The US Building Materials Industry
Building materials is five operating models under one roof: roughly 1.7 million workers and $1.2 trillion in receipts across 46 six-digit NAICS codes, spanning the manufacture and two-step distribution of the physical inputs to buildings. The editions keep the five segments apart rather than averaging them — a sawmill, a cement plant, and a wholesale yard do not belong on the same benchmark line.
The five segments: Wood — sawmills, millwork, and engineered wood; Minerals — cement, ready-mix concrete, glass, gypsum, and lime; Metals — fabricated structural and architectural metalwork, doors, and sheet metal; Plastics — foam and plastics building products; Distribution — the lumber, brick, roofing, and construction-materials wholesale channels through which materials reach builders and contractors.
Every code is listed on the NAICS code reference.
The US HVAC & Plumbing Industry
One industry running two businesses: the contractor trade that installs and maintains the systems moving air, heat, and water through buildings, and the two wholesale channels that supply it — roughly 1.5 million people across about 107,000 employer firms, with a larger sole-proprietor tail beneath.
The complex is defined by three six-digit NAICS codes: plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning contractors (NAICS 238220), plumbing and heating equipment and supplies wholesalers (NAICS 423720) on the hydronics side, and warm-air heating and air-conditioning equipment and supplies wholesalers (NAICS 423730). The editions keep contractor and distributor side by side, never blended — a labor business and a working-capital business make a meaningless average.
Adjacent industries — HVAC equipment manufacturing, household appliance repair, refrigeration equipment wholesale, and general residential remodeling — operate under different dynamics and sit outside the scope of this page and of the references built around it.
The US Specialty Trade Contractors Industry
The largest, most fragmented layer of US construction: 393,962 employer firms operating 401,293 establishments, employing 3.66 million people on $983.9 billion of output in 2022 (U.S. Economic Census, 2022) — beneath which sits a sole-proprietor tail larger still. Specialty trade contractors perform the defined-scope work of construction — foundations and structure, building exterior, electrical and other building equipment, interior finishing, and site preparation — generally as subcontractors to a general contractor or directly for an owner.
The peer set is NAICS 238 excluding 238220 — eighteen six-digit codes. Plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors are the contractor side of the separately published HVAC & Plumbing peer set and are excluded here so the two peer sets never overlap and no firm is counted twice. Every code is listed on the NAICS code reference.
Adjacent activities sit outside this scope: general building contractors (NAICS 236) and heavy and civil engineering construction (NAICS 237) operate under different dynamics, and landscaping services (NAICS 561730) sits in a different subsector with a large consumer maintenance tail that establishment counts cannot separate from design-and-install work.
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