The Labor Shortage Utility Contractors Talk About Least Is the One Inside Their Own Estimating Departments

Ask any utility contractor about the labor shortage, and you’ll hear about the field: not enough hands to run pipe, fewer apprentices coming up, and crews on overtime just to hold schedule. It’s the industry’s most talked-about problem, and most hiring plans are built around it.

What rarely comes up is the same shortage inside the estimating department. Many firms rely on one or two estimators to price every bid that fills the backlog. When they fall behind, nothing shows on a jobsite. Bids don’t go out, and the work goes elsewhere.

The numbers behind the quiet shortage

The hiring problem reaches beyond the field. According to the AGC and Sage 2026 Construction Hiring and Business Outlook, 82% of firms struggle to fill hourly craft positions, and 80% struggle to fill salaried roles, the office side of the business where estimating sits. The same survey found estimating is among the most common uses of AI.

For estimating teams, that means the same bid volume lands on fewer people. And those estimators aren’t just pricing. They’re still doing takeoff by hand, alongside scope review and subcontractor coordination, which leaves less time for the bids themselves.

A capacity problem hiding inside a hiring problem

A crew shortage limits how much work a firm can build. An estimating shortage limits how much work it can compete for, and it’s easier to miss. A delayed project gets flagged. A bid that was never submitted leaves no record.

Takeoff takes up a large share of an estimator’s time, and every hour spent measuring is an hour taken from the decisions that win bids and protect margin. That’s why hiring alone doesn’t solve it. A new estimator, if you can find one, inherits the same takeoff-heavy workload and the same ceiling on bids.

Rethinking who does the takeoff

The better question isn’t how to find more estimators. It’s which part of estimating actually needs one.

Pricing strategy, risk assessment, and scope interpretation need an estimator’s judgment. Measuring quantities from drawings doesn’t need to consume the same amount of their time. And when teams are already stretched thin, doing every takeoff manually simply doesn’t cut it.

Beam AI gives estimators another way to handle that work. They can generate AI takeoffs themselves or hand the takeoff off to Beam’s team for reviewed quantities. Either way, more of their time is spent on the decisions that actually require their experience.

When takeoff stops consuming so much of each estimate, the same team can price more bids each week without waiting on another hire.

When takeoff stops consuming so much of each estimate, the same team can price more bids each week without waiting on a new hire.

The shortage you can actually solve this year

The craft labor shortage will take years to ease, and no software changes that. The estimating shortage doesn’t have to wait, because the fix lies in how the team works, not who’s on it. The bids a firm never sends out don’t show up on any report. But each one is work the firm never had a chance to win.