Nonfarm payroll employment in December increased by 145,000, seasonally adjusted, from November and by 2,108,000 (1.4%) for the year, BLS reported. The unemployment rate remained at November’s level of 3.5%, matching the 50-year low reached in September.
Construction spending totaled $1.324 trillion at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in November, up 0.6% from the upwardly revised October rate and up 4.1% year-over-year (y/y) from November 2018, the Census Bureau reported.
January 07, 2020
Editor’s note: Construction Citizen is proud to partner with AGC America to bring you AGC Chief Economist Ken Simonson's Data DIGest. Check back each week to get Ken's...
December 23, 2019
Editor’s note: Construction Citizen is proud to partner with AGC America to bring you AGC Chief Economist Ken Simonson's Data DIGest. Check back each week to get Ken's...
December 17, 2019
Construction spending patterns diverged in recent months, as declining multifamily and private nonresidential spending offset a surge in single-family homebuilding. Spending totaled $1.291 trillion at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in October, 0.8% below the September rate but up 1.1% year-over-year (y/y) from October 2018, the Census Bureau reported on Monday.
December 05, 2019
Texas again added the most construction jobs (51,400 jobs, 6.9%), followed by California (34,400, 4.0%), Florida (25,300, 4.6%), Arizona (14,400, 8.9%) and Nevada (12,000, 13%). Nevada again added the highest percentage of construction jobs, followed by New Mexico (11%, 5,300), Arizona, New Hampshire (8.1%, 2,200) and Arkansas (7.6%, 3,800).
November 25, 2019
Compared to October 2018, the PPI for new nonresidential building construction—a measure of the price that contractors say they would charge to build a fixed set of buildings—rose 4.0%. Increases ranged from 2.9% year-over-year (y/y) for new office buildings to 3.2% for healthcare buildings, 4.6% for industrial and school buildings, and 5.8% for warehouses.
November 19, 2019
Tis the season for 2020 forecasts. The chief economists for AGC, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and ConstructConnect discussed the current state of design and construction and the outlook for 2020 in a webinar on Wednesday.
November 13, 2019
Reports last week on construction employment, pay and spending were mixed and somewhat contradictory. Nonfarm payroll employment in October increased by 128,000, seasonally adjusted, from September and by 2,093,000 (1.4%) year-over-year (y/y) from October 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported on Friday.
November 06, 2019
"Business conditions remained generally flat at architecture firms in September," the American Institute of Architects (AIA) reported in its monthly "Work-on-the-Board" report on Thursday. AIA's Architecture Billings Index (ABI) measures the percentage of surveyed architecture firms that reported higher billings than a month earlier, less the percentage reporting lower billings.
October 29, 2019
