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County-Level Employment Data for Electrical Contractors Offers Local Market Insight
When EM’s editors checked the latest county-level employment data for electrical contractors to find the fastest-growing counties, there weren’t too many surprises in the list of large metropolitan areas that added the most contractor employees.
Outside of East Baton Rouge Parish, LA, which added a shocking 1,553 electrical contractor employees between 2017 and 2018, two of the usual suspects were at the top of the list: Arizona’s Maricopa County in the Phoenix metropolitan statistical area (MSA) with a +1,288 increase to 16,976 employees, and Los Angeles County, with a +1,038 increase to 19,480 employees. Hillsborough County in the Tampa-St. Petersburg MSA added 881 more employees and had an 18% year-over-year (YOY) gain and Virginia’s Loudoun County in the western Washington, DC, suburbs added 628 employees and had a 14% YOY gain.
You can also find data on more than 1,000 counties by clicking on the green box below. Click here if you need an Excel verson of this data (.csv format). You can also see this data in a Tableau map below.
The largest counties in the land did have some surprises when we looked at their share of total electrical contractor employment. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employment data for electrical contractors revealed that of the more than 3,000 counties in the United States, 1,047 had electrical contractor employees, and that altogether these counties had 826,238 contractor employees in 4Q 2018.
We were surprised to find that a huge percentage of these employees are in a fairly small number of counties. The top 10 counties had 16% of all electrical contractor employees in the U.S., and the top 50 counties had 46%. The biggest surprise was that 81% of all electrical contractor employees work in just 250 counties. These numbers are important for electrical marketers. For instance, electrical distributors need to consistently analyze their branch coverage to make sure they have locations in the right places to service the hottest counties, and electrical manufacturers need to ensure they have enough independent reps or factory salespeople to cover the fastest-growing counties.
But it’s not all about the growth of the large metros. Some smaller counties in what are called “micropolitan statistical areas” (population of at least 10,000, but less than 50,000 in total population), are also showing some great growth. Rutherford County in western North Carolina near Asheville; New Mexico’s Lea County just across the border from the Midland-Odessa oil patch; and Dickinson County in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula caught our eye.
Marion County, IA, (+76%) near Des Moines and Stark County, ND, (+41%), also were among the leaders when ranked on a YOY percent increase basis.