Helper and Laborer Pay Is the Early Warning of Skilled-Trade Wage Inflation

A new peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Management in Engineering (2025) gives HVAC and appliance shop owners a surprisingly practical tool for next year's bids: watch what helpers and laborers are getting paid, because that number predicts where your journeyman wages are heading.

Authors Chammout and El-adaway pulled 24 years of wage data across more than 20 construction occupations — 1999 through 2023 — and ran the statistical relationships between them. Unskilled and helper wages rose 2.75 to 3.5 percent annually across the period, which outpaced most skilled trades. More useful for business owners: those early-trade wage moves statistically predicted subsequent wage bumps for plumbers, electricians, and HVAC techs.

The classical labor-economics literature has leaned the other way for years, arguing that skilled wages lead the market and unskilled wages follow. This study pushes back with long-horizon construction data. One caveat worth flagging up front: this is a construction-engineering journal, not a classical labor-economics outlet. The finding is rigorous within its domain but narrower than an industry-wide forecast.

What This Looks Like on Your P&L

Most shop owners repriced labor last time the phone started ringing with journeymen asking for raises. That's reactive. The paper suggests you'd catch the wave earlier by tracking what the help across town is charging to swing a ladder and haul copper.

Here's the practical move. Pull the quarterly wage data out of BLS Occupational Employment Statistics for your metro. Watch the helper, laborer, and apprentice lines. When those climb faster than trend, budget for a journeyman repricing six to twelve months out and start nudging your bid multipliers now rather than absorbing the margin hit later.

California shops have been riding this trend the hardest. The state's 2025 minimum wage hit 16.50 an hour, and counties like San Diego and Los Angeles have layered higher local floors on top. Helper pay at 22 to 26 dollars an hour is the new baseline in most metros. That's already setting the stage for the next round of journeyman increases.

Why Owners Miss This

Shop owners tend to track competitor journeyman pay because that's who walks out the door for a two-dollar raise. Helpers and green techs feel like a captive audience.

They aren't.

When unskilled construction pay climbs, your entry-level techs have options. They leave for a solar install crew, a new-construction GC, or a warehouse picking job that suddenly pays the same. You backfill at a higher rate, which compresses the gap to your mid-level techs, who then ask for their own raise. The paper traces that exact cascade in the data.

The authors flag that the predictive relationship is strongest in metros with active commercial construction. In slower markets, the signal is noisier. For shops in growth metros — Austin, Nashville, Phoenix, the Inland Empire — the data is loud enough to act on.

What it doesn't do is tell you exactly when to raise bids. That's still judgment. But it does tell you which direction the wind is blowing, which is more than most shop owners have when they sit down to price next quarter's service agreements.

For related coverage, see our 2026 California technician compensation survey and workforce shortage reporting.

Source

Chammout, Bahaa and Islam H. El-Adaway (2025). "Understanding the Underlying Trends in US Construction Labor Wages: A Data-Driven Mixed-Method Computational Approach." Journal of Management in Engineering, Vol. 41, No. 2, Article 04024069. https://doi.org/10.1061/JMENEA.MEENG-6285