BLS Now Projects 72,700 Electrician Openings a Year Through 2035

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its 2025-2035 employment projections on Aug. 27, and utilities finished as the fastest-growing industry sector in the country at 9.8 percent. BLS credits nearly all of that gain to electric power generation, transmission and distribution, and says overall electricity demand will rise "in large part to AI adoption and demand for related infrastructure, such as data centers." An agency analysis published Sept. 2 confirmed utilities at the top of the sector table, ahead of every other industry BLS tracks.

The topline is modest. Total employment is projected to rise from 170.3 million to 176.2 million over the decade, 5.9 million jobs and 3.5 percent growth, well under the 10.9 percent recorded from 2015 to 2025. Utilities leads on rate but not on volume: 9.8 percent works out to 58,800 jobs, because the sector was small to begin with. Computing infrastructure providers, the industry classification that holds data center operations, is projected to grow 25.1 percent and add 120,400 jobs. Construction adds 410,700 positions, a 5.0 percent gain, and construction and extraction occupations grow 5.1 percent.

Electricians sit between those figures. BLS counted 821,000 electrician jobs in 2025 and projects 9 percent growth through 2035, close to three times the all-occupation rate. The agency expects roughly 72,700 openings a year on average across the decade, a number driven mostly by retirements and by workers leaving the trade rather than by newly created positions. Median pay was $63,190 a year, or $30.38 an hour, as of May 2025. The occupational outlook text now names AI, data centers and grid capacity upgrades directly among the reasons for the growth.

Where the growth sits matters more than the rate. If nearly all utility hiring comes from generation, transmission and distribution, and the fastest industry expansion outside it is computing infrastructure, the electrical scope attached to those jobs is substation and switchgear work, medium-voltage feeders, generator and UPS tie-ins, and campus-scale distribution. That is different work from interior fit-out, and it is bid by contractors drawing from the same 821,000 people as everyone else in the trade. BLS does not publish a separate data center electrician occupation, so none of this scope is broken out; it sits inside the same electrician code as every other commercial job.

Two of these numbers are easy to misread. The 72,700 annual openings cover every electrician in every sector, not data center work specifically, and most of them replace a person rather than expand a crew. The $63,190 median is the same kind of figure, one national number spanning all electricians and all sectors, and it is not a rate for commercial or industrial scopes. A contractor staffing a substation crew is competing for a share of 72,700, not adding to it, and neither figure forecasts what any single project pays.

The rate is the headline. The 72,700 is the hiring.