, 2025 annual average, private ownership. Density is per 10,000 housing units.
| # | State | Composite | Density score | LQ score | Employees per 10k homes | Location quotient | QCEW employees |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | District of Columbia | 91.6 | 83.2 | 100.0 | 65.3 | 0.43 | 2,324 |
| 2 | West Virginia | 89.4 | 100.0 | 78.8 | 41.4 | 0.71 | 3,557 |
| 3 | Illinois | 85.3 | 90.4 | 80.3 | 55.1 | 0.69 | 30,002 |
| 4 | Pennsylvania | 84.4 | 90.9 | 78.0 | 54.4 | 0.72 | 31,447 |
| 5 | Alaska | 83.8 | 91.0 | 76.5 | 54.2 | 0.74 | 1,775 |
| 6 | South Carolina | 82.3 | 91.1 | 73.5 | 54.1 | 0.78 | 12,993 |
| 7 | Rhode Island | 80.3 | 87.9 | 72.7 | 58.6 | 0.79 | 2,839 |
| 8 | Vermont | 79.0 | 89.9 | 68.2 | 55.8 | 0.85 | 1,880 |
| 9 | Kansas | 77.3 | 83.4 | 71.2 | 65.1 | 0.81 | 8,363 |
| 10 | New Jersey | 76.1 | 81.8 | 70.5 | 67.3 | 0.82 | 25,405 |
| 11 | New York | 76.0 | 81.6 | 70.5 | 67.5 | 0.82 | 57,678 |
| 12 | Connecticut | 75.7 | 82.5 | 68.9 | 66.3 | 0.84 | 10,187 |
| 13 | Michigan | 75.6 | 86.0 | 65.2 | 61.4 | 0.89 | 28,239 |
| 14 | Missouri | 74.6 | 83.3 | 65.9 | 65.1 | 0.88 | 18,298 |
| 15 | Mississippi | 74.2 | 86.9 | 61.4 | 60.0 | 0.94 | 7,994 |
| 16 | Kentucky | 73.6 | 83.5 | 63.6 | 64.9 | 0.91 | 13,046 |
| 17 | Delaware | 73.3 | 81.5 | 65.2 | 67.7 | 0.89 | 3,101 |
| 18 | Maine | 73.2 | 86.6 | 59.8 | 60.5 | 0.96 | 4,513 |
| 19 | Minnesota | 72.7 | 78.0 | 67.4 | 72.7 | 0.86 | 18,309 |
| 20 | New Hampshire | 70.5 | 78.9 | 62.1 | 71.5 | 0.93 | 4,607 |
| 21 | Tennessee | 67.0 | 76.4 | 57.6 | 75.0 | 0.99 | 23,217 |
| 22 | Wisconsin | 66.5 | 75.4 | 57.6 | 76.4 | 0.99 | 21,016 |
| 23 | Washington | 66.3 | 74.3 | 58.3 | 78.0 | 0.98 | 25,436 |
| 24 | California | 66.0 | 70.0 | 62.1 | 84.2 | 0.93 | 122,326 |
| 25 | Montana | 65.7 | 77.6 | 53.8 | 73.2 | 1.04 | 3,830 |
| 26 | Ohio | 65.7 | 75.3 | 56.1 | 76.6 | 1.01 | 40,366 |
| 27 | North Carolina | 65.6 | 75.8 | 55.3 | 75.8 | 1.02 | 36,521 |
| 28 | Massachusetts | 65.1 | 70.4 | 59.8 | 83.5 | 0.96 | 25,179 |
| 29 | Oklahoma | 64.8 | 77.4 | 52.3 | 73.5 | 1.06 | 12,967 |
| 30 | Indiana | 64.3 | 73.3 | 55.3 | 79.5 | 1.02 | 23,469 |
| 31 | Oregon | 63.0 | 72.3 | 53.8 | 80.8 | 1.04 | 14,864 |
| 32 | Georgia | 62.8 | 71.8 | 53.8 | 81.6 | 1.04 | 36,586 |
| 33 | Florida | 61.8 | 74.3 | 49.2 | 78.0 | 1.10 | 78,618 |
| 34 | Alabama | 61.2 | 76.2 | 46.2 | 75.2 | 1.14 | 17,424 |
| 35 | Arkansas | 60.4 | 74.7 | 46.2 | 77.4 | 1.14 | 10,708 |
| 36 | South Dakota | 57.4 | 65.6 | 49.2 | 90.4 | 1.10 | 3,637 |
| 37 | Hawaii | 56.6 | 64.8 | 48.5 | 91.5 | 1.11 | 5,170 |
| 38 | Louisiana | 56.2 | 72.3 | 40.2 | 80.8 | 1.22 | 16,928 |
| 39 | Texas | 54.1 | 61.2 | 47.0 | 96.7 | 1.13 | 114,972 |
