The impact of the construction industry is obvious during the daily commute.

From roads and plumbing to power lines and even the grocery store — everything was previously a construction site, said Mac Bybee, CEO of the Associated Builders and Contractors in Nevada, or ABC Nevada.

Those projects aren’t finished without enough construction workers, he emphasized. The industry will need to attract about 439,000 net new workers in 2025 to meet anticipated demand for construction services, and 499,000 new workers in 2026, data from ABC Nevada showed.

“One is the work—projects just don’t get done as quickly,” Bybee said when asked about the direct result of a talent shortage in construction. “The other thing is, if you have a deficit of skilled individuals, wages usually go up. Which is not something I’m opposed to, but when wages go up, the price of construction goes up.”

During the Great Recession in the late 2000s, few entered the industry because the jobs weren’t there, Bybee said. Las Vegas, in particular, was “ground zero” for the sector’s collapse, he said.

By the time construction regained its stride nearly a decade later, Bybee continued, its workforce was aging out.

Neil Opfer, an associate professor at UNLV in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction, attributed talent shortages to the retirement of longtime workers and the loss of prospective workers to other sectors. A fast-food restaurant or similar job promises air conditioning and indoor restrooms, he said, amenities not guaranteed on a construction site.

But Vince Saavedra, executive secretary treasurer at the Southern Nevada Building Trades Unions, is disputing claims of a shortage.

“I think that there’s a false narrative of people trying to claim that there’s a worker shortage,” Saavedra said, “when they need to look at their bottom line and their profit margins and ask themselves, is it a worker shortage or a payment shortage?”

The unions have more workers than jobs, he asserted. The COVID-19 pandemic taught families how valuable their time and skill sets are, so they are looking for jobs that offer a fair, livable wage—which, Saavedra said, he doesn’t think contractors want to pay.

“If you’re having a hard time finding workers right now in the construction industry, you might want to look at paying them better, or health care or benefits, or any of those things that a lot of non-union contractors don’t offer,” he said. “Nobody wants to go to work for a slave wage.”

Saavedra said many builders in the region have placed their projects on hold to see what will happen in the wake of the new presidential administration.

He pointed to fear around the fate of the Brightline West high-speed rail between Las Vegas and Southern California—which received $3 billion in grant funding from the federal government as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and began construction in 2024—as an example.

“People are scared right now,” he said. “Because they don’t know when their next meal is going to come, or when the next big project is going to come so that they can put food on the table.”

The Southern Nevada Building Trades Unions does work in recruitment and retention, Saavedra said, going to high schools to teach about apprenticeship and community college programs.

ABC Nevada, a trade association for non-union commercial contractors, also conducts career fairs to bulk up the industry, facilitating apprenticeships and a Leadership Institute that equips workers to move from the field to the office, Bybee said.

“What we try to do is we try to facilitate a system where we could bring somebody from no skill at all, all the way up into a management track, possibly even an ownership track,” he said.

Nevada has diversified its economy beyond tourism in the last several years, he said, to bring jobs in manufacturing and logistics. Those trades create competition for the construction industry.

He’s seen workers move from the manufacturing space into construction because they want a more defined career-plan and understand construction is a “true career,” he said, with all the benefits therein.

“The beauty of having a trade, or being skilled in a trade, is that’s not something that a company owner can own—that belongs to the individual,” Bybee said. “And that’s the individual’s asset. They’re able to do whatever they want once they develop those skills.”

If talent shortages do persist, Opfer said, construction costs are going to steadily increase. A skilled workforce, on the other hand, will ultimately lead to lower costs.

“If we have a more skilled workforce, then that’s going to translate into a higher productivity,” Opfer said. “And, with higher productivity, you’re going to see a lower overall cost of construction for both homebuyers as well as business owners.”

Though construction has long had an image of “tobacco chewing” and “beer swilling,” Opfer joked, he emphasized also that contracting has grown to be much more professional, with a better overall work environment.

“One of the things that I tell our students is … we make life better for people,” he said. “We create and build better roads and better schools and better buildings and better housing, and obviously, more affordable housing and all those types of things and so forth. And so we make life better for people.”

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