Are Electricians Safe From Automation? What the Data Says

What the numbers say about demand

The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook is the standard reference for job outlook in the US. Its current edition, updated August 27, 2026, covers the 2025–2035 decade.

Growth: Employment of electricians is projected to grow 9 percent from 2025 to 2035, which BLS calls "much faster than the average for all occupations." That's from 821,000 jobs in 2025 to 896,900 in 2035, an increase of 75,900.
All jobs, for comparison: BLS projects total US employment will grow 3.5 percent over the same decade.
Openings: BLS projects about 72,700 openings for electricians each year, on average. BLS says many of those openings come from replacing workers who retire or move to other occupations.
Pay: The median annual wage for electricians was $63,190 in May 2025, or $30.38 an hour. The median for all occupations was $50,980. The top 10 percent of electricians earned more than $108,510.

BLS also says why it expects growth. In its words, "the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and demand for data centers to support this growth are expected to contribute to rising electricity demand," and the national grid "will need to be upgraded while new infrastructure will need to be added to meet this demand."

That sentence is worth reading twice. The government's own labor forecasters list AI as a reason electricians will be needed, not a reason they won't.

Why automation isn't the threat here

Automation is good at work that is predictable, repetitive, and happens in a controlled setting. A robot arm welding the same seam on the same car body a thousand times a day is the classic example. Software is good at work that lives on a screen: sorting data, filling in forms, drafting documents.

Electrical work is almost the opposite. Every house is wired differently. Every remodel opens a wall that someone else closed 40 years ago. You're working on ladders, in attics, in crawlspaces, and in ceilings full of other trades' work, figuring out what's there before you decide what to do about it.

The research lines up with that.

Frey and Osborne (Oxford, 2013). The widely cited 2013 study on job automation is Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne's "The Future of Employment". It estimated that 47 percent of US employment was in the "high risk" category. Electricians landed in the low-risk group, which the paper defines as a probability below 0.3. The paper gave electricians a 0.15 probability of computerisation, ranking them 192nd of 702 occupations, where 1st is least likely to be automated. For comparison, telemarketers were at 0.99 and bookkeeping clerks at 0.98.

The paper's reasoning matters more than the score. It named "perception and manipulation" as one of the main bottlenecks for robots and noted that "most homes are unstructured, requiring the identification of a plurality of irregular objects and containing many cluttered spaces." That describes a service call pretty well.

One detail from the same table is worth knowing if you're new: the paper scored electricians' helpers at 0.74. My read on that is simple. The closer a job is to carrying material and repeating the same task, the more exposed it is. The closer it is to judgment, diagnosis, and skilled hand work, the safer it is. That's a good argument for finishing your apprenticeship and getting licensed.

McKinsey Global Institute (2017). McKinsey's report "A future that works" broke work into activity types and estimated how much of each could be automated with demonstrated technology. Predictable physical work had the highest automation potential of any category, at 81 percent. Physical work in unpredictable environments was at 26 percent. McKinsey wrote that this kind of work makes up "a high proportion of the work in sectors such as forestry and construction."

What changed with generative AI. Generative AI raised the automation estimates for knowledge work much more than for trade work. McKinsey's 2023 generative AI report found that the technology's impact on physical work activities "shifted much less, which isn't surprising because its capabilities are fundamentally engineered to do cognitive tasks." In a companion report on the US workforce, McKinsey estimated that among construction occupations, laborers (240,000 positions added), supervisors (150,000), and electricians (130,000) "could experience the largest growth in demand by 2030." Its November 2025 report, "Agents, robots, and us," put it plainly: "most physical work still demands fine motor skills, dexterity, and situational awareness that technology cannot yet replicate reliably."

None of this means nothing will change. It means the parts of the job most likely to be automated are the paperwork around the work, not the work itself.

Automation is the demand

The strongest case for the trade isn't that automation will skip it. It's that almost every big technology build-out right now needs more electrical work.

Electricity use is climbing. The International Energy Agency's Electricity 2026 report says US demand rose 2.1 percent in 2025 and is projected to grow by nearly 2 percent a year through 2030, "with around half of the total increase driven by the rapid expansion of data centres." The US Energy Information Administration's September 2026 outlook expects US electricity sales to reach 4,135 billion kilowatthours in 2026, a record.