| 40 | Maryland | 53.8 | 64.5 | 43.2 | 92.0 | 1.18 | 23,422 |
| 41 | Iowa | 52.2 | 62.7 | 41.7 | 94.6 | 1.20 | 13,495 |
| 42 | New Mexico | 48.8 | 66.6 | 31.1 | 88.9 | 1.34 | 8,443 |
| 43 | Virginia | 47.6 | 57.4 | 37.9 | 102.1 | 1.25 | 37,300 |
| 44 | Colorado | 47.5 | 57.1 | 37.9 | 102.4 | 1.25 | 26,074 |
| 45 | Nebraska | 46.4 | 54.2 | 38.6 | 106.6 | 1.24 | 9,121 |
| 46 | Nevada | 46.3 | 53.9 | 38.6 | 107.0 | 1.24 | 13,994 |
| 47 | Idaho | 45.9 | 56.2 | 35.6 | 103.7 | 1.28 | 8,056 |
| 48 | Arizona | 38.1 | 53.6 | 22.7 | 107.6 | 1.45 | 33,799 |
| 49 | Wyoming | 35.0 | 51.1 | 18.9 | 111.0 | 1.50 | 3,055 |
| 50 | North Dakota | 31.9 | 43.4 | 20.5 | 122.0 | 1.48 | 4,572 |
| 51 | Utah | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 183.9 | 1.75 | 21,935 |
BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, NAICS 23821, 2025 annual average, private ownership, retrieved 6 September 2026. Housing-unit denominators from ACS 2023 5-year table B25034, retrieved 5 September 2026. Composite is the equal-weight index defined above; higher composite = tighter measured workforce concentration.
Density-only top 10: WV, SC, AK, PA, IL, VT, RI, MS, ME, MI. Location-quotient-only top 10: DC, IL, WV, PA, AK, SC, RI, KS, NJ, NY.
Equal-weight composite top 10: DC, WV, IL, PA, AK, SC, RI, VT, KS, NJ.
Six of ten states appear in both single-variable top-10 lists; four do not, which is the honest measure of how much the weighting choice matters.
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 specialized 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.
The tightest 15 and loosest 10, side by side
| Tightest 15 | Composite | Loosest 10 | Composite |
|---|---|---|---|
| District of Columbia | 91.6 | New Mexico | 48.8 |
| West Virginia | 89.4 | Virginia | 47.6 |
| Illinois | 85.3 | Colorado | 47.5 |
| Pennsylvania | 84.4 | Nebraska | 46.4 |
| Alaska | 83.8 | Nevada | 46.3 |
| South Carolina | 82.3 | Idaho | 45.9 |
| Rhode Island | 80.3 | Arizona | 38.1 |
| Vermont | 79.0 | Wyoming | 35.0 |
| Kansas | 77.3 | North Dakota | 31.9 |
| New Jersey | 76.1 | Utah | 0.0 |
| New York | 76.0 | ||
| Connecticut | 75.7 | ||
| Michigan | 75.6 | ||
| Missouri | 74.6 | ||
| Mississippi | 74.2 |
Read from the full ranking above. The loosest column runs from 42nd to 51st place.
The occupation-level check: licensed electricians per 10,000 homes, all 51
Source fact. The ranking above counts an industry: everyone on an electrical contractor’s payroll. BLS OEWS counts the occupation: people employed as electricians (SOC 47-2111) in any industry. In September only five states could be pulled before the public API’s daily cap.
