Data Center Construction Superintendent Salary 2026: What Contractors Actually Post

Every figure on this page comes from an employer’s own job posting with its requisition number printed beside it, or from a government agency. No figure came from a crowd-sourced salary site.

There is a reason this page used to be full of estimates. Superintendent pay is the least visible number in data center construction, and the reason it is invisible turns out to be the most interesting thing about it.

Data center construction superintendent salary: the key numbers

The finding: one employer, one job title, and the pay is printed in three states and blank in two

Skanska USA has five live requisitions for the same superintendent job family. Three of them print a salary band. Two of them print nothing. The split is not random.

Requisition	Title as posted	Location	Does that state require a range in the posting?	Band as printed
8898	Superintendent I (Area)	San Francisco, California	Yes	$125,000 to $170,000 a year
9266	Superintendent I (Area)	Pasco, Washington	Yes	$115,690 to $150,000 a year
9240	Superintendent I (Area)	Appomattox, Virginia	Yes, since July 1, 2026	$100,600 to $110,000 a year
8950	Superintendent I (Area)	Atlanta, Georgia	No	Nothing printed
9290	Superintendent I (Area)	Franklin and Johnson City, Tennessee	No	Nothing printed

Five requisitions, one title, one employer, read the same day from Skanska’s own careers system. Every state that requires a range got one. Neither state that does not require one got anything.

The pay obviously exists. Skanska knows what it intends to pay a Superintendent I in Atlanta, and it filled in that field for four other cities. The number is withheld in Georgia and Tennessee because withholding it there is allowed.

That reframes the whole question. The reason nobody can tell you what a data center superintendent earns is not that the job is too varied to price. It is that most of the states building data centers right now do not make anyone say.

What changed in Virginia on July 1, 2026

Virginia is the largest data center market in the country and it spent years with no pay posting requirement at all. Senate Bill 215 changed that. Signed April 22, 2026, in force July 1, 2026, it requires every Virginia employer to include the wage, the salary, or the wage or salary range in each public and internal posting of a job, promotion or transfer. The range has to be a good faith estimate of the minimum and the maximum. There is no small employer exemption.

Skanska’s Appomattox posting is what that looks like three months in, and it is worth looking at closely.

Skanska Superintendent I (Area)	Band	Spread between floor and ceiling
San Francisco, California (req 8898)	$125,000 to $170,000	$45,000
Pasco, Washington (req 9266)	$115,690 to $150,000	$34,310
Appomattox, Virginia (req 9240)	$100,600 to $110,000	$9,400

The newest mandate state gets the narrowest band on the board, by a factor of four. A $9,400 spread is a precise number. It is also a number that tells a candidate almost nothing about where they might land, which a $45,000 spread at least does.

Some Virginia superintendent and mission critical postings read for this page carried no range at all. This page does not draw a compliance conclusion from that. Whether the law reaches a given posting depends on things a reader cannot see, including where the work is actually performed and when the posting was created. The observation worth keeping is narrower and safer: a law that is three months old has not yet made this job’s pay easy to find in Virginia.

---

---

The contractor that prints the number everywhere

One general contractor breaks the pattern completely, and it happens to do the most data center work of any employer on this page. Mortenson publishes a full band on every data center superintendent posting, including in Texas, Iowa, Nebraska and Indiana, none of which require it.

Requisition	Title as posted	Location	Band as printed	Minimum experience
22530	General Superintendent, Data Center Construction	Cedar Rapids, IA	$178,800 to $268,200	14 years construction management, or 10 years trade
22554	General Superintendent, Data Center Construction	Omaha, NE	$178,800 to $268,200	14 years construction management, or 10 years trade
22616	Senior MEP Superintendent II, Data Center Construction	Pampa, TX and Minneapolis, MN	$164,300 to $246,500	18 years construction, 13 supervisory
22616	Senior MEP Superintendent I, Data Center Construction	Pampa, TX and Minneapolis, MN	$144,300 to $216,500	15 years construction, 10 supervisory
22212	MEP Superintendent II, Data Center Construction	Pampa, TX	$130,100 to $195,200	15 years construction
22324	Superintendent II	Pampa, TX	$130,100 to $195,200	8 years construction management, or 10 years trade
22241	Electrical Superintendent I	Lebanon, IN	$125,600 to $188,400	10 years with high and medium voltage equipment
22212	MEP Superintendent I, Data Center Construction	Pampa, TX	$111,400 to $167,100	8 years construction, 2 supervisory
22442	Assistant Superintendent	Chicago, IL	$95,700 to $129,200	3 years construction management

