The Federal Government Refunds 20 Cents of Every Historic-Rehab Dollar. The Trades to Spend It Are Running Short.

Ford Motor Company spent $377 million rehabilitating Michigan Central Station in Detroit — a Beaux-Arts train depot abandoned for 30 years, vandalized, and once slated for demolition — into a technology hub that reopened in 2024.▸ That project ran through the same federal system every historic rehabilitation in the country runs through: an application process administered by the National Park Service, a 20% credit against the cost of the work, and a state historic-preservation office checking that the result still looks like the building it was. The system moved $8.64 billion through that process in fiscal 2025 alone. The people who can actually do the work — the plumbers, electricians, and inspectors who know how to touch a 100-year-old building without ruining it — are a separate, much tighter market.

The Federal Historic Preservation Tax Incentives Program, run by the National Park Service with the 50 State Historic Preservation Offices, works in three steps.▸ Part 1 certifies that a building is historic — 1,387 of those certifications were filed in fiscal 2025. Part 2 is a preliminary review of the rehabilitation plan itself; 1,170 were approved, covering an estimated $13.10 billion in planned work. Part 3 certifies the work as actually completed to preservation standards — 939 projects cleared that bar in FY2025, with a final, audited construction cost of $8,636,796,948 in Qualified Rehabilitation Expenditures (QRE). That completed-QRE figure is what the credit is calculated against.

Under IRC §47, an owner who completes a certified rehabilitation may claim a tax credit equal to 20% of QRE — not in the year the building reopens, but ratably, one-fifth at a time, over the five years starting when it's placed back in service, a change made by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.▸ Applied to FY2025's completed projects, that 20% works out to $1,727,359,390 in federal credit value, against $6,909,437,558 the owner still has to finance from private capital, debt, or (in 39 states) a stacked state historic tax credit.

Median completed-project QRE in FY2025 was $2.00 million; the average, pulled upward by projects like Michigan Central, was $9.20 million.▸ Since the program's first year in 1977, it has certified 51,055 projects and $135.76 billion in rehabilitation investment, producing 329,548 rehabilitated and 377,293 new housing units — 216,892 of them low- or moderate-income.

New York alone accounted for $2.05 billion of the $8.64 billion national total — nearly a quarter of it, and more than the next three states combined.▸ Ohio, Illinois, Texas, Virginia, Massachusetts, California, and Pennsylvania round out the rest of the top eight, together adding another $2.96 billion. The other 48 states, DC, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands split the remaining $3.64 billion. It's a program that runs through every state historic preservation office in the country, but the dollar volume concentrates in states with the deepest inventory of income-producing historic buildings and, often, their own stacking state credit.

None of that $8.64 billion gets spent without someone who actually knows how to repair a Guastavino tile ceiling or rewire a building without gutting its plaster.▸ That labor market is a separate system from the tax credit, and the most detailed national look at it — a 2022 study by PlaceEconomics for The Campaign for Historic Trades, a workforce initiative of Preservation Maryland working with the National Park Service's Historic Preservation Training Center — found it strained everywhere it looked. Rehabilitation of existing buildings represents nearly $85 billion a year industry-wide (about 19% of building construction) and employs 1.3 million workers. Of the roughly 165,000 jobs historic rehabilitation activity creates annually, the study estimated nearly 100,000 are jobs for which specific historic-preservation skills, training, and experience "would be desirable" — a specialization most of the general construction workforce doesn't carry. The supply problem compounds: 40% of America's 96 million buildings are already at least 50 years old, and another 13.3 million will cross that threshold in the next decade.

Historic-preservation plumbers and electricians earned a weighted-average $40.23 an hour and a 7.8% wage premium over new-construction work in the same trade — yet 77.7% of surveyed historic-trades experts still rated the labor supply "shortage" or "severe shortage."▸ Building inspectors with preservation training, at $40.99 an hour, scored worse: 78.6%. Even landscapers, the least-strained of the three trades studied, came in at 68.9%. For plumbing and electrical work specifically, the study estimated 27,596 to 36,794 jobs nationally required historic-preservation expertise in 2022, projected to grow to 35,514–47,352 by 2030 — a specialization the wage premium is not yet large enough to fully solve.

Federal figures cover fiscal year 2025 (Oct. 2024–Sep. 2025) as reported by the National Park Service; labor-market figures are drawn from a 2022 national study, the most recent nationwide historic-trades labor survey publicly available, and were not re-derived or updated to 2025 dollars.