Electrical Contractors Are Adding Factory Floor, Not Just Field Crews

Comfort Systems USA told investors in late July that its modular production operations, already past three and a half million square feet, will exceed four million square feet by the end of this year and reach roughly five million square feet by late summer 2027. IES Holdings said a week later that it had added about a million square feet of production capacity over the previous twelve months. Neither company is building data centers inside those walls. They are building the electrical assemblies that go into them, and that is where a growing share of commercial electrical labor is now being performed.

The backlog behind that spending is the reason. Comfort Systems closed the June quarter with $14.06 billion in backlog, up 73 percent from $8.12 billion a year earlier and up 13 percent from the first quarter alone, on quarterly revenue of $3.27 billion. EMCOR Group reported $17.14 billion in remaining performance obligations at June 30, a 43.9 percent increase year over year and $3.89 billion higher than at the end of December. IES Holdings ended its fiscal third quarter with $4.5 billion in total backlog, up 91 percent since its fiscal 2025 year end.

The mix has moved as fast as the totals. Technology customers accounted for 57.6 percent of Comfort Systems revenue in the first half of 2026, against roughly 40 percent a year earlier. With manufacturing added, industrial customers make up 75.1 percent of the book. At IES, the Communications segment that houses the data center business posted $453.1 million in quarterly revenue, up 51 percent, and carried $1.61 billion of backlog on its own. EMCOR's U.S. electrical construction segment turned $1.66 billion in the quarter, 24 percent above last year, at a 13.9 percent operating margin against 11.8 percent a year ago.

Set those numbers against the labor supply. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 821,000 electrician jobs nationally as of 2025 and projects 9 percent growth through 2035, which works out to roughly 72,700 openings a year once retirements and exits are counted. Median pay was $63,190 in May 2025. A workforce growing at that rate cannot absorb backlogs that nearly doubled in twelve months, and the contractors carrying those backlogs are putting capital into production floor rather than waiting for the field to catch up.

Modular construction moves assembly off the jobsite and into a controlled plant. Rather than a crew building out a power room in sequence on a live site, a shop team assembles the equipment on a production line and it arrives ready to be set, connected, terminated and tested. The work does not leave the field so much as change shape. Fewer hours go into building components in place, and more go into rigging, interconnection, commissioning and closeout on compressed schedules.

IES chief executive Matt Simmes credited the company's added capacity to its Gulf Island acquisition and to facility purchases in Abilene, Texas and Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and said IES is actively working to train additional teams to serve the data center end market. That is a hiring statement with a street address attached. A production plant anchors jobs to a specific town in a way a data center project never does, because the project ends.

Comfort Systems president Trent McKenna told analysts the buildout is not a bet on a boom holding. "We're not going to invest in buildings just on speculation," he said. "We expand when customers provide us meaningful multi-year commitments." The company added $510 million in modular bookings in the June quarter alone, and modular work accounted for 17 percent of first-half revenue. Comfort Systems employs more than 25,000 people.

For a commercial electrician, this opens a second track that did not exist at this scale five years ago. Shop work means a fixed location, a predictable shift and no travel, which is worth something to anyone who has spent years following projects across state lines. It also trades away the per diem and overtime that make road work pay. The skills overlap heavily but not completely. Repeatable assembly to a print, documentation and production throughput matter more on a line than the on-the-spot problem solving a jobsite rewards.

For the contractors and owners doing the hiring, the binding constraint is no longer whether the work exists. Operating margins at these firms widened while backlogs grew, which leaves more room to compete on wages than there was two years ago. The firms adding plant capacity are the ones wagering they can staff one building faster than they can staff a hundred jobsites, and every square foot of production space they announce is a commitment to fill it.

The electrical scope of the AI buildout is being industrialized. The question in front of a commercial electrician now is not only what the job pays, but whether it happens on a site or on a line.