Every one of those postings carries the same rider, and it is the rarest thing in this entire dataset: an employer publishing its own geographic pay differentials in public. Mortenson states that the actual range is higher for certain office locations, by 5 percent for Denver and Chicago, 10 percent for Seattle and Portland, and 12.5 percent for Washington DC.

Employers almost never publish the multiplier. They publish a band and let you guess. Requisition 22530 is worth reading in full for that reason alone: see Mortenson’s own posting for requisition 22530.

What Mortenson proves

A general contractor can publish data center superintendent pay nationwide and suffer no obvious harm from it. So when another contractor leaves the field blank in Georgia, that is a policy choice and not a practical impossibility.

The published ladder, from field engineer to general superintendent

Two employers publish enough of their own bands to build a ladder without estimating anything. Skanska’s runs lower and starts earlier. Mortenson’s runs higher and goes further.

Rung	Skanska USA	Mortenson
Field Engineer	$55,000 to $80,000 (req 8888, South Hill VA, a data center project)	Not posted
Assistant Superintendent	$90,000 to $145,000 (reqs 8983 South Hill VA, 8882 Queens NY, 8719 San Jose CA)	$95,700 to $129,200 (req 22442, Chicago IL)
Superintendent	$100,600 to $170,000 (reqs 9240, 9266, 9198, 8898)	$130,100 to $195,200 (req 22324, Superintendent II)
MEP Superintendent	$137,250 to $219,750 (req 8671, New York NY and Parsippany NJ)	$111,400 to $195,200 across levels I and II (req 22212)
Senior MEP Superintendent	Not posted	$144,300 to $246,500 across levels I and II (req 22616)
General Superintendent	Not posted	$178,800 to $268,200 (reqs 22530, 22554)

Read the floors rather than the ceilings. The floor is what an employer commits to, and it moves in clean steps: about $55,000 for a field engineer, about $90,000 to $95,000 for an assistant, $100,600 to $130,100 for a superintendent, and $178,800 for a general superintendent running a campus.

Two other employer bands belong beside those. J.E. Dunn posts a Superintendent in Santa Clara, California at $148,800 to $185,999, asking five years of construction and three years of field supervision, requisition 62360. Holder Construction posts an MEP Field Coordinator in Mount Prospect, Illinois at $90,000 to $100,000, asking one to three years, which is the genuine bottom of the MEP track.

The owner side calls the job something else, and prints the number everywhere

A search of Amazon’s job board for the word superintendent returns zero results worldwide. Amazon does not use the title. It says Construction Manager and Manager of Construction, and it prints a band in every US state, including states with no disclosure law at all.

Requisition	Title as printed	Location	Band as printed
10544602	Manager of Construction, Data Center Construction	New Carlisle and Hobart, IN	153,200.00 to 254,500.00 USD annually
10530073	Sr. Construction Manager, Data Center Construction	Shreveport, LA	125,400.00 to 187,300.00 USD annually
10552992	Construction Manager, AMER	Sterling and Aldie, VA	111,300.00 to 186,100.00 USD annually
10536789 and five identical reqs	Construction Manager, Data Center Construction	Boardman, OR	111,300.00 to 186,100.00 USD annually
Chief Estimator, AMER Estimating and Cost Control	Chief Estimator	Herndon VA and Seattle WA	153,200.00 to 254,500.00 USD annually
Construction Safety Manager	Construction Safety Manager, DCPD Health and Safety	Arlington, OR	121,200.00 to 163,900.00 USD annually

Indiana, Louisiana and Oregon require nothing. Amazon prints anyway. Six identical Boardman requisitions at one band also says something about scale: that is one number hiring six people at once.

Requisition 10552992 asks for six years of experience constructing and managing complex MEP systems and four years managing general contractors, and it offers a substitution that matters to anyone who came up through the field: a degree, or nine years of related construction management experience in lieu of one.

