Florida is a national leader in construction spending

While the housing boom is a national thing, without Florida (plus Texas and a few other states) it would be more of a blip, according to new report on construction spending.

One highlight: Seven states accounted for more than half the value of all building permits approved in 2020, with Texas No. 1 at $43 billion followed by Florida, with $37 billion. The report comes from Construction Coverage, a construction project management and data website. In addition to total value, the report also analyzed total new home construction per construction worker. On that, it divided the value of building permits in a region by the number of construction workers employed there. It used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

One takeaway from the report is construction workers in Florida and a few other Southeast states are some of the busiest in the country.  The national average in that metric was $51,783, the report shows. On the high end, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida are among the states that spent, on average, at least $90,000 per worker on new residential projects. On the opposite end, West Virginia spent $14,367 per worker, while Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania were under $24,000 each, the report found.  

Florida regions also scored well in a breakdown of metro areas.

The Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area, with $88,532 per worker in 2020, ranked No. 10 nationwide, one spot ahead of Atlanta and one spot behind Tucson, Arizona among large metro regions. The Orlando region ranked No. 7 and the Jacksonville area ranked No. 6 on that list. Austin was No. 1. Four Florida regions ranked in the top 15 for small metros, the report shows, and six regions made the top 10 for midsize metros, including three on the state’s west coast.