How to Staff a Data Center Project: A Contractor’s Guide

Staffing a data center project comes down to three questions: how many workers the job takes, what those workers actually cost, and how you get them to a site in a county with no labor pool. Here is the math on all three, with sources you can check.

The pipeline is enormous. JLL counts more than 35 GW of data center capacity under construction in North America. CBRE, which tracks primary markets only, puts the end-of-2025 figure at 5,994.4 MW, with vacancy at a record-low 1.4%. The two numbers differ because the definitions differ, not because either is wrong: CBRE counts the established hubs, while JLL includes the frontier markets where much of the new construction has moved.

Spending tells the same story. Per Census Bureau data, US construction spending on data centers hit $41 billion in 2025, up 32% from the prior year and up 344% from 2020.

The workforce did not grow with it. In the AGC of America and NCCER 2025 workforce survey of 1,342 firms, 92% reported difficulty filling open positions. If you are a GC, an electrical contractor, or an owner’s rep heading into one of these builds, labor deserves the same treatment as long-lead equipment, and this guide treats it that way.

How Many Workers a Data Center Project Takes

Start with a ratio you can plan against. A November 2025 employment forecast from the Hamm Institute for American Energy at Oklahoma State University puts data center construction workforce requirements at roughly 0.7 to 2.0 construction workers per MW of capacity.

Run that against a real project. A 200 MW campus implies somewhere between 140 and 400 craft workers on site on an average day. The arithmetic is ours; the ratio is the Hamm Institute’s. Peak headcount lands well above the average, concentrated in electrical fit-out and commissioning.

McKinsey’s estimate for a typical large data center, around 250,000 square feet, is up to 1,500 workers on site during the construction phase: site developers, equipment operators, construction workers, electricians, and technicians, many earning wages upward of $100,000 per year.

At gigascale, the numbers exceed anything most contractors have ever staffed. OpenAI’s Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, a 1.2 GW project, has been reported with 5,000 to 6,400 workers at peak depending on the source and the month, with thousands working through the night, per local KTAB/KRBC coverage and other reporting. Meta’s Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana supports more than 5,000 construction jobs at peak, according to Louisiana Economic Development. Richland Parish has a population of just over 20,000, so peak construction labor equals roughly a quarter of the local population.

One more planning number: the construction crew dwarfs the permanent staff. PwC’s analysis of data center employment puts construction-phase headcount at roughly 1,000 to 10,000 workers depending on project size, against roughly 50 to 300 permanent operations jobs, with about six indirect or induced jobs generated for every direct one.

Where the Curve Peaks

Headcount is not flat across the schedule. Sitework and shell come first: civil crews, equipment operators, concrete, steel. Those trades are tight everywhere, but they are sourceable in most regions.

The constraint arrives with fit-out. Fortune reports that electrical work accounts for 45% to 70% of total data center construction costs. Encor Advisors’ cost guide puts electrical systems at 40% to 50% of the construction budget, or $280 to $460 per square foot on electrical-heavy scopes.

The ranges differ, and we are showing you both. Either way, a data center is an electrical project with a building around it.

That is why whoever controls electrical labor controls the schedule. Microsoft president Brad Smith told Fortune that electrical talent shortages are the number one problem slowing Microsoft’s US data center expansion, and that the company has employed electricians commuting up to 75 miles to reach its sites.

What Data Center Labor Actually Costs

National wage statistics will wreck your estimate if you budget from them. BLS wage data for 2025 put the median electrician at $30.38 per hour, about $63,190 per year. Data center work does not price anywhere near that.

Buildforce is a construction staffing platform, so treat its figures as vendor market data rather than government statistics. The BLS figure is the 2025 national median across all electricians, not data center specialists.

Two things stand out. First, union scale in the top data center market runs roughly double the national median before overtime. Fortune reports that experienced electricians in the Washington, DC area can approach $200,000 a year with overtime and foreman roles, while first-year apprentices there start around $26 per hour.

