Every figure on this site traces back to its source and its date. Licensed supply is a count of current license records on a state register, one row per license. Project counts and values come from the project record (permits, awards, filings, news), wages from federal statistics, and anything modeled, such as the 24-month outlook, is labeled as an estimate.
A record counts when two things are true. Its register does not mark it dead (expired, revoked, inactive), read from the register's own status and from its expiry date where no status is published. And the register evidences it as a license actually held.
The second test is what excludes pending applications. A pending record is counted only when its own wording shows a licensed holder mid-process: Oklahoma writes "Pending - CE Hours" for a licensee who owes continuing education, and that person is licensed, so they are counted. A bare "Pending", as New Jersey and Connecticut write it, evidences no license at all, and is not. Where the register says nothing either way the record is excluded, because a published count may not assert what its source does not support. This is why ATI's New Jersey electricians figure is lower than the row count of the state register: the register holds 24,737 records it does not mark dead, and evidences 9,988 of them as licenses actually held.
Each license record is counted once; a holder with more than one license, or licensed on more than one board, appears once per license. Licenses are not people, and a contractor license is a business, not a worker.
Thousands of raw state classifications normalize onto one ladder: apprentice, intermediate, journeyman, master, contractor, inspector. Apprentice licensing couples to registered programs in some states and not others, so pipeline ratios respect that per-state distinction.
Per-100k figures divide the licensed count by U.S. Census 2023 population estimates. They describe licensed supply relative to population, not employment.
Every state carries a documented note on what it licenses at state level. States whose registers we cannot yet read completely are omitted from published figures rather than shown low. National figures publish with per-state counts beside them.
As of October 6, 2026.
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