The Trade
Demand Index
A monthly read on where skilled-trade labor is scarce and where the pay follows. Built entirely from public government statistics and openly-licensed data — no listings, no advertising.
Shortage signal, by state
Each tile is a state, shaded by how tight the market is for Electrical — postings and structural pressure measured against the local workforce. Select a state to rank its trades below.
Most in-demand
trades in Texas
Ranked by state TDI. Wage is adjusted to local cost of living, so a lower headline number can still mean more take-home.
Trade vs. college,
net of debt
Cumulative earnings minus outstanding debt, from age 18, starting from Electrical’s real median wage. The trade path earns from day one; the degree path pays tuition first, then catches up — sometimes. Move the sliders.
Monthly movers · shareable
Auto-rendered from the biggest Shortage Signal swings this month. Two export sizes for the trade press and social.
The Trade Demand Index blends state construction-market momentum (construction employment and building permits from BLS and the Census Bureau, plus job-postings momentum from Indeed Hiring Lab), projected 10-year growth (Projections Central), workforce age and apprenticeship throughput, and wages adjusted for cost of living (BEA RPP). Scores are percentile-ranked 0–100 across the full panel and updated monthly. Market momentum is measured for the state, so it reads the same for every trade in it — the per-trade posting signal returns when our CareerOneStop application clears. Full writeup: the methodology page.
This product uses the FRED® API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. This product uses Census Bureau data but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau. Employment, wage, and price data are published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Job-postings data is published by Indeed Hiring Lab under CC BY 4.0. The Trade Demand Index is TradeAtlas’s own derivative product; no source above endorses it or is responsible for how we combine their data.
Data through June 2026. Figures are computed from public government statistics and openly-licensed data under methodology v0.2. Government series publish on a lag, which is why the latest month shown trails the calendar. Marked provisional while two structural inputs (workforce age, apprenticeship throughput) remain unavailable at state granularity, and while market momentum is measured at state rather than trade level.
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