South Atlantic Region - 2026 Market Planning Guide
The South Atlantic covers a huge area from the Baltimore-Washington, DC, metroplex and Loudoun County, VA, west of the nation’s capital, the largest concentration of data centers in the United States, south through Virginia’s suburbs, and the harbors of Norfolk and Newport News that are home to many U.S. Navy facilities; down through the Carolinas, Georgia and into Florida. The region is home to some of the fastest-growing metros in the entire country, including the Raleigh-Durham, and Charlotte metros; Charleston, SC; Atlanta, GA; and Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa and most of southwest Florida and Miami.
This region is home to some of the healthiest electrical construction markets in the entire country. Electrical Wholesaling’s editors counted 17 mega-projects valued at a billion dollars or more, including eight data centers in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. At least two projects on the drawing boards have total contract values exceeding $10 billion – EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure’s 3.9-million-sq-ft $17-billion data center campus in Louisa County, VA; and the $10-billion Amazon Data Center & AI campus in Hamlet, NC.
While few U.S. metros are having banner years in single-family construction, the South Atlantic region has half of the MSAs enjoying an increase of at least 390 permits YOY through July. The Orlando, Miami and Northport-Bradenton-Sarasota, FL, metros are seeing strong growth in multi-family housing, as each is up at least 1,100 permits YOY through July.
Supporting much of this growth is steady population growth, The Miami, Orlando, Tampa, Washington, DC, Charlotte, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Raleigh and Sarasota metros are among the nation’s leaders in population growth over the past four years. One quick-and-easy measure of a market’s growth is the number of news residents moving in each day, and the South Atlantic Region is one of the nation’s leaders by the metric with several of the fastest-growing metro areas: Miami (306 new residents per day); Orlando (185 new residents per day); Washington, DC (167 new residents per day); Tampa (148 new residents per day); Charlotte (141 new residents per day); and Atlanta (133 new residents per day).
HOW TO USE THE DATA IN THE MARKET PLANNING GUIDE
The late Andrea Herbert, former chief editor of Electrical Wholesaling, launched the Market Planning Guide more than 40 years ago. She won several national editorial awards for her efforts with the Market Planning Guide, including the Jesse H. Neal Award, the business press’ highest honor.
She wanted the Market Planning Guide to be a practical tool for salespeople and managers at distributors, manufacturers and independent manufacturers’ reps, and her thoughts on how to use it still ring true today:
• Determine market share & penetration.
• Evaluate branch performance and decide which local market areas may support new branches.
• Determine the areas with the greatest sales potential so you can concentrate your salespeople’s efforts in the most productive directions.
• Keep on top of changes in the market area (new residential development, large construction projects in the pipeline & population shifts).
• Direct advertising and promotion to the places where it will have the most impact.
• Explain to suppliers what they can expect from you in the way of market coverage.
• Verify or challenge what suppliers expect from you in sales.
• Set sales quotas for salespeople, territories or product lines.
• Calculate the number of salespeople needed to cover an area.
• Compare how well salespeople in different territories are doing with the same product on the basis of market potential.
• Back up intuition.
OTHER REALLY USEFUL DATA
In addition to breaking out our national and regional sales potential estimates, the 2026 Market Planning Guide also offers some other great local data that will help offer a clearer picture of the electrical opportunities available: electrical contractor and industrial employment, population growth, construction projects worth at least $100 million in total construction value and building permits.
Electrical Contractor Employment Data
You can use use this employment data with EW's sales-per-employee estimates for electrical contractors of $78,775 per employee to develop contractor sales potential estimates at the local and state level.
You can use use this employment data with EW's sales-per-employee estimates of $2,650 per employee to develop industrial sales potential estimates at the local and state level.
Population Change (2020-2024)
Following population trends is a quick-and-easy way of gauging a market’s local economy. If a market is gaining or losing residents, it obviously affects the tax base, enrollments counts and schools and the need for additional construction for service industries. In our presentation of the U.S. Census Dept.’s 2023 data at the MSA and state level, we map out new-residents-by-day data, which is calculated with the number of folks moving into or out of a local market. It’s a simple calculation that highlights population growth in a fun and easy-to-view manner.
Construction Projects
Electrical work typically accounts for roughly 10% of total construction value of a project, and the construction projects highlighted here offer a sense of the project mix available in a given state or region. Our construction project data was gathered through Oct. 2025. Electrical Marketing newsletter updates its construction project database each quarter, and those updates can be downloaded in a spreadsheet as part of a $99 subscription. Our decision to only include the projects we find of $100 million of more in total contract value is based totally on the bandwidth of the EW staff; we realize that many smaller projects can be even more profitable than larger jobs.
Building Permits
Available monthly from the U.S. Census Bureau on an MSA, state and national level, building permits are a leading indicator of future residential construction because homebuilders typically don’t invest in a permit until they are serious about breaking ground. Permit data is also an early indicator of future nonresidential construction in a local market, because once residential developments go in, the constructions of stores, light commercial and other projects typically follows.
About the Author
Jim Lucy
Editor-in-Chief of Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing
Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 40 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing newsletter, and as a contributing writer for EC&M magazine During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement.
Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted with his wife and three sons in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 30 years.