Even though this region stretches from sunny San Diego, across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii and up the West Coast to Oregon, Washington on north to Alaska, EW’s editors did not spot as many billion-dollar construction projects in it as several other geographically smaller regions, including the Mountain Region, West South Central Region and South Atlantic Region. Most of the big projects we did find were in California, including the $2.6-billion Los Angeles Convention Center expansion; plans for a $2.2-billion renovation of the Palm Springs, CA, airport; the $1.5-billion; Sacramento, CA’s Kaiser Permanente Railyards Campus; the $1.3-billion expansion of the Sacramento Airport; and the $1-billion Aratina Solar Farm in Boron, CA.
Southern California’s two largest markets for estimated electrical contractor sales potential saw some impressive growth in electrical contractor employment over the past year. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA, MSA saw an estimated 8,667 new electrical contractor employees to 258,700 employees and Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA MSA had an increase of 6,500 employees to 118,233 employees. The electrical contractor sales potential for the Los Angeles metro is roughly $2.6 billion and the Riverside metro has $1.1 billion in potential according to EW estimates.
Despite these big projects, California does have a major demographic concern in the number of people who have moved out of its two largest metropolitan markets -- Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA, MSA, lost 255,281 residents from 2020 to 2024, and the San Francisco metropolitan area lost 97,183 residents over that same time period.
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
Over the past 40-plus years, hundreds of Jim’s articles have been published in Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing newsletter on topics such as the impact of new competitors on the electrical market’s channels of distribution, energy-efficient lighting and renewables, and local market economics. In addition to his published work, Jim regularly gives presentations on these topics to C-suite executives, industry groups and investment analysts.
He recently launched a new subscription-based data product for Electrical Marketing that offers electrical sales potential estimates and related market data for more than 300 metropolitan areas, and in 1999 he published his first book, “The Electrical Marketer’s Survival Guide” for electrical industry executives looking for an overview of key market trends.
While managing Electrical Wholesaling’s editorial operations, Jim and the publication’s staff won several Jesse H. Neal awards for editorial excellence, the highest honor in the business press, and numerous national and regional awards from the American Society of Business Press Editors. He has a master’s degree in Communications and a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, N.J. (now Rowan University).