On 27 October 2026 all 50 states and DC were retrieved in full, May 2025 estimates, and the five earlier states matched to the person. The table divides each state’s OEWS electrician count by the same ACS housing-unit total the index uses.
HYRE analysis. The two measures agree on the broad shape and disagree on specific states. Their rank orders correlate at a Spearman coefficient of 0.71.
5 of the index’s ten tightest jurisdictions (IL, PA, SC, VT, NJ) are also among the ten lowest on electricians per 10,000 homes. South Carolina has the fewest, 33.4 per 10,000 homes.
The biggest disagreement is West Virginia: lowest of all on contractor payroll per home, but 49.9 electricians per 10,000 homes and an occupation location quotient of 1.25, above the national average. HYRE inference: a larger share of its electricians appear to work outside electrical-contracting firms.
A homeowner hiring a contractor still faces the thin contractor workforce, which is why the index keeps QCEW as its base.
At the loose end both measures name the same places: Wyoming (107.6), Utah (96) and North Dakota (95.2) have the most electricians per 10,000 homes, the energy and construction economies the index already placed at the bottom.
| State | Index rank | QCEW contractor staff per 10k homes | OEWS electricians per 10k homes | OEWS location quotient | OEWS median wage | QCEW industry average pay |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| District of Columbia | 1 | 65.3 | 68.5 | 0.71 | $78,970 | $96,590 |
| West Virginia | 2 | 41.4 | 49.9 | 1.25 | $64,810 | $82,317 |
| Illinois | 3 | 55.1 | 42.5 | 0.78 | $99,560 | $101,425 |
| Pennsylvania | 4 | 54.4 | 39.3 | 0.77 | $67,600 | $92,888 |
| Alaska | 5 | 54.2 | 57.1 | 1.18 | $89,440 | $98,520 |
| South Carolina | 6 | 54.1 | 33.4 | 0.71 | $58,740 | $74,150 |
| Rhode Island | 7 | 58.6 | 49.9 | 0.99 | $74,090 | $85,224 |
| Vermont | 8 | 55.8 | 37.7 | 0.86 | $63,430 | $68,963 |
| Kansas | 9 | 65.1 | 49.4 | 0.91 | $65,860 | $81,730 |
| New Jersey | 10 | 67.3 | 35.8 | 0.65 | $77,250 | $95,221 |
| New York | 11 | 67.5 | 47.0 | 0.85 | $78,750 | $93,966 |
| Connecticut | 12 | 66.3 | 50.2 | 0.93 | $77,540 | $87,401 |
| Michigan | 13 | 61.4 | 51.2 | 1.10 | $76,270 | $91,896 |
| Missouri | 14 | 65.1 | 45.5 | 0.89 | $65,410 | $86,490 |
| Mississippi | 15 | 60.0 | 49.6 | 1.17 | $60,860 | $71,285 |
| Kentucky | 16 | 64.9 | 54.9 | 1.13 | $59,720 | $73,260 |
| Delaware | 17 | 67.7 | 49.3 | 0.96 | $63,700 | $78,339 |
| Maine | 18 | 60.5 | 50.6 | 1.21 | $75,380 | $72,971 |
| Minnesota | 19 | 72.7 | 57.0 | 1.00 | $78,160 | $101,068 |
| New Hampshire | 20 | 71.5 | 51.7 | 1.00 | $62,840 | $85,575 |
| Tennessee | 21 | 75.0 | 55.1 | 1.07 | $61,090 | $80,429 |
| Wisconsin | 22 | 76.4 | 52.0 | 1.00 | $76,540 | $85,500 |
| Washington | 23 | 78.0 | 59.4 | 1.12 | $95,220 | $101,610 |
| California | 24 | 84.2 | 50.4 | 0.83 | $76,160 | $104,434 |
| Montana | 25 | 73.2 | 52.6 | 1.10 | $76,760 | $73,094 |
| Ohio | 26 | 76.6 | 54.9 | 1.07 | $64,700 | $92,126 |
| North Carolina | 27 | 75.8 | 44.9 | 0.90 | $56,800 | $73,867 |
| Massachusetts | 28 | 83.5 | 59.1 | 1.01 | $79,420 | $103,755 |
| Oklahoma | 29 | 73.5 | 48.2 | 1.02 | $61,010 | $70,128 |
| Indiana | 30 | 79.5 | 64.4 | 1.22 | $68,490 | $88,061 |
| Oregon | 31 | 80.8 | 57.6 | 1.11 | $101,310 | $104,874 |
