Industry overview
The Construction sector across Belgium comprises approximately 142,700 enterprises employing about 221,028 people and generating €95.2 bn in net turnover in 2022. The average enterprise size is 2 employees per firm. This is a useful yardstick when assessing whether your own operation sits within the typical scale band of the sector.
Profitability
With a healthy operating margin of 11.3% of revenue in 2022, the sector reports €10.7 bn of gross operating surplus (Eurostat's EBITDA-equivalent, before depreciation). This figure provides the headline benchmark against which an individual operator can sanity-check their own bottom line, values significantly below indicate cost or pricing pressure, those above suggest competitive advantage worth defending.
Cost structure
Cost of revenue dominates the Construction P&L at 76.2% of turnover, reflecting the high material and input content of activities in this sector. Personnel costs account for 13.2%, with energy purchases adding 1.2%. Procurement efficiency and contract management are therefore the two strongest profit levers for operators in this segment.
Productivity & human capital
Each employee in the Construction sector generates approximately €273,000 of net turnover against a labour cost of €24,000, yielding a productivity-to-cost ratio of 11.4. Value added per employee stands at €105,000 This is a headline figure to compare against individual firm performance when judging whether headcount is creating proportional value.
Trend & trajectory
Over the period 2010 to 2022 the operating margin moved from 10.4% to 11.3% (+0.9 percentage points), an encouraging upward trajectory. Sectors with stable or improving margins tend to reflect successful pass-through of input costs and disciplined capacity management; declining margins typically point to either over-supply or a structural cost squeeze that warrants strategic review.