Data centers. A Department of Energy report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found data centers used 4.4 percent of US electricity in 2023 and projected 6.7 to 12.0 percent by 2028. The Electric Power Research Institute's 2026 analysis goes further, projecting data centers will use 9 to 17 percent of US electricity by 2030, up from 4 to 5 percent today. Construction spending shows it too. Census Bureau data puts private data center construction at $9.947 billion in 2021 and $49.737 billion in 2025 (Census construction spending). Every one of those buildings is packed with switchgear, busway, UPS systems, generators, and cable tray.

Factories, chips, and batteries. Census data shows total manufacturing construction spending went from $82.030 billion in 2021 to $244.292 billion in 2024 (Census construction spending). It dropped to $215.015 billion in 2025, and the July 2026 figure was down 21.2 percent from a year earlier, but 2025 was still more than double the 2021 level. The CHIPS program had awarded over $33 billion in semiconductor incentives across 22 states as of January 2025. The Department of Energy counted more than $150 billion in announced US battery supply chain investment since 2021, and it named electricians specifically as a trade where "limited labor supply" can raise costs and stretch timelines.

EV charging. The DOE's Alternative Fuels Data Center lists 255,915 public charging ports in the US as of September 2026. A 2023 NREL study for DOE estimated the country would need 28 million charging ports by 2030 for 33 million plug-in vehicles, including 182,000 public fast-charging ports and 1 million public Level 2 ports. The other 26.8 million would be private chargers, mostly at homes, and each of those is a circuit someone installs.

Heat pumps. US manufacturers shipped 3,644,596 air-source heat pumps in 2025, compared with 3,247,426 gas furnaces, according to AHRI. Heat pump shipments were down 11.6 percent from 2024, but they still outsold gas furnaces. Heat pumps run on electricity, and in my experience a lot of those installs come with a panel upgrade.

The grid. DOE's National Transmission Needs Study (2023) found that in a high-load-growth future, within-region transmission would need to grow 128 percent by 2035, more than doubling the current system. Meanwhile, roughly 2,061 gigawatts of generation and storage was waiting to connect to the grid at the end of 2025, according to Berkeley Lab's Queued Up 2026. Solar is part of that. The US installed 43.2 gigawatts of solar in 2025, down 14 percent from 2024.

Not every one of these markets goes straight up. Solar, heat pumps, and factory construction all cooled in 2025. But the direction across all of them together is more electrical load, more equipment, and more connections, and every one of those ends with a licensed electrician terminating conductors and signing a permit.

The workforce gap

Demand is only half of it. The other half is whether there are enough people to do the work, and right now there aren't.

Contractors can't find electricians. In the 2026 AGC workforce survey, released September 3, 2026, electricians were the most widely reported hard-to-fill craft. Of firms with openings for electricians, 81 percent said they were having difficulty filling them.
Construction needs more people overall. Associated Builders and Contractors estimates the industry needs to attract 349,000 net new workers in 2026 and 456,000 in 2027. In the same release, ABC's chief economist said "demand for electricians capable of precision wiring has surged due to the rapid increase in data center construction" and that "approximately one-fifth of all electricians are over 55."
The union side says the same thing. The IBEW reported about 52,000 apprentices enrolled in early 2025 and wrote that it "needs more journeyman inside wiremen. Hundreds of thousands more." The managing director of the IBEW–NECA electrical training ALLIANCE said its learning system "can handle well over 100,000."
The merit shop side too. The Independent Electrical Contractors say America needs 80,000 net new electricians per year for the next decade.
It's global. The IEA's World Energy Employment 2025 report lists electricians among the top energy occupations facing shortages and says "around 60% of companies reported labour shortages."

One number goes against the usual story. You'll hear that the trade is about to age out. BLS survey data puts the median age of electricians at 39.6 in 2025, younger than the 42.1 median for all workers. The shortage isn't mainly a retirement cliff. It's that the amount of electrical work is growing faster than the number of people being trained to do it.

What will change: the tools, not the job

I don't want to oversell this. Technology is changing how electricians work, and some of it is already here.