Second, base wage is the smaller share of the bill. Per Buildforce’s market data, base pay is less than two-thirds of total compensation for most data center electricians once overtime, shift premiums, and per diem are counted. Budget from base rates and you will be off by a third.

The Per Diem Line

Per diem deserves its own line in the estimate. The GSA benchmark for fiscal 2026 is $178 per day for standard locations in the continental US: $110 for lodging plus $68 for meals and incidentals. Roughly 300 non-standard areas carry higher rates.

Benchmark a traveling crew against that rate and the number grows fast. Fifty travelers at $178 per day is about $8,900 a day, roughly $267,000 a month, before a single hour of wages. Again, the arithmetic is ours and the rate is GSA’s. In remote counties the effective cost often runs past the federal rate, because housing does.

Halls near the megaprojects confirm the pattern. IBEW Local 237 in western New York, whose jurisdiction covers the Lake Mariner data center job, posts a journeyman rate of $48.20 per hour for June 2026 through May 2027, and multiple electrical contractors on that project are offering per diem to attract travelers.

The Whole Envelope Is Inflating

JLL’s 2026 Global Data Center Outlook tracks build costs rising from $7.7 million per MW in 2020 to $10.7 million per MW in 2025, with a forecast of another 6% increase to $11.3 million per MW in 2026. JLL names construction labor as a significant headwind, citing an aging workforce, persistently low entry into the trades, and immigration enforcement disruptions in major markets.

Turner & Townsend’s 2025 Data Centre Construction Cost Index found 47% of respondents saw bid prices rise 6-15% over the past year, and another 21% saw increases above 15%. For 2026, 60% expect construction costs to rise another 5-15%. Labor you lock early is cheaper than labor you chase late.

Why You Cannot Just Hire Your Way Out

The shortage is structural, and it is bigger than data centers. Associated Builders and Contractors estimates the industry must attract 349,000 net new workers in 2026 just to keep labor supply and demand in balance, rising to 456,000 in 2027. ABC chief economist Anirban Basu notes that a majority of the 2026 need comes from retirements rather than growth in construction demand.

The AGC/NCCER survey adds texture: 45% of firms said worker shortages delayed at least one project in the past year, and the top candidate problems were lack of skills or qualifications (57%) and new hires not showing up or quickly quitting (48%).

For electricians specifically, Fortune reports projections that more than 300,000 new electricians are needed over the next decade to meet AI-driven demand, while nearly 20,000 retire every year. McKinsey estimates the US needs 200,000 to 300,000 more skilled workers such as electricians, mechanical workers, welders, and pipe fitters to complete $400 billion of construction in advanced industries, and that the annual hiring need for critical trades through 2032 runs more than 20 times the projected annual increase in net new jobs in those trades.

The pipeline is responding, slowly. Fortune reports applications for commercial electrical apprenticeships rose more than 70% nationwide between 2022 and 2024, from roughly 70,000 to 120,000. But an apprentice who applied in 2024 is years from journeyman status, and McKinsey notes nearly 30% of union electricians are between the ages of 50 and 70.

We broke down the supply side in our earlier piece on the electrician shortage. The short version: no single labor channel can fill a large data center call sheet on its own.

The Frontier Market Problem

Here is the part most staffing plans miss. JLL reports that 64% of capacity under construction in North America sits in frontier markets, with West Texas, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Ohio among the key beneficiaries, and that 92% of under-construction capacity is precommitted through binding leases or owner-occupied development. The schedule pressure is locked in before ground breaks.

Frontier markets are frontier markets because land and power are cheap. Skilled labor is not on the list of local resources. On a rural gigasite, close to the entire craft workforce must be recruited from somewhere else, moved, housed, and kept.

Abilene is the case study. Time reported that thousands of out-of-state construction workers flooded the area around the Stargate site and drove up rental prices. When travelers burn their per diem on rent, they leave for the next job, and your attrition problem starts compounding your sourcing problem.