The vocabulary gap is the practical lesson. If you search only for superintendent you will never see the owner side of this market, and the owner side is where the printed numbers are. Search both. Our data center construction salary guide and data center construction jobs cover the wider set of titles.

Certifications barely appear on these postings

Across every superintendent posting read completely for this page, exactly one named a credential. Mortenson’s Assistant Superintendent in Chicago lists an electrician program, master, journeyman or apprentice, as preferred. Nothing else on any posting from any employer named a certification, required or preferred.

No posting asked for a PMP. None asked for LEED. None asked for a commissioning credential. What every posting asked for instead was years: years of construction, years of supervision, years with medium and high voltage gear.

That matters because the credentials get sold to this audience on the promise of a raise, and the issuers do not support that promise.

Credential	Issuer	Published fee	Does the issuer publish a salary premium?
LEED AP BD+C	Green Business Certification Inc (GBCI) for USGBC	$350, or $250 for USGBC members, for the standalone specialty exam. Combined with Green Associate, $550 and $400.	No. No earnings or pay claim of any kind.
PMP	Project Management Institute (PMI)	PMI publishes no flat exam fee. Its own handbook says pricing varies by membership status and region.	Yes, and read it carefully. See below.
CHC, Certified Healthcare Constructor	American Hospital Association Certification Center	$400 ASHE member, $570 non-member	No. And it requires five years of healthcare construction to sit for.

PMI does publish a figure, from the 14th edition of its Project Management Salary Survey, December 2025. It reports that PMP holders in the United States had a median salary of $135,000 against $109,157 for non-certified respondents, about 24 percent apart, from 14,628 project professionals across 21 countries.

Three things about that survey belong next to the number. It is self reported and self selected. It compares two groups rather than measuring what certifying does to one person’s pay, and it controls for nothing, not experience, not seniority, not industry. And it publishes no breakout for construction, for superintendents, or for data center work.

The safety credentials are different and they are genuinely expected on site: OSHA 30 for data centers and NFPA 70E certification are access requirements rather than pay levers.

What federal data actually measures, and what it does not

There is no federal occupation code for a data center construction superintendent. The two codes people reach for describe different jobs and only one of them has a published handbook page.

What BLS publishes	Figure	What it actually covers
Construction managers, median annual wage May 2025	$114,990, with 9 percent growth projected 2025 to 2035 and 609,100 people employed	Running the project: schedule, subcontractors, budget, safety, owner interface. This is the closer match to a superintendent.
First-line supervisors of construction trades and extraction workers, mean annual wage May 2025	$86,450, across 812,210 people	A working foreman directing a crew inside one trade. BLS publishes no Occupational Outlook Handbook page for this code at all.

Both figures cover all construction, most of which is not data center work, so treat them as the surrounding landscape rather than as this job’s pay. The construction managers page carries a Last Modified date of August 27, 2026. Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, construction managers.

Notice that every published data center superintendent band on this page clears the construction managers median. Mortenson’s General Superintendent floor of $178,800 sits $63,810 above it.

Per diem and travel pay, with the federal numbers

Superintendent work travels, and per diem gets quoted loosely in this trade, usually as a round number with the claim that it is tax free. The federal ceilings are published and they are lower than the numbers that circulate.

Location	Lodging per day	Meals and incidentals	Total per day
Standard rate for most of the country, fiscal 2027	$113	$68	$181
Loudoun County VA, flat all year	$121	$80	$201
Maricopa County AZ, February and March peak	$232	$86	$318
Maricopa County AZ, June to August	$122	$86	$208

Fiscal 2027 covers travel on or after October 1, 2026. The standard rate across most of the country is $181 a day. A flat $200 a day sits above that ceiling in most places, and the amount above it is not automatically tax free. Check the GSA per diem rate tables for the county you are actually working in, and check with your own tax adviser before treating any of it as untaxed.

No employer posting read for this page printed a per diem rate, a truck allowance, a bonus target or a completion bonus. Those figures exist in offers. They do not exist in public, and this page does not invent them.

Where the work actually is in 2026, and what moved

The market that decides where superintendents get hired shifted this year, and the shift is the opposite of what most career content still says.

