A bricklayer's week in Tulum fell from 6,000 pesos to 3,000

Tulum's construction slowdown has reached the payroll. A bricklayer who cleared 5,000 to 6,000 pesos a week during the building boom now takes work at around 3,000, according to the CROC.

Claudio Cortés Méndez, municipal leader of the Confederación Revolucionaria de Obreros y Campesinos in Tulum, gave that figure this week, along with a count of what remains of the boom on the ground. "If you see four or five projects, that is a lot," he said, against the 40 or 50 that were spoken of at the peak. Both numbers are the union's reading of the town, not a tally of building permits.

The reading matters to people who never set foot on a site. Construction and tourism carried employment in Tulum through the expansion years, and both are soft at once. Federal statistics do not measure Tulum on its own, but for the state around it, they point to where the union is pointing.

This publication reported in April that the FESOC union put local construction at 30 to 40 percent of its usual capacity, with members on standby waiting for assignments. What has changed since is the price of the work itself.

What the Tulum construction slowdown pays a bricklayer now

Cortés Méndez said a skilled bricklayer could take home 5,000 to 6,000 pesos a week when the market was moving. Some are now accepting around 3,000 to keep an income coming in, a reduction of 40 to 50 percent on the figures he cited for the peak.

The legal floor sits below that. Tulum falls within the general minimum-wage zone, where the professional minimum for a journeyman bricklayer is 363.44 pesos per day in 2026, roughly 2,181 pesos for a six-day week. Quintana Roo Hoy reported in January that a bricklayer's helper in Tulum was earning close to 2,000 pesos a week, often with no contract and no social security.

Three thousand pesos a week clears the legal floor. It also works out to about 13,000 pesos a month, against an average asking price of 19,066 pesos across the 113 long-term rentals advertised for Tulum on Vivanuncios on September 2.

One confederation, two versions of the same wage

The CROC has published a different account of construction pay this year, and the two do not point the same way.

In remarks reported on August 18 by the Heraldo de México edition for Quintana Roo, Víctor Guzmán Hernández, the confederation's construction and transport coordinator in the state, said a bricklayer who used to earn 4,000 to 5,000 pesos a week was now asking for 8,000, and treated the increase as a cost problem for companies already short of cash. Two weeks later, Cortés Méndez describes workers in Tulum signing on for half of what they once made.

The two statements measure different things. One is what crews are demanding across the state, the other is what individual workers in one municipality are willing to sign for. Neither has been checked against payroll or IMSS records, and neither union figure has been published with a methodology.

INEGI puts state construction output down 20.3 percent in June

The official numbers arrive with a lag, and they arrive for the state rather than the municipality.

In June, the production value of construction companies in Quintana Roo fell 20.3 percent against June 2025, according to the National Survey of Construction Companies published by INEGI. Total personnel in the sector dropped by 9.6 percent, and hours worked fell by 8.2 percent. Real average pay for those still employed edged up 0.2 percent.

Nationally, the same survey recorded production up 8.0 percent, personnel up 1.1 percent and hours up 2.4 percent. Quintana Roo is moving against the country.

A second federal source counts people rather than companies. INEGI's employment survey recorded about 99,388 construction workers in Quintana Roo during the second quarter of 2026, down from 107,773 in the same quarter of 2025. That is 8,385 fewer people in the sector, in a state where informal employment reached 45 percent of the workforce over the same three months.

Dump trucks, suppliers and the projects that never started

Cortés Méndez named the volqueteros first among those affected, before the bricklayers. Material haulers are paid per load, and loads stop the moment