Thrilling or Ho Humming — Which Is It?

Feeling like it’s getting harder to pin down a pay increase or a market value number? You’re not alone. Headlines and stories from many national sources are pegging pay increases to average 3.5% to 3.8% in 2025 for all industries combined.

Construction is looking like 3.8% to 4.1%, depending on which source you look at. Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone in the industry is committed along those lines; unless you seek out the contradictions that pop up in an expanded analysis, you’ll miss some important trends.

This article focuses on the changes over the past few years in the Employment Cost Index (ECI) and pay increases, actual average base and variable pay for the overall heavy civil sector, and some none too obvious details.

The ECI: Mostly Ho-Hum

The ECI defines wages and salaries as the hourly straight-time wage rate or, for workers not paid on an hourly basis, straight-time earnings divided by the matching scheduled hours (from a fixed group of employers).

Straight-time wage and salary rates are total earnings before payroll deductions, including production bonuses, incentive earnings, commission payments, and cost-of-living adjustments. Or, in other words, base pay for a normal work week. All other supplemental cash payments are considered benefits and added to the benefit portion of the ECI.

The ECI — Construction is a great indicator of base pay movement and provides a quarterly look at how payrolls changed. It’s tough to challenge the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), but it seemed that the ECI (construction) for the last three quarters of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025 was not reflective of what most saw in base pay changes.

The rebound reflected in Q2 of 2025 to 4.2% felt more realistic.

Exhibit 1: Quarterly Payroll Changes

While comparing the ECI to annual pay increases is a little like comparing oranges and apples, they both deal with base pay and are somewhat related.

Historically, the ECI runs less than actual annual increases. Most likely the easiest explanation is workers entering at lower rates of pay and attrition of older workers leaving the industry at higher rates of pay. The end result is payrolls moving slower than an individual employee’s pay.

Pay Increases: Some Ho-Hum

There’s no doubt annual increases have trended down from the 5.0% to 5.5% seen in 2022 and 2023.

Exhibit 2: Annual Increases

Executive & Staff Pay in 2025: Maybe Thrilling

Exhibit 3 represents the national average base pay for a few executive and staff positions by the type of construction performed, followed by the average bonus amount expressed as a percent of base pay.

Exhibit 3: Base Pay

Exhibit 4: Bonus Percentages Expressed as a Percent of Base Pay

Craft Pay in 2025

Exhibit 5 summarizes national open shop craft data for heavy, highway, and municipal work only. Rates are summarized as a range of pay by piece of equipment or job function.

Exhibit 5: Hourly Pay

It will be interesting to see if the March 14 recission of Executive Order 14026 will have any impact on unskilled craft pay. The executive order had moved minimum hourly pay to $17.75 in 2025.

Experience says overall entry level pay will not slide back to pre-2022 rates, but given the opportunity use a lessor rate on jobs, some contractors may roll back a little bit. Though we’re not sure how that will work in times of a worker shortage. 

Trends & Details: Thrilling

It’s easy to pick just one number from anything in a compensation survey and run with it. But unfortunately, if you stop there you are missing so much.

Take the next step and jump into dissecting the numbers and looking for trends. For example, check out the actual change in pay for the past 10 years for the Project Superintendent (all sectors). 

Exhibit 6: Actual Change in Pay for Project Superintendent (All Sectors) for the Past 10 Years

Just looking at the changes can give you a sense of how pay changed over a 10-year span, comparing to your own project superintendent pay movement. Take it a step further and break down each year by sector or other demographics for the best analysis.

For example, the 3.69% change in Project Superintendent pay between 2024 and 2025 is just a starting place. The following is a sector-by-sector breakdown of the actual change in base pay from 2024 to 2025 for the Project Superintendent position.

Exhibit 7: Project Superintendent: Sector-by-Sector Breakdown of Actual Change in Base Pay

The 1.1% for municipal construction is a little perplexing, as most of the superintendent job family had change averaging from 6.4% to 7.1% for the municipal breakouts. 

And should you think this 6.8% for the Project Superintendent is an anomaly, in the heavy civil group, the Assistant Superintendent changed 6.6%, Superintendent changed 6.9%, Project Manager changed 5.6%, and Senior Project Manager moved up 5.2% between 2024 to 2025.

So why don’t these actual 2024-25 changes jive with actual and anticipated pay increases noted previously? Call it necessary selectivity. 

With those four quarters of the ECI showing minimal change and the dwindling annual increases for 2024 and 2025, it seems the heavy, highway, and municipal sector would have experienced a Ho-Hum year.

But maybe those annual increases are being skewed toward selective operations positions to remain market competitive — spend a little more here and a little less on other job families. Or, maybe the cost of recruiting new employees from the outside is pushing pay up — or both.

Bottom line is pay grew this past year in critical heavy, highway, and municipal operations positions — positions that are necessary for profitable work.