According to the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), the pre-adjusted order intake in the German construction main industry decreased in the year 2024. It was 0.7 percent lower than the previous year. At the same time, the nominal order intake of 103.5 billion euros was 1.1 percent higher than the previous year’s level and remained in the three-digit billion range for the second year in a row.
In the high-rise construction, the order intakes were 47.2 billion euros, real 5.0 percent and nominal 4.0 percent lower than the previous year’s result, the agency reported. The residential construction sector, with a real decline of 3.5 percent (nominal: -2.4 percent), experienced less significant decreases than the non-residential construction sector (real: -5.8 percent, nominal: -4.8 percent). The order intake in the civil engineering sector, with 56.3 billion euros, was real 3.4 percent and nominal 5.7 percent higher than the previous year, largely due to large orders, particularly for the construction of highways, bridges and tunnels, as well as the expansion of the power grid.
In December 2024, the real order intake in the construction main industry, calendar and seasonally adjusted, was 7.7 percent lower than the previous month. In the year-over-year comparison, it was 0.1 percent lower and the order intake was around 8.7 billion euros, which was 0.6 percent more than in December 2023.
The industry’s annual turnover in 2024, according to Destatis, was real 1.0 percent lower than the previous year and nominal 0.8 percent higher, reaching a new high of 114.8 billion euros. Within the individual construction sectors, the commercial civil engineering sector, with 25.1 billion euros, had the highest annual turnover, followed by the commercial high-rise sector with 24.8 billion euros.
In the statistics, all companies with 20 and more employees are included. In 2024, there were around 9,500 such companies, a 1.5 percent decrease from the previous year and the first decline in 14 years (2009: 7,000 companies) of continuous growth.
In the surveyed companies, 534,200 people were employed on average in the year, a decrease of around 2,200 or 0.4 percent from the previous year. The wages, in the same period, were 4.7 percent higher than the previous year’s result, with a total of 25.2 billion euros.