What's getting easier:

Estimating and paperwork. Building a quote used to mean a legal pad, a supply house catalog, and an evening at the kitchen table. Software now handles line items, pricing, and sending the estimate. AI tools can draft a starting list of materials from a job description. You still have to check it, because it doesn't know the house.
Code lookup and calculations. Voltage drop, conduit fill, box fill, and ampacity with derating used to mean flipping through the code book and doing math on a scrap of drywall. Now they're a few taps on a phone.
Documentation. Photos of every panel, marked up and attached to the job. Time and material logs that don't depend on remembering.
Diagnostics. Better meters, thermal cameras, and smart equipment that reports its own faults.

What stays hard:

Troubleshooting in the real world. An intermittent fault in a 1960s house with three generations of add-ons doesn't show up on a screen. Finding it takes experience and patience.
The physical work. Pulling wire through a finished wall, bending conduit, landing conductors in a crowded panel. None of this is close to being automated in buildings that already exist.
Judgment and liability. Deciding what's safe and what meets code, and signing your name to it. Inspectors and customers want a licensed person accountable for the work.
People. Explaining to a homeowner why their panel needs replacing, or working out a change with a GC on a job that's behind schedule.

The way I see it, the tools take away the parts of the job that were never the point. An electrician with good tools can spend more of the day doing electrical work and less of it doing office work.

How to future-proof your career

If you're in the trade or about to be, here's what I'd focus on.

Finish your apprenticeship and get licensed. BLS says most electricians learn the trade in a 4- or 5-year apprenticeship, with apprentices typically receiving 2,000 hours of paid on-the-job training each year, and that most states require a license. The license is what separates you from a helper, and as the Frey and Osborne numbers show, that difference matters.
Keep up with code and continuing education. BLS notes electricians may be required to take continuing education to keep their licenses, usually covering safety, code changes, and manufacturer training. The electricians who keep learning are the ones who get the new kinds of work.
Pick up a specialty that's growing. EV charging, solar and storage, controls and automation, low-voltage and data cabling, and data center work all tie directly to the demand trends above.
Look at where the pay is. BLS reports a May 2025 median wage of $74,550 for electricians in manufacturing and $79,820 in government, compared with $61,570 at electrical contractors. Location matters too. In BLS state data, Oregon had the highest annual mean wage for electricians, at $99,750.
Consider running your own shop. BLS counts 7 percent of electricians as self-employed. Owning a shop means learning estimating, invoicing, and customer service on top of the trade. It's more work, but it's also where you control your rates and your schedule.

The bottom line

The data doesn't support the fear that electricians are about to be replaced. BLS projects 9 percent growth for electricians against 3.5 percent for all jobs, automation research consistently rates hands-on work in unpredictable environments as hard to automate, and US electricity demand is projected to keep rising through 2030. What's changing is the toolkit. If you learn the trade well, get licensed, and keep learning, this is a career with a future.

I built Electrician Pro X for electricians running their own shops.

Frequently asked questions

Will AI replace electricians?

No. The widely cited 2013 Oxford study on job automation gave electricians a 0.15 probability of computerisation, ranking them 192nd of 702 occupations. McKinsey's research found generative AI affects cognitive work far more than physical work, and estimated US demand for electricians could grow by 130,000 by 2030, one of the largest increases among construction occupations.

Is electrician a good career in 2026?

By the numbers, yes. BLS projects electrician employment will grow 9 percent from 2025 to 2035, compared with 3.5 percent for all occupations, with about 72,700 openings each year.

How much do electricians make?

The median annual wage for electricians was $63,190 in May 2025, or $30.38 an hour, according to BLS. The top 10 percent earned more than $108,510.

Is there a shortage of electricians?

Yes. In the 2026 AGC workforce survey, electricians were the most widely reported hard-to-fill craft, with 81 percent of firms that had openings for electricians reporting difficulty filling them.

How long does it take to become an electrician?

Most electricians learn the trade through a 4- or 5-year apprenticeship, according to BLS, with apprentices typically receiving 2,000 hours of paid on-the-job training each year. Most states also require electricians to pass a test and be licensed.

Will robots be able to do electrical work?

Not in existing buildings any time soon. McKinsey estimated that only 26 percent of physical work in unpredictable environments could be automated with demonstrated technology, compared with 81 percent of predictable physical work.

Why is demand for electricians growing?

Electricity use is rising, driven largely by data centers. The IEA projects US electricity demand will grow by nearly 2 percent a year through 2030, with about half of the increase coming from data centers.