The UK construction workforce shrunk to its lowest level since 2Q2024 in the second quarter of 2025, according to the latest employment data from the ONS.
There were 2,064,084 workers in the construction sector in 2Q2025, with over one-third self-employed.
This was a 3.1% decrease on the total workforce in 1Q2025 but a 0.3% increase on the year.
The size of the workforce remained 12.2% lower than in pre-pandemic 2Q2019, with 287,898 fewer workers. Compared with 2Q2008, just before the start of the global financial crisis, the workforce has shrunk by more than 417,000 workers.
It comes as figures show new orders and output in construction were at odds in the second quarter. Output was broadly positive, with the sector outperforming the wider economy and posting 1.2% growth on the previous quarter.
“New order figures provided less positive reading,” said Dr David Crosthwaite, chief economist at BCIS. “Orders were down on the quarter and the year with substantial quarterly decreases in the commercial, industrial and infrastructure sectors.
“In part, this may be symptomatic of the lack of clearly defined private finance routes in the Infrastructure Pipeline. Without the investment fine print, there’s little impetus yet for investors to engage.
“As ever, housebuilding is a major concern. Private housebuilding new orders were down significantly on the year in the second quarter, overshadowing the small increases in new private housing output.
“The stakes are high for this government. But it’s still impossible to see how it plans to scale up housebuilding with little to no control over housebuilders’ output.”
He added that the latest employment figures are “not where they need to be”.
Total construction workforce numbers were down on the quarter in 2Q2025 and both direct employment and self-employed workers remain significantly lower than the levels recorded before the 2008-09 financial crisis.
“Government skills initiatives, including the recent confirmation that 40,000 construction workers are to be trained in specialist colleges by 2029, are certainly welcome,” he said.
“The trouble is they are longer-term fixes. They are unlikely to have the immediate impact on labour supply that’s urgently needed for housebuilding and infrastructure delivery. If demand does increase in the next year, where are the additional workers going to come from?”
Breaking down the LFS figures by gender, 84.9% of all construction workers in 2Q2025 were men, with 310,842 women working in the sector in total.
Among employed workers, the number of male and female workers respectively decreased on the quarter. The number of employed men in construction also fell by 7.6% on the year while employed women increased by nearly one-fifth (19.2%).
By comparison, self-employed men decreased by 3.3% on the quarter and rose by 6.6% annually. In contrast, the number of self-employed women rose by 3.7% on 1Q2025 and fell by 2.3% on the year.
Dr Crosthwaite added: “Low job vacancies typically point to a slowdown in the job market. While this is not necessarily an indication that businesses are struggling, in this context, it’s not a good sign for construction given the wider labour supply shortfall.
“Together, lower numbers of job vacancies and workers do not provide much optimism for the sector’s ability to handle a potential uptick in demand.”
