Budget season is in full swing, and the same question comes up in every pre-construction meeting we sit through: what should we carry for framing in 2026? After pricing work all fall across Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Montana, our honest read is this: plan for moderate overall escalation, expect real swings in the lumber package, and treat skilled labor as the line item that only moves in one direction.
Lumber: volatile, not runaway
Nobody times the lumber market — not us, not the mills, not the guys on the futures forums. What we can tell you is how we protect a budget against it. Dimensional lumber and panel pricing has bounced around enough this year that we quote packages with a defined price-lock window and buy out early for confirmed spring starts. For projects breaking ground in the back half of 2026, we tell owners to carry a 5–10% contingency on the lumber package alone. Engineered wood — LVL, I-joists, rim board — tends to move slower than commodity lumber, but when it resets, it resets and stays there.
Trusses deserve their own paragraph. Plants across the Upper Midwest book out fast once spring hits, and a late truss order can cost you more schedule than money. Lock your truss slot when you award framing, not when the slab cures.
Light-gauge steel: steadier, but watch trade policy
Cold-formed steel pricing has been calmer than lumber lately, which is part of why more mid-rise work in our markets pencils in steel. The caveat: stud pricing follows mill pricing, and mill pricing follows trade policy, which nobody in a hard hat controls. If your project could frame either way, price both early — we walked through how that decision actually plays out in wood vs. steel framing for commercial projects.
Labor: the number that never goes down
Here's the part no outlook wants to lead with: the tightest constraint in 2026 won't be material, it'll be experienced framers. Every year we plan for mid-single-digit wage growth for skilled hands, and every year that assumption proves about right. That flows straight into per-square-foot labor pricing. In markets like Fargo and western Montana, where local framing capacity is thin, travel crews fill the gap — but travel crews come with per diem and lodging, and that shows up in the number too.
The quiet line items
- Hardware and connectors — hangers, hold-downs, and fasteners creep up steadily, a few points a year, every year.
- Fuel and mobilization — on rural and out-state work, getting crews and equipment to the site is a real cost, not a rounding error.
- Insurance — general liability and workers' comp for framing keep grinding upward across the board.
What we're telling GCs and developers to do
- Lock your framing sub early. Booked capacity is price certainty. The bids we hold firm are the ones tied to a committed slot on our schedule.
- Consider turnkey. When we supply labor and material, the buy-out risk moves to us — and we're watching mill pricing every week anyway.
- Get framers your plans early. The cheapest savings in 2026 will come from value engineering before drawings are final, not from beating up bids after.
- Use escalation clauses instead of padding. A defined lumber escalation clause is cheaper for everybody than a fat contingency baked into every bid.
If you want to see where the dollars actually sit inside a framing number, our commercial framing cost guide breaks the package down line by line, and our ballpark estimate calculator will get you a starting number in about two minutes.
Pricing a 2026 start? Send us your plans and we'll turn around a real framing number, not a guess.