| Georgia | 32 | 81.6 | 48.3 | 0.91 | $58,320 | $81,543 |
| Florida | 33 | 78.0 | 49.3 | 1.03 | $57,250 | $68,438 |
| Alabama | 34 | 75.2 | 47.1 | 1.06 | $55,690 | $72,640 |
| Arkansas | 35 | 77.4 | 54.2 | 1.18 | $49,070 | $68,677 |
| South Dakota | 36 | 90.4 | 74.1 | 1.34 | $61,390 | $76,159 |
| Hawaii | 37 | 91.5 | 54.3 | 1.01 | $96,460 | $94,141 |
| Louisiana | 38 | 80.8 | 50.4 | 1.12 | $61,540 | $83,402 |
| Texas | 39 | 96.7 | 64.6 | 1.12 | $58,570 | $82,346 |
| Maryland | 40 | 92.0 | 53.8 | 1.02 | $73,490 | $92,448 |
| Iowa | 41 | 94.6 | 72.2 | 1.36 | $60,860 | $82,875 |
| New Mexico | 42 | 88.9 | 52.9 | 1.18 | $58,390 | $77,364 |
| Virginia | 43 | 102.1 | 64.7 | 1.18 | $62,900 | $91,368 |
| Colorado | 44 | 102.4 | 66.8 | 1.22 | $62,230 | $82,072 |
| Nebraska | 45 | 106.6 | 75.3 | 1.29 | $60,820 | $75,762 |
| Nevada | 46 | 107.0 | 63.9 | 1.11 | $73,570 | $94,657 |
| Idaho | 47 | 103.7 | 73.3 | 1.36 | $63,000 | $77,341 |
| Arizona | 48 | 107.6 | 67.3 | 1.34 | $61,060 | $85,926 |
| Wyoming | 49 | 111.0 | 107.6 | 2.16 | $76,120 | $77,118 |
| North Dakota | 50 | 122.0 | 95.2 | 1.71 | $65,710 | $91,263 |
| Utah | 51 | 183.9 | 96.0 | 1.36 | $62,000 | $85,465 |
OEWS: BLS SOC 47-2111, May 2025, wage-and-salary electricians, retrieved via the BLS public timeseries API v2 on 27 October 2026. QCEW: NAICS 23821, private ownership, 2025 annual average, retrieved 6 September 2026.
Median wage and average pay measure different populations: a median for one occupation against a mean for every job in the industry, owners and estimators included. QCEW average pay exceeds the OEWS median in 48 of 51 jurisdictions. These are wages, not prices for electrical work.
Cite or embed this data
Cite as: HyreElectrical Research Desk, “The Electrician Shortage Index: Workforce Tightness by State” (updated October 27, 2026), https://hyreelectrical.com/research/electrician-shortage-index/. Built from BLS QCEW, BLS OEWS and Census ACS data. Free to reuse with a link.
Embed snippet: <p>Electrician workforce by state: <a href="https://hyreelectrical.com/research/electrician-shortage-index/">HyreElectrical Electrician Shortage Index</a> (BLS QCEW + OEWS, Census ACS).</p>
The full 51-row file, with every input and both per-home measures, is the CSV download below.
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).
It projects 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. It also lists 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 labeled 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 index cannot tell you
Restated because it is the limitation that governs every other one: no federal dataset counts unfilled electrician demand. A low score is consistent with scarcity; it does not prove it, and a state could score low simply because it needs fewer electricians per home.
NAICS 23821 employment includes everyone on an electrical contractor’s payroll — apprentices, estimators, office staff, owners — not only licensed electricians, and it excludes electricians who work inside other industries (manufacturing, government, schools). The ranking is titled to what QCEW actually counts.
Both programs cover unemployment-insurance-covered jobs. A one-person electrical business with no employees is invisible to this study and to both federal programs it draws on.