Measure, CBRE North America Data Center Trends H1 2026	Figure
Total under construction across primary markets	7,481.1 MW, up 24.8 percent in the first half
Share of that capacity already preleased	80.4 percent, against 74.3 percent a year earlier
Atlanta under construction	2,882 MW, up 52.3 percent year over year
Northern Virginia under construction	2,420.2 MW, up 16.5 percent
Northern Virginia vacancy	0.2 percent
Overall primary market vacancy	1.4 percent, a record low

For the first time, Atlanta has overtaken Northern Virginia as the top market for total construction. That is CBRE’s own wording, published August 27, 2026. See CBRE North America Data Center Trends H1 2026, and our guides to data center jobs in Atlanta and data center jobs in Northern Virginia.

JLL’s North America Data Center Report for year end 2025, published February 17, 2026, puts the North American construction pipeline at 35 GW, with 64 percent of it outside traditional mature markets and vacancy at a record 1 percent. Texas alone carries 6.5 GW under construction, and more than ten projects of 1 GW or larger are building at once.

Atlanta sits in Georgia, and Georgia is one of the two states where Skanska printed nothing. The construction is moving toward states that do not require anyone to publish what the work pays. More on the demand side in the data center construction boom and the data center workforce shortage.

What we could not verify

• A national average for this job. No federal occupation code covers a data center construction superintendent.
• Per diem, truck allowance, bonus targets and completion bonuses. Not printed on a single posting read for this page.
• A certification pay premium. No issuer publishes one for LEED or the CHC, and PMI’s figure measures a gap between two self-selected groups with no construction breakout.
• Any MEP share of data center construction cost. The widely repeated 60 to 70 percent figure traces to no primary source. Turner and Townsend does publish a US equipment cost allocation for data centres, mechanical at 22 percent and electrical at 54 percent for air cooled facilities, but that is an equipment allocation and not a trade share, and plumbing is not broken out at all.
• Bands from DPR, Turner, Clayco, Whiting-Turner, Hensel Phelps, McCarthy, Rosendin, Southland, Balfour Beatty, Fortis or Corgan. Every one of those boards refused an automated read. No figure for any of them is claimed here.
• Whether Suffolk and Gilbane print bands. Both run a system that returned the job description without the requirements block, so an absent range there is a reading failure rather than evidence. Their postings are not counted either way.
• A commissioning-specific or superintendent-specific staffing shortage figure. No published figure exists from CBRE, JLL or Uptime Institute. Uptime’s 16th Annual Global Data Center Survey, published July 28, 2026 with more than 800 respondents, reports that more than half report difficulty finding qualified candidates. Uptime names high costs, not staffing, as the greatest concern in that edition.

---

---

Frequently asked questions

What does a data center construction superintendent make in 2026? Published employer bands run from $100,600 at the floor of Skanska’s Superintendent I in Virginia to $268,200 at the ceiling of Mortenson’s General Superintendent for data center work. Mortenson posts Superintendent II at $130,100 to $195,200. All read September 24, 2026.

Why is it so hard to find a superintendent salary online? Because most states building data centers do not require a range in the posting. Skanska printed a band on the same title in California, Washington and Virginia, and printed nothing in Georgia and Tennessee. The number exists. Disclosure is what varies.

Which states require a pay range in a job posting? California, Colorado, Washington, New York, Hawaii, Maryland, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, Vermont, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, plus Virginia from July 1, 2026 and Maine from July 29, 2026. Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana and Nebraska do not.

What does a general superintendent earn on a data center campus? Mortenson posts General Superintendent, Data Center Construction at $178,800 to $268,200 in both Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Omaha, Nebraska, requisitions 22530 and 22554. It asks a minimum of 14 years of construction management experience, or 10 years in the trades.

Do you need a degree to be a data center superintendent? Not at these employers. Mortenson accepts 10 years of trade experience in place of 14 years of construction management. Amazon’s Construction Manager posting accepts nine years of related construction management experience in place of a degree. Field time substitutes for the classroom on every posting read here.

