High mortgage rates aren’t the only reason homeownership remains out of reach for many Americans.

Behind the scenes, homebuilders are grappling with an overlooked challenge — a shortage of skilled workers — that is slowing construction and making it harder to close the nation’s housing gap.

Builders say the labor shortage is creating a ripple effect throughout the housing market, delaying projects, raising construction costs and limiting the number of new homes coming online at a time when demand continues to outpace supply.

BIDEN’S ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION SURGE CAUSED HIGHER RENT AND HOME PRICES, FED STUDY FINDS

NAHB estimates government regulations add nearly $132,000 to the price of a typical new home. (Matthew Busch/Bloomberg/Getty Images / Getty Images)

“Labor is one of the largest and most expensive inputs when it comes to home production and land development,” Jim Tobin, president and CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, told Fox News Digital.

He said that every month, the construction industry is short by approximately 250,000 workers.

“It’s been as high as 400,000 jobs short when we were really cooking along a few years ago,” Tobin said, adding that the labor gap “is a persistent shortage.”

And the industry’s labor needs are only expected to grow in coming years.

THE KEY STRATEGY RED STATES ARE USING TO LOWER HOUSING COSTS REVEALED

Housing industry leaders say states that have prioritized homebuilding have been better positioned to accommodate population growth and economic expansion. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

A recent Home Builders Institute and National Association of Home Builders report estimates builders will need roughly 723,000 new workers annually to keep pace with demand and help close the nation’s 1.5 million-home housing gap.

The shortage is already affecting how quickly homes can be built. According to Home Builders Institute President and CEO Ed Brady, labor constraints are extending construction timelines and driving up costs.

ONE TYPE OF PROPERTY IS QUIETLY SAVING AMERICANS THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS

“This shortage adds nearly two extra months to building timelines, inflating costs and delaying delivery,” Brady told Fox News Digital.

Builders say replenishing the skilled trades pipeline is only part of the solution.

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An “Open House” sign in front of a home for sale in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, California on July 13, 2025.  (Eric Thayer/Bloomberg/Getty Images / Getty Images)

Tobin said many construction jobs do not require a four-year college degree and can provide stable, middle-class careers, but the home construction industry has struggled for years to attract enough workers to replace retiring tradespeople.

Wordle players searching for Sunday’s answer can find it here: the solution to puzzle #1849, released July 12, 2026, is CLACK, according to multiple outlets tracking the daily New York Times word game.

The five-letter word refers to a sharp, abrupt, rhythmic sound produced when two hard objects strike against each other rapidly, such as the noise of an old mechanical keyboard, colliding pool balls, or train wheels rolling over track joints. Puzzle trackers described Sunday’s word as a moderate challenge for solvers, noting that some players gravitated quickly toward the correct meaning while others were initially thrown off by words evoking similar sounds or unrelated concepts, including air travel, geometry and carpentry, before ultimately landing on the correct answer.

For those working through the puzzle before checking the solution, several structural clues were available to help narrow down the possibilities. The word contains a single vowel alongside four consonants, along with one repeated letter, and begins with the letter C. Puzzle guides also offered a wordplay-style hint describing the answer as “the signature noise produced by typing on an old-fashioned mechanical keyboard,” alongside its resemblance to words such as “snack,” “track” and “back,” given that it rhymes with each.

Wordle challenges players to guess a hidden five-letter word within six attempts, using color-coded tile feedback to indicate whether each guessed letter is correct and correctly placed, correct but misplaced, or absent from the word entirely. The game, created by software engineer Josh Wardle in 2021, was acquired by The New York Times the following year after surging in popularity, and has since become a fixture of the paper’s daily games lineup alongside titles such as Connections, Strands and the Mini Crossword.

Puzzle trackers offered a familiar set of strategic reminders for players working through Sunday’s word or preparing for future puzzles. Common advice includes opening with a word containing frequently used letters such as R, S, T, N and L to quickly surface useful information, testing different vowel placements early in the guessing process, and treating even an incorrect guess as useful data by paying close attention to which letters turn green, yellow or gray. Guides also cautioned against ruling out repeated letters too quickly, noting that Wordle answers occasionally reuse the same letter twice, as in past answers like SHEEP or BLOOM, a pattern Sunday’s answer, CLACK, also followed with its doubled C.

Players down to their final guesses were advised to avoid speculative attempts once the field of possibilities had narrowed significantly, instead favoring answers that satisfy every constraint established by prior feedback rather than guessing based on instinct alone. Analysts of the game’s daily difficulty patterns have generally noted that maintaining composure in the final one or two guesses, rather than rushing, tends to produce better outcomes than reactive guessing under pressure.

Saturday’s puzzle, #1848, carried the answer AVIAN, according to solution trackers, continuing a recent stretch of varied five-letter words spanning different categories and levels of difficulty. The Times maintains a full archive of past Wordle puzzles, allowing players who want extra practice, or who missed a previous day’s word, to revisit earlier solutions at their own pace.

Beyond the standard daily puzzle, Wordle’s broader ecosystem has continued to expand in recent years, inspiring a range of spinoff and companion games that build on its core mechanics. Among the more prominent examples is Worldle, a geography-based riff on the format in which players attempt to identify a country based on its outline shape, receiving distance-based feedback in kilometers after each guess, within the same six-attempt structure as the original game. Recent Worldle answers have included countries such as Ethiopia, Italy, Mali and Taiwan over the preceding week, according to puzzle trackers following that spinoff separately. Other Wordle-inspired games mentioned alongside Sunday’s puzzle updates included Octordle and Quordle, both of which challenge players to solve multiple hidden words simultaneously rather than just one.

The puzzle’s continued popularity nearly five years after its original release has been attributed in large part to its simplicity and shareability. Each day brings exactly one new word, with no ads interrupting the format, and players can share their results on social media through a grid of colored squares that reveals their guessing pattern without spoiling the actual answer for others who haven’t yet played. That shareable format helped fuel Wordle’s rapid rise in the early 2020s and has continued to sustain a large, dedicated daily audience in the years since.

The Times’ companion analysis tool, Wordle Bot, continues to offer players detailed statistical breakdowns of their performance on each day’s puzzle, including how efficiently a given guess eliminated remaining possibilities and how a player’s overall approach compares with the broader base of daily solvers. Data cited by puzzle trackers covering Sunday’s word did not include finalized average-guess figures at the time of publication, though the Times’ internal Wordlebot statistics for the previous day’s puzzle, AVIAN, showed a range of solving outcomes across the player base.

Players who did not solve Sunday’s puzzle were reminded by tracking outlets that a new Wordle puzzle becomes available every day at midnight in each player’s local time zone, meaning a missed word carries no bearing on future attempts and streak-conscious players can simply pick back up with the next day’s release. The Times has continued to expand its broader portfolio of daily puzzle offerings in recent years, part of a wider strategy aimed at keeping readers returning to its games platform on a consistent basis, with Wordle remaining the most widely recognized entry point into that ecosystem.

Monday’s Wordle puzzle is set to reset at midnight local time, continuing the game’s unbroken daily cadence. Players looking for an early head start on hints can typically expect a new round of guides and clues to appear across puzzle-tracking sites shortly after the transition, following the same structural format used for Sunday’s reveal.