Census Nonemployer Statistics would quantify that gap; its API required a registration key we do not hold and returned a redirect to a missing-key page on every attempt today, and no working flat-file substitute was found. This is disclosed rather than waved past.
State-level OEWS for all 51 jurisdictions was retrieved on 27 October 2026 and is published in the occupation check above.
It is kept as a check rather than blended into the index, because the index was built and published on QCEW and OEWS counts a different population (electricians in every industry, not contractor payroll).
OEWS state estimates also carry sampling error that BLS publishes per cell.
apprenticeship.gov’s state-by-state apprentice counts are served through an embedded Tableau dashboard rather than a static page or a public CSV, so the pipeline side of this question — how many people are training into the trade, by state — is not included here.
This is a gap in the index, not a claim that it doesn’t matter.
BLS’s own detailed Employment Projections tables were not reachable today. The 93%-replacement figure is calculated from O’Net’s published employment and openings totals at the growth band’s stated floor, and is shown at four assumed growth rates for exactly this reason.
The 0.5/0.5 split is declared, not fitted. The sensitivity section shows the two single-variable rankings so a reader who prefers a different weighting — or no blending at all — can read either input directly.
This index does not incorporate housing permits, EV registration growth, or any other forward-looking demand signal. It measures 2025 workforce concentration against 2023-2025 housing and population counts — a snapshot, not a trend.
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 license before the price, in every state, regardless of how this index scores it: our license-checking guide and the license 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 favorable mention.
Questions
Is there really an electrician shortage?
Which state has the fewest electricians relative to its housing stock?
Why does DC rank as the single tightest jurisdiction if West Virginia has the lowest density?
Does this index use HyreElectrical’s own contractor listings?
What is a location quotient, in plain terms?
Why build the ranking from QCEW instead of OEWS data?
How much does the denominator choice actually matter?
What share of electrician job openings comes from workers leaving versus new growth?
Does a tight score mean I should expect to pay more for an electrician?
Written and audited by
HyreElectrical Research Desk
Primary-source research and fact checking
We read the model code, the federal safety notice, the municipal fee sheet or the utility tariff ourselves, and we publish the figure with the document it came from and the date we retrieved it.
Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify. HyreElectrical does not perform, supervise or warrant electrical work. Authorship is organizational: this desk, not a named persona.
- 16
- original research studies published
- 5
- states with verified license records
- 16,369
- electrical companies in those records
- 74%
- of the store is Florida — disclosed first, not footnoted
How this desk works
- Primary sources only. Code statements come from NFPA 70 as the model code. Safety statements come from CPSC. Permit fees come from the city or county fee sheet. Utility charges come from the filed tariff. We do not cite a blog that cites a source; we open the source.
- Our contractor store is five states, and 74% of it is Florida. Any figure built on that store is titled to those states and names the concentration in the first screen. It is not a national sample of electricians.
- Load calculations on this site are a published simplification in the shape of NEC 220.82 — first 10 kVA at 100%, remainder at 40%, HVAC at 100%, EVSE at 125%. They are labeled as not a stamped calculation. A licensed electrician using the adopted edition does that work.
- No national price for a panel upgrade is shipped. Labor rates, the adopted code edition, whether the utility is involved, and the state of the existing wiring move the invoice too far for a roundup to help. The cost pages publish named permit fees and the variables that move the price instead.
- We do not perform electrical work, and we take no payment for placement, ranking or a favorable mention. Nobody buys a position on this site.
Data as of 6 September 2026; OEWS state data 27 October 2026; ACS housing units 5 September 2026. Authorship on this site is organizational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold.
Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.
The data behind this page
Every figure on this page is computed from one file, and that file is published here so the analysis can be checked, disagreed with, or reused.
Sources & retrieval dates
Hiring in a state that scores tight on this index?
Plan further ahead and verify the license before the price. We do not perform, supervise or warrant electrical work, and we take no payment for placement, ranking or a favorable mention.
HyreElectrical does not perform, supervise or warrant electrical work, and takes no payment for placement, ranking or favorable mention. This index is a HyreElectrical calculation built from public federal data; it is a proxy for workforce concentration, not a measurement of unfilled demand, and none of it is drawn from our own five-state contractor store.