r/Construction: rules, karma requirements and posting culture

Who posts here

The rules pitch the subreddit at working professionals, and the comments talk in GCs, subs, supers, journeymen and paper trails without explaining any of it. But a large share of the feed is people on their way in: an 18 year old asking how to get into a trade, a second year apprentice, a career changer from kitchens. Those get straight, kind answers. A homeowner question is the one pitched too low, and the rules say it will be removed.

• Tradespeople on the tools: carpenters, electricians, sprinkler fitters, operators, laborers.
• Foremen, superintendents, project engineers and project managers, mostly on the commercial side.
• Small contractors and shop owners dealing with clients, GCs and payment disputes.
• Apprentices, students and career changers asking how to get in and which trade to pick.
• Homeowners who post anyway, despite the rule against it.

Karma and account requirements

What it takes to get a post through in r/Construction.

What you can post

What happens to a new post

Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.

• Stayed up68%
• Removed by Reddit's filters32%
• Deleted by the author<1%

Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.

The rules, in the mods' words

1. 1

   Be Polite and Civil

   No harassment, bullying, toxicity, and/or threats of violence. No personal attacks, no revealing personal information, no negatively charged comments about an individual on the basis of their identity.

2. 2

   No Commercial Content

   No Commercial Content, Surveys, Advertising or Study Related Content including Homework Assistance.

3. 3

   Do Not Promote Unsafe Work Practices

   Do not post comments (including humor) that may be interpreted as promoting unsafe work practices or making light of reasonable safety standards.

4. 4

   No Politics

   No Political discussions or posts are allowed on this sub. There are other subreddits to discuss it. Posts breaking this rule will be removed and the poster warned.

5. 5

   No DIY Content

   This subreddit is for working professionals. If you are looking for DIY or Homeowner advice from a professional, please try other DIY related subreddits.

6. 6

   Stay On Topic

   Provide content related to the construction industry, no low-effort posts.

These are the rules as archived in January 2025. Rules change. Check the sidebar before you post.

The culture

r/Construction is a break room for people who build things. It has about 594,000 members and sees around 36 posts a day, with a typical post getting ten comments. Roughly half of posts are text, a quarter are images and the rest are links and video.

What rises is visual and funny: something absurd found on site, a lift walled in by the drywall crew, a homemade answer to tool theft. Humor is the flair on most of the top posts. Underneath that is the working layer of the subreddit, which is text. People ask whether to leave a non-union shop for a state job, how long they will be the gopher, and who ends up paying when a verbal instruction goes wrong. Those threads get the longest and most useful replies, usually from people who have been burned before.

The recurring arguments are union against non-union, residential against commercial, and how much ribbing a new guy should put up with. Safety is the one thing the room does not joke about. A photo of a deep trench with no shoring gets a serious pile-on, and the rules back that up.

What lands

• A jobsite photo with a short dry caption. Most of the top posts are a single image.
• A first milestone from someone learning, such as wiring a first light in a training class. The top recent post was exactly that.
• An open question that invites stories, like the best nickname anyone earned on site, which drew over a thousand comments.
• A safety callout with a photo and a clear message to refuse the unsafe job.
• A specific career or contract problem with the trade, the region, union status and the numbers stated.

What gets removed or ignored

• Homeowner and DIY questions. The subreddit description says those posts will be removed and points to other subreddits.
• Advertising, surveys, homework help and market research, all named in the rules and the sidebar.
• Political posts, which the rules say are removed with a warning to the poster.
• Low-effort or off-topic posts.
• About a third of posts in our sample were removed by Reddit's own filters. We saw no moderator removals in the sample, so we cannot show what the mods take down by hand.

The unwritten rules

• Say what you do in the first line. Trade, years in, union or not, residential or commercial. It decides whether you get answers or get sent to a DIY subreddit.
• Titles are short, about six words. Long clever headlines look out of place.
• Expect swearing and ball-breaking in the replies. The rule is against personal attacks, not rough language.
• The standing advice on any dispute is to get it in writing. Come with the paperwork details and you will get better answers.
• Comments are short, about 21 words, and fewer than 3% contain a link. Anything that reads like a tidy motivational post or a product demo stands out as written by an outsider.

Self-promotion

The rule is a flat no on commercial content, and the sidebar repeats it: no spam, no surveys, no homework help, no market research. In practice enforcement is uneven. Our sample includes a few link posts and write-ups from people who build software for the industry that were still up, mostly with little response. That is not a strategy. A vendor or founder has no approved way to pitch here, and research questions are explicitly unwelcome. The only thing that works is being someone who works in or alongside the trades and talking about the work itself.

How people write here

Typical post length

84 words

Typical title length

6 words

Titles phrased as a question

30%

Typical comment length

21 words

Comments that include a link

3%

Posts that carry a flair

100%

The regulars

The accounts that showed up most in our sample. Worth reading before you post: they set the tone, and they are usually the first to reply.

Top keywords

The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/Construction.

• construction 64 posts
• commercial 19 posts
• contractor 16 posts
• truck 12 posts
• field 20 posts
• project 30 posts
• job 37 posts
• company 36 posts
• union 10 posts
• jobsite 6 posts
• apprentice 6 posts
• site 22 posts
• carpentry 6 posts
• framing 8 posts
• internship 10 posts
• guys 25 posts
• siding 7 posts
• construction management 6 posts
• gcs 5 posts
• journeyman 4 posts
• foreman 4 posts
• project engineer 5 posts
• walls 10 posts
• residential 7 posts
• concrete 9 posts
• superintendent 5 posts
• job site 4 posts
• non union 3 posts
• general engineering 3 posts
• area 15 posts
• materials 8 posts
• trade 10 posts
• electrician 4 posts
• footings 3 posts
• carpenters 3 posts
• career fair 3 posts
• workers 8 posts
• screws 4 posts
• osha 4 posts
• wood 7 posts

Posts that did well

• I wired my first lightbulb today8.3k upvotes · 173 comments · Electrical ⚡
• boom truck was out of service5.3k upvotes · 222 comments · Roofing
• Whoops. 🤣4.5k upvotes · 25 comments · Humor 🤣
• Stolen Tools4.3k upvotes · 764 comments · Humor 🤣
• Just so you know4k upvotes · 95 comments · Informative 🧠
• Give me your best jobsite lines!3.2k upvotes · 339 comments · Humor 🤣
• I finally got out of residential and got a commercial job!2.8k upvotes · 82 comments · Humor 🤣
• Update about the forgotten lift. It's fire resistant now.2.6k upvotes · 157 comments · Humor 🤣

Common questions