Is a PMP or LEED worth it for a superintendent? Not one superintendent posting read for this page asked for either. The only credential named anywhere was an electrician program, listed as preferred. PMI publishes a 24 percent median salary gap for PMP holders in the US, from a self-selected survey with no construction breakout. GBCI publishes no salary claim for LEED at all.

Does Amazon hire data center superintendents? Not under that title. A search of Amazon’s board for superintendent returns zero results worldwide. Amazon posts Construction Manager at $111,300 to $186,100 and Manager of Construction at $153,200 to $254,500, and it prints those bands in every state.

Which market has the most data center construction right now? Atlanta. CBRE reported on August 27, 2026 that Atlanta reached 2,882 MW under construction, up 52.3 percent year over year, overtaking Northern Virginia at 2,420.2 MW for the first time.

The terms and documents behind these numbers

• Virginia Senate Bill 215, signed April 22, 2026 and in force July 1, 2026, which requires a wage, salary or range in every Virginia job posting.
• Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), the source for the construction managers median of $114,990.
• Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), the BLS programme that publishes the $86,450 mean for first-line supervisors of construction trades, released May 15, 2026 for the May 2025 reference period.
• Standard Occupational Classification (SOC), the federal system that decides which jobs get a published wage. It has no data center superintendent occupation.
• Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII), the BLS programme behind the recordable incident rates quoted on safety pages.
• General Services Administration (GSA) per diem, the federal lodging and meal rates that set the tax free ceiling on travel reimbursement.
• CBRE North America Data Center Trends, published twice a year. The current edition is H1 2026, August 27, 2026.
• Total recordable incident rate (TRIR), the safety metric large contractors are measured on. The BLS rate for nonresidential building construction was 1.9 per 100 full-time workers in 2024, against 2.2 for construction overall.
• Applicant tracking system (ATS), the software an employer posts jobs through. Whether a contractor’s pay is findable at all often comes down to which one it bought.

Superintendent against the roles beside it on the same jobsite

These are published bands for adjacent roles, so they compare like with like.

Role	Published band	Employer and requisition
General Superintendent, data center	$178,800 to $268,200	Mortenson 22530
Manager of Construction, data center	$153,200 to $254,500	Amazon 10544602
Superintendent MEP	$137,250 to $219,750	Skanska 8671
Sr. Construction Manager, data center	$125,400 to $187,300	Amazon 10530073
Superintendent II	$130,100 to $195,200	Mortenson 22324
Construction Manager	$111,300 to $186,100	Amazon 10552992
Superintendent I (Area), California	$125,000 to $170,000	Skanska 8898
Assistant Superintendent	$95,700 to $129,200	Mortenson 22442
Field Engineer, data center project	$55,000 to $80,000	Skanska 8888

The verdict from this table is that the owner side and the contractor side pay about the same at the top, and the gap between them is smaller than the gap between rungs. Moving from Superintendent II to General Superintendent moves the floor by $48,700. No employer switch on this table does that. The same shape appears in data center operations manager salary and VP data center operations salary.

Next steps

If you are pricing a superintendent role, three things will do more than any salary estimate. Search the owner-side titles as well as superintendent, because that is where the printed numbers live. Read a posting for the same title in California, Washington or Illinois even when your job is in Georgia, because that is the same employer telling you what the job is worth. And compare floors rather than midpoints, since the floor is the number an employer commits to in public.

Every figure on this page can be checked. Skanska’s bands come from Skanska USA’s own careers board, Mortenson’s from its own postings, and Amazon’s from amazon.jobs.

Related guides

Construction: data center construction salary, data center construction jobs, the data center construction boom and Loudoun County data center alley.

On the same jobsite: data center commissioning engineer salary, data center commissioning agent salary, what data center commissioning is, MEP engineer data center salary, critical facilities engineer salary and fiber optic technician data center salary.

Trades and getting in: electrician to data center technician, data center technician salary, OSHA 30 for data centers, NFPA 70E certification and the data center workforce shortage.

Markets and pay context: data center jobs in Atlanta, data center jobs in Northern Virginia, data center jobs and salary in Phoenix, data center jobs in Dallas, Texas, data center jobs in Columbus, Ohio, data center salary by state, data center salary against cost of living, data center operations manager salary and VP data center operations salary.

Methodology and sources

---