Richland Parish is the same story at a different address: 5,000 peak workers against a parish population just over 20,000. Mortenson, Turner Construction, and DPR Construction hold the GC work there, and each of them is solving housing, transport, and retention, not just recruiting.

A Staffing Plan That Holds Up

Pull the numbers together and a planning sequence falls out. This is what we would put in front of any contractor pricing a data center job.

Size the crew from the power number.Use the Hamm Institute’s 0.7 to 2.0 workers per MW as the planning band, then adjust for scope and schedule compression. Expect the peak well above the average, late in the job.

Lock electrical labor before anything else.Electrical is 45-70% of cost per Fortune’s reporting, and it is the hardest trade to source. If the electrical staffing plan is “the local market will provide,” there is no plan, least of all in a frontier market.

Budget total compensation, not base wage.Base is less than two-thirds of total pay for most data center electricians, per Buildforce’s market data. Model overtime, shift premiums, and per diem from day one, with GSA’s $178 daily rate as the floor and local housing reality as the adjuster.

Solve housing before mobilization.Abilene’s rent spike is what happens when thousands of workers hit a small market without a housing plan. Blocked rooms, negotiated extended-stay rates, or built camp capacity decide whether travelers stay twelve months or twelve weeks.

Run more than one sourcing channel. Union halls, direct hires, and staffing firms all have hard capacity limits, and the AGC survey says 92% of the industry is fishing the same pond. Rinvio staffs non-union, 100% W-2 skilled-trades crews in all 50 states, and we will say plainly that no channel, ours included, staffs a gigasite alone. Blend sources and start months ahead of mobilization.

Screen hard and price in attrition.Nearly half the firms in the AGC survey (48%) named no-shows and quick quits a top hiring problem. Retention pressure continues after turnover, too: in the Uptime Institute’s 2025 global survey, 46% of operators report difficulty finding qualified candidates and 37% struggle to retain staff, and most of those losing people lose them to competitors doing data center work. Your best commissioning techs will get offers before substantial completion, so budget retention money now, not after the walk-off.

The Bottom Line

Demand is set for years. CBRE recorded 2,497.6 MW of net absorption in 2025, up 38% from 2024, against that record-low 1.4% vacancy. The supply of workers is short by hundreds of thousands, and the training pipeline runs in years, not months.

That gap will not close before your project delivers. So treat staffing like long-lead equipment: quantify it early, procure it from more than one source, pay the market rate instead of wishing for 2019 rates, and protect the crew you land. The contractors winning data center work in 2026 are not the ones with the lowest labor number in the bid. They are the ones whose labor shows up.

Sources: Associated Builders and Contractors, 2026 workforce projection (January 2026); AGC of America / NCCER, 2025 Workforce Survey (August 2025); U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and employment projections, via O*NET OnLine; Fortune, “The AI data center boom is creating a dire electrician shortage” (March 2026); McKinsey & Company, “How data centers and the energy sector can sate AI’s hunger for power” (September 2024) and “Tradespeople wanted: The need for critical trade skills in the US”; CBRE, North America Data Center Trends H2 2025; JLL, North America Data Center Report Year-End 2025 and 2026 Global Data Center Outlook; Turner & Townsend, Data Centre Construction Cost Index 2025; U.S. Census Bureau construction spending data, via Wolf Street (February 2026); Uptime Institute, Global Data Center Survey 2025; GSA, FY2026 CONUS per diem rates (August 2025); Hamm Institute for American Energy, Oklahoma State University, Data Center Employment Forecast Analysis (November 2025); PwC, “A new era of load growth”; Encor Advisors, data center cost guide; Buildforce compensation data; IBEW Local 237 work outlook; Louisiana Economic Development; Meta Data Centers; KTAB/KRBC Abilene coverage; Time.