Most Manufacturers Say They’re Reshoring. Barely a Third Say They’re Ready For It.

Manufacturers really are bringing production home. Four in five US manufacturing decision-makers say they have already reshored production or are actively doing it, according to a March 2026 survey of 250 firms run by Atomik Research for BigRep. Read that number and the tariff-and-geopolitics story writes itself: firms are stepping back from fragile overseas supply chains and building real resilience closer to home. The trouble starts with the next question down. Are they actually able to deliver it? In that same survey, only 34% of the firms already reshoring describe their in-house production capacity as fully adequate for the job. Most of what looks like a reshoring boom is still a reshoring intention.

The construction data tells the other half of the story

US Census Bureau figures on construction spending show what survey answers do not. Manufacturing construction spending rose from around $80 billion a year at the end of 2019 to a peak near $239 billion in June 2024, a near-tripling driven largely by the 2022 CHIPS Act and clean-energy incentives. Since that peak, it has fallen by roughly a fifth, and the computer, electronics and electrical segment, the exact category most reshoring announcements fall into, is down 44%. That is the part of the reshoring pipeline needing poured concrete and installed equipment rather than a press release, and it is moving backwards.

Named projects behind the aggregate numbers tell the same story. T1 Energy, formerly Freyr, cancelled a $2.5 billion battery plant in Georgia, and AESC paused construction on a $1.6 billion South Carolina plant it had already broken ground on. Neither was a reshoring decision reversed out of unwillingness. Both met a workforce or financing reality the original announcement had not priced in. Nationally, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show manufacturing employment fell by roughly 89,000 jobs between April 2025, when the broad tariff package took effect, and February 2026. If tariffs alone were driving a reshoring boom, employment should be rising in the sector they were meant to protect, not falling.

The bottleneck was never the tariff

The real constraint sits upstream of trade policy. A 2025 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies puts US manufacturing jobs at risk of going unfilled by 2033 at 1.9 million, and finds 20.6% of US plants were already running below capacity in 2024 for want of skilled workers, with over a quarter of the workforce retirement-eligible. In the BigRep survey, 22% name a skilled-staff shortage, not tariffs or cost, as the main barrier: two independent readings, one answer. The limit is people, not policy. ISM’s December 2025 forecast puts a number on the response: 64% of manufacturers have no plans to reshore at all, because it remains cheaper to source offshore or shift to a less tariff-exposed country than relocate to the US, ISM chair Susan Spence has noted.

Even the Reshoring Initiative, whose figures underpin most boom headlines, builds this lag into its own methodology: it assumes hiring follows an announcement by 12 to 24 months, since a plant must be built and staffed first. Of the roughly 2 million reshoring and foreign-investment jobs announced since 2010, about 1.7 million have actually been filled, an 85% fulfilment rate, respectable only if you treat each year’s headline figure as a promise redeemable years later, not a current fact.

What is actually deliverable this year

There is a genuine resilience move available right now, and it needs no new hire or groundbreaking ceremony. US Foreign-Trade Zones, the customs programme letting firms defer duty on imported components, handled $963.8 billion of merchandise in 2024, the second-highest total on record and more than 50% above 2020 levels, according to the Foreign-Trade Zones Board’s own annual report to Congress. Production activity, not simple storage, accounts for the larger share of it. Firms are using existing customs infrastructure harder than they are building new factories, the more honest measure of where resilience decisions are landing this year: dual sourcing, tariff engineering through bonded facilities, and supplier diversification, all of which work with the supply chain a company already has rather than the one it hopes to have in three years.

The Reshoring Initiative, having first projected a drop to 174,000 announced jobs for 2025, later revised that up toward 240,000, citing firms gaining confidence as tariff policy settled. That assumes certainty converts directly into hiring. It does not survive contact with trade policy having changed more than 50 times between April 2025 and April 2026, or with the workforce shortfall behind the CSIS numbers having nothing to do with tariff certainty at all. A settled tariff regime might unblock a financing decision. It does nothing for a fifth of US plants unable to find the workers to run the equipment they already have.

Reshoring announcements are a tariff response, not evidence of resilience already built. The resilience is showing up in sourcing contracts and customs filings that need no ribbon-cutting, not in construction data moving the opposite way from the headlines. The practical split for leaders running these programmes is straightforward. Treat dual sourcing, supplier diversification and bonded-warehouse structures as this year’s resilience project, since the infrastructure and expertise to execute them already exist. Treat any reshoring capital commitment as a separate, multi-year workforce and supplier-base build with its own delivery plan, gated on realistic hiring timelines rather than the tariff headline of the week. Announcing a plant is a decision. Staffing and supplying it is a different programme, and right now more companies are winning the first argument than funding the second.

Sources

• Reshoring Initiative, 2024 Annual Report Including 1Q2025 Insights
• BigRep / Atomik Research survey of 250 US manufacturing decision-makers, reported via ManufacturingTomorrow (March 2026)
• Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Innovation Lightbulb: Reshoring’s Bottleneck, The Manufacturing Workforce”
• US Census Bureau, Value of Construction Put in Place Survey (manufacturing construction spending)
• US Foreign-Trade Zones Board, 86th Annual Report to Congress (2024 data)
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing employment data
• Institute for Supply Management, December 2025 Supply Chain Planning Forecast, reported via Manufacturing Dive
• National Association of Manufacturers, “EV, Battery Plants Being Canceled”
• Energy-Storage.News, “US battery gigafactories face delays and cancellations amid market uncertainty”