Phoenix Trendlines

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Phoenix-metro construction jobs, September 2026

economy
employment
construction
Published

October 22, 2026

Construction and mining payroll employment in the Phoenix metro, thousands of jobs, NSA, 1990 to September 2026: from 60k to a peak of 190k in August 2026, now 188k.

Construction and mining as a percent of all Phoenix-metro payroll jobs, NSA, 1990 to September 2026: from 6.0% to 7.6%, with a high of 10.0% in July 2006.

The Phoenix metro’s construction and mining employers had 188,500 jobs on payroll in September 2026, up 3.5% from a year earlier. That is 7.6% of all payroll jobs in the metro, against 7.4% a year before.

Construction is the most cyclical sector the site tracks and the one that turns first. The share chart shows it without the flattery of a growing economy — it peaked at 10.0% in July 2006 and bottomed at 4.7% in February 2011, a measure of how much of the region’s labour is pointed at building anything.

It has a real summer season in the raw data, so — as everywhere in these NSA series — the year-over-year change is the number that means something and a fall from August to January is just weather. It sits alongside building permits as this site’s two reads on whether Phoenix is building: permits lead; payrolls are what actually happened. The share is computed at read time from the same BLS release as the count.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, mining, logging and construction and total nonfarm payrolls, Phoenix–Mesa–Chandler MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.