Every contractor in America is running the same math when it comes to construction productivity. There is more work on the books than there are people to build it, and hiring your way out of the gap stopped being realistic years ago. So the question shifts: if the crew size is fixed, how do you get more finished work out of the same day?

A new national field study says a large part of the answer is already standing on your jobsite, holding tools, waiting for somebody else to show up.

Associated Builders and Contractors released the first installment of Multiskilling in the U.S. Construction Industry on September 2, 2026. It is the largest dataset ever assembled on what happens when craft professionals carry verified credentials in more than one trade and are allowed to use them. The Simplar Foundation ran the research alongside three university partners: Arizona State University, the University of Kansas and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

What the researchers actually did

This is not a survey. Nobody asked contractors to self-report how efficient they feel.

Research teams made 40 visits to 36 active projects spread across 24 states. The projects covered 22 different types and ranged from half a million dollars to over a billion. Observers watched 60 multiskilled crews, 644 workers in total, employed by 30 different contractors, and logged more than 11,400 individual work-sampling observations of what those workers were doing minute to minute.

That distinction matters. The numbers below describe what people were seen doing, not what anybody believes about labor strategy.

The findings that jump off the page

Direct work time climbed 39%. Direct work is the portion of the day a crew spends physically advancing the build. Multiskilling raised that share by roughly 39%. Run the same scenario in reverse and the drop is stark: restrict workers to a single trade and direct work falls from close to half the day down to about a third.

Idle time collapsed by 68%. Waiting is the silent line item on every job. Waiting for the electrician to finish so the drywall can go up. Waiting for a handoff that was scheduled for Tuesday and lands on Thursday. Crews with cross-trade capability cut idle and waiting time during active work periods by about 68%, largely because the person standing there could simply pick up the next task.

Same work, far fewer people. This is the number that should get an owner’s attention. Accomplishing the same observed work sequence under a one-trade restriction would have required an estimated 45% to 72% more workers. In a labor market this tight, that is not a cost question. That is a question of whether the project gets built at all.

Cross-trade work was normal, not occasional. Workers spent roughly 36% of observed crew time on tasks outside their primary trade. Enforcing single-trade boundaries would mean about a third of the observed work needed to be reassigned, delayed or handed to someone else.

The skill mixes were remarkably varied. Researchers catalogued 128 distinct trade combinations in the field. The typical worker put close to three separate skill classifications to use, and some used as many as six inside a single day.

Safety did not suffer. It looked better.

The reflexive objection to multiskilling is that broader scope means thinner competence, and thinner competence means incidents. The data points the other way.

Across roughly 33.2 million work hours, participating contractors reported an average Total Recordable Incident Rate of 0.74. That sits 57% below the NAICS-weighted benchmark, with no fatalities reported.

The researchers offer a plausible mechanism. Fewer bodies and fewer separate crews moving through a tight work area means less congestion, fewer competing activities in the same footprint and less coordination pressure. A calmer, less crowded work zone tends to be a safer one.

Why the gains were bigger on some jobs than others

The study is careful here, and contractors should be too. Benefits were not uniform across every site.

Brian Lines, principal investigator and associate professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering at the University of Kansas, noted that the largest returns showed up where the work naturally created frequent chances to cover adjacent tasks, skip a handoff and keep the crew in motion. Where returns were smaller, the limiting factor was usually the task mix and the work sequence rather than any shortcoming in worker capability.

In plain terms: multiskilling pays the most on handoff-heavy scopes. On a project built around long, uninterrupted runs of a single specialized activity, there are simply fewer gaps for a second skill to fill. Knowing which of your jobs falls into which category is the practical takeaway.

The part that matters most to the person swinging the hammer

ABC president and CEO Michael Bellaman framed the worker benefit as the headline finding, and it is worth taking seriously.

Broader verified capability gives a craft professional more directions to move. More career paths. Higher earning potential. Eligibility for more projects and more hours. Longer assignments once they are on a job, because there is more for them to do when their primary scope pauses. Researchers were explicit that this does not hollow out craft depth. A worker does not trade mastery for breadth. They add to it.

Bellaman also positioned multiskilling as a complement to specialization rather than a replacement for it, and tied the industry’s ability to deliver highways, bridges, hospitals and energy infrastructure to solving the productivity problem rather than waiting out the labor shortage.

What to do with this

This release is the first of three in the data series, so more detail is coming. In the meantime, three questions are worth putting in front of your own operation.

Which of your active scopes are handoff-heavy? Those are where cross-trade capability converts fastest into schedule.

Do you actually know what your people are credentialed in beyond their primary classification? Many contractors are carrying capability they are not deploying.

What does your crew’s idle time look like during active work periods? If nobody has measured it, that is the cheapest study you can run this quarter.

The full data series is available at simplarfoundation.org/multiskilling, with a Q&A and additional background at abc.org/multiskilling.

To read the full announcement and data series breakdown, view the Associated Builders and Contractors Press Release