Rochester’s construction mess is creating good jobs

Standing in front of a massive road closure through downtown Rochester, deputy city administrator Cindy Steinhauser didn’t see the barricades and detour signs, she saw a future bus rapid transit line.

“This is almost a three-mile corridor that can take you to entertainment, to arts, to education, to the library, to cultural institutions, to your medical appointment, to Cascade Lake,” Steinhauser said about the new public transportation project, which is slated to open next year.

The transit line is one of the city’s 13 public works construction projects underway right now. Within the next year, that number will nearly double. And that doesn’t count private construction projects like new housing developments or the new hospital that Mayo Clinic is building downtown.

In one way or another, all of these barricades, jackhammers and cement trucks are tied to Mayo’s expansion or Destination Medical Center, a 20-year, $5.6 billion economic development plan that promises to make Rochester more attractive to visitors and to people interested in moving here.

It all started in 2015 and Rochester’s population has already grown about 11 percent since then. Steinhauser said many are medical professionals, but their arrival has a ripple effect throughout the economy.

“For every physician that you bring to town, there’s seven support service jobs that are created, and those jobs are both in the medical profession, but also outside of the medical profession,” Steinhauser told MPR News. “Obviously, the construction demand and the construction job profile is really strong in Rochester, and it will be till through 2030.”

Rochester construction jobs growing faster than elsewhere

Minnesota’s construction job market grew 2.3 percent from 2024 to 2025, according to an analysis by Amanda Blaschko, who is a labor market analyst for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.

But Blaschko noted that Rochester’s construction job creation numbers stand out compared to the rest of the state, growing at nearly double the statewide rate during the same period of time.

According to DEED’s data, construction jobs grew by 4 percent in southeast Minnesota last year. Construction jobs created in the Twin Cities could in fact reflect work being done in Rochester, too, said Blaschko, as some of the contractors hired to build in the Rochester area are based in the Twin Cities.

And while the Twin Cities metro led the state in creating jobs associated with construction of buildings, southeastern Minnesota’s civil engineering job market grew faster than anywhere else in the state.

But it’s the region’s job growth in specialty trades like plumbing and electrical that really stands out to Blaschko.

“That’s where we’re really seeing growth for southeast Minnesota,” she said. “We added about 257 jobs from 2024 to 2025 at a 3.9 percent growth rate, which is higher than what we saw across the state of Minnesota at 2.9 percent.”

Behind the scenes work

People working in the specialty trades are feeling the demand for workers. That includes Jordan Barnes, who owns Accord Electric. In a transportation facility on the edge of town, his company is building a charging station for the electric buses that will run on the rapid transit line.

“There’s a lot of people who know about the expansion of several of the different areas and the buildings that are going downtown,” Barnes said. “What they may not see is behind the scenes with all of the additional work that goes to support that.”

To meet demand, Barnes has been hiring through the local labor union’s training program, which has also seen increased interest. In the last year-and-a-half, the program attracted 700 applicants – an unusually high number.

Some are people wanting a career change. But many are young, too, which Barnes said is a good trend for a job that’s in high demand.

“We’re seeing, you know, more people enter into trade school in order to start that process, and then just the younger generation. We’re seeing a lot of interest in the electrical industry as a whole,” he said.

Wages matter, too, said Barnes, because they attract new talent to the region.

“We recently saw the largest, as a percentage, increase to the wage package in order to keep pace with the work that’s coming,” Barnes told MPR News. “That number increasing does close the gap some with the metro area.”

In general, specialty trades in southeastern Minnesota are paying better than many other kinds of jobs, said Blaschko. The median wage for electricians, plumbers and other specialty trades in the region is $33.57 an hour – nearly $7.50 more than the median hourly wage across all occupations, she said.

Barnes said that while it may seem like Rochester is under construction everywhere, his business is in a bit of a lull. He has electrical work on 1,500 residential units under contract, but that work isn’t expected to begin for at least a few months. The tricky thing for him is keeping his employees busy until then.