Masonry Contractors: What BLS's Flat Labor Forecast Means for Your Next Equipment Purchase
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects masonry worker employment will grow just 1 percent between 2025 and 2035, far slower than the 6 percent growth projected for construction trades overall and the 3 percent average across all occupations. Yet the same BLS data projects about 18,400 masonry job openings every year over that decade, almost entirely driven by workers retiring or transferring out of the trade rather than by new demand. The 2025 median pay for masonry workers sits at $58,270 annually. Put those numbers together and the picture is clear: masonry contractors aren't short on work, they're short on hands, and that gap is exactly where the right equipment investment starts paying for itself.
This isn't a new problem for the trade, but it's intensifying in a specific, measurable way, and it changes how a masonry contractor should think about the next piece of equipment, not as a convenience, but as the tool that lets a smaller crew keep up with a workload the labor market simply isn't going to staff the old-fashioned way.
Construction overall is still a growth industry by BLS's own numbers, trades as a category are expected to add jobs faster than the economy-wide average. Masonry's near-flat trajectory within that otherwise-growing category says something specific about the trade: either demand for masonry work is softer than for other trades, which the ongoing specification of brick and block facades on commercial and institutional projects doesn't support, or the trade is losing workers to other, less physically demanding construction occupations faster than it's recruiting replacements. Most people inside the trade would recognize the second explanation immediately.
What a Mason's Equipment List Actually Looks Like
Masonry is still, fundamentally, hand-built work: laying brick, block, or stone one unit at a time is a skill that no machine replaces. But the equipment around that skilled labor determines how much of a mason's day goes to the actual craft versus hauling material, mixing mortar, or climbing scaffolding with a hod. Mortar mixers, material handling forklifts, mast climbing work platforms, and brick/block saws form the core equipment list, and each one exists specifically to reduce the non-laying time that eats into a crew's productive output.
A mast climbing platform is probably the single highest-leverage piece of equipment in this list for a growing masonry contractor. Unlike traditional scaffolding, which requires a separate crew and significant time to erect, dismantle, and relocate, a mast climber moves vertically with the push of a button and keeps material at the working height the crew needs, continuously, rather than requiring a labor-intensive restock cycle every time the wall height changes.
Doing More With the Crew You Actually Have
Here's where the BLS numbers connect directly to equipment decisions. If your market's available masonry labor pool is effectively flat, growing your business doesn't mean finding masons who don't exist, it means getting more finished square footage out of the crew you can actually hire and retain. A telehandler or a compact forklift that keeps material staged at the right height and location does the job that would otherwise require an additional laborer dedicated purely to hauling, freeing that labor budget for an actual bricklayer instead.
This same logic applies to mortar supply. A contractor running a continuous mixing and pumping system, rather than batch-mixing mortar by hand or with a small portable mixer, keeps masons laying continuously instead of waiting on the next batch. On a large commercial job, that difference in continuous supply can be the gap between finishing a wall section in a day versus two, without adding a single additional mason to the crew.
The Financing Case for Mast Climbers and Material Handling Equipment
Equipment in this category isn't cheap, and mast climbing systems in particular represent a serious capital commitment for a masonry contractor used to thinking in terms of hand tools and a used mixer. But the return math is direct: if a mast climber eliminates the need for a dedicated scaffold crew and keeps your masons laying instead of climbing up and down ladders with material, the productivity gain compounds across every job the equipment touches for its working life, not just the one project that justified the purchase.
That's the argument for financing this equipment rather than treating it as an occasional rental expense. A contractor who rents a mast climber job by job is paying rental markup indefinitely and never builds equity in an asset that's actively solving their labor-availability problem. Financing structured to match the contractor's actual project pipeline, not a generic flat note, lets a growing masonry business own the productivity tool instead of renting its way through each individual contract.
What to Weigh Before Financing Masonry Equipment
A few practical questions specific to this trade:
Does your current project mix justify a mast climbing platform's capital cost, or does your job size and height profile fit better with a scaffold-and-forklift combination instead.
How much of your crew's day is currently spent on material handling rather than laying, and would a telehandler or forklift addition shift that ratio meaningfully.
Is your mortar supply method, batch mixer versus continuous mixing and pumping, actually keeping pace with your crew's laying rate, or is it the bottleneck limiting daily output.
Given the BLS's flat masonry employment projection for your region, is your growth plan realistic about labor availability, or does it depend on hiring masons who simply may not be there.
Resale and Utilization Across Projects
Masonry equipment, mast climbers, mixers, and material handlers in particular, holds value reasonably well because the underlying demand for the trade's output doesn't disappear even as the labor pool tightens: commercial buildings, schools, and institutional projects still specify brick, block, and stone facades, and that demand has to be met by whichever contractors can actually staff and equip the work. A well-maintained mast climbing system or material handler is a transferable asset across job types and even across markets if a contractor's business expands geographically.
That transferability matters for financing conversations, because equipment that holds value across a range of project types and sizes is a stronger collateral position for a lender than equipment built narrowly for one job type. It's also a hedge against the labor-constrained growth problem itself: a contractor whose equipment can keep a smaller crew productive across varied project sizes has more flexibility to take on work even in years when hiring is particularly difficult. That resale discipline is worth pairing with the broader equipment maintenance and resale-value guide we've published, since the same principles apply directly to mast climbers and material handlers.
Protecting the Investment Once You've Made It
Mast climbers, forklifts, and mortar mixing systems are exposed to a harsher daily environment than most people assume, constant mortar and dust exposure, weather exposure on a mast climber's exterior components, and the general wear of being moved and reconfigured across job sites multiple times a year. A maintenance program that keeps this equipment running reliably isn't optional overhead, it's what protects the resale value and working life of an asset that's carrying a disproportionate share of your crew's productivity. A masonry contractor who neglects equipment maintenance isn't just risking a breakdown, they're risking the exact productivity multiplier that justified the purchase in the first place, and they're shortening the resale window on a piece of equipment that represented a serious capital commitment.
Why Crew Retention Connects to Equipment Too
There's a retention angle here that's easy to overlook. Masonry is physically demanding work, and a crew spending less time hauling material up ladders and more time doing the skilled work they were trained for tends to stay in the trade longer. In a labor market where the BLS projects almost no net employment growth and nearly 20,000 annual openings driven mostly by attrition, anything that makes the job more sustainable for the workers you already have is itself a labor-supply strategy, not just a productivity one. We've written before about how the right equipment lets a smaller crew do more, and masonry is one of the clearest examples of that principle in practice.
Equipment Financing for a Trade Facing a Real Labor Constraint
The masonry trade isn't shrinking in demand, commercial and institutional construction keeps specifying masonry facades, and the work itself hasn't been displaced by substitute materials the way some other trades have faced. What's constrained is the labor supply, and that constraint makes equipment that multiplies your existing crew's output more valuable to a masonry contractor today than it would have been a decade ago, when hiring another mason was a simpler answer to the same growth problem.
Equipment financing built around a masonry contractor's actual project pipeline and crew capacity, rather than a generic equipment loan, is the practical path to adding the mast climber, material handler, or continuous mortar system that lets your business grow even while the labor market working against you stays essentially flat. The contractors who make that investment now, while the BLS numbers are still a planning signal rather than an acute crisis, are the ones who'll be bidding the larger commercial masonry packages five years from now with a crew that's no bigger than it is today, just considerably more productive per hour on the wall. If you're evaluating whether financing or a traditional loan fits your credit profile better, our equipment financing credit score guide walks through what lenders actually look for.
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