San Francisco-Oakland Trendlines

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San Francisco-metro construction jobs, September 2026

economy
employment
construction
Published

October 22, 2026

Construction and mining payroll employment in the San Francisco metro, thousands of jobs, NSA, 1990 to September 2026: from 85k to a peak of 132k in November 2019, now 115k.

Construction and mining as a percent of all San Francisco-metro payroll jobs, NSA, 1990 to September 2026: from 4.7% to 4.7%, with a high of 6.0% in August 2006.

The San Francisco metro’s construction and mining employers had 115,000 jobs on payroll in September 2026, down 3.0% from a year earlier. That is 4.7% of all payroll jobs in the metro, against 4.9% a year before.

Construction is the most cyclical sector the site tracks and the one that turns first. The share chart shows it without the flattery of a growing economy — it peaked at 6.0% in August 2006 and bottomed at 3.7% in January 1993, a measure of how much of the region’s labour is pointed at building anything.

It has a real summer season in the raw data, so — as everywhere in these NSA series — the year-over-year change is the number that means something and a fall from August to January is just weather. It sits alongside building permits as this site’s two reads on whether San Francisco is building: permits lead; payrolls are what actually happened. The share is computed at read time from the same BLS release as the count.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, mining, logging and construction and total nonfarm payrolls, San Francisco–Oakland–Fremont MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.