Construction labour cost by state

Ranked most expensive first. An index of 1.10 means the labour portion of an estimate is multiplied by 1.10 in that state; the material portion is not touched. A blank ZIP code gets 1.00, the national median. The last column is the cost-of-living index this site used before, kept so you can see how far the two disagree.

Why only labour

This is the single biggest difference between the prices here and the prices on most other calculator sites, and it is worth arguing about rather than taking on trust.

A bag of concrete mix is a manufactured good on a pallet. It costs roughly the same in Mississippi as in New Jersey, because it is made and shipped by the same companies to the same big-box chains. What genuinely differs by geography is the hour of a person’s work. Multiplying an entire estimate by one “local cost factor” inflates the material half by a number that mostly reflects the price of housing.

So the material and the labour are computed separately, and only the labour carries this index. Heavy and bulk materials get a freight sensitivity of their own instead, because what moves the delivered price of stone or ready-mix is the distance to the pit or the plant — not the state line.

Where the index comes from

From what the trades are paid. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes, state by state, the median hourly wage of every occupation it surveys — a survey of around 1.1 million workplaces over three years, in its occupational employment and wage survey for May 2025. We take the six trades that do most work on a house and divide each state’s median by the national one. The index is the average of those six ratios, each weighted by how many people do the job nationally:

We do not use the published figure for all construction occupations at once, because it includes mining and oil-field work, which pulls up the states with a lot of it. The BLS does not publish the narrower construction-trades group by state, so the six trades are averaged here instead. Every state publishes all six.

Why not a cost-of-living index

Until October 2026 this table used the federal Regional Price Parities, the usual “local cost factor”. They measure what a basket of goods and services costs, and rent dominates them. Construction wages follow other things — union density, the local building cycle — and the two part company exactly where it matters. In Illinois the trades earn 38% above the national median, while the cost of living is at the national average. In Florida the cost of living is 3% above the national average and the trades earn 10% below the national median. The old index charged the second too much and the first too little. The switch, and what it moved, is in the changelog.

Reading the spread

The labour index runs from 0.79 in Arkansas to 1.44 in Hawaii: the same hour costs 83 per cent more at one end than the other. On the labour half of a small job that is real money; on a large one it is the difference between two quotes. Within a state the difference between a city and a rural county is often larger than the difference between states — no state-level index can capture that, and a calculator that claims to is guessing. A local quote is the only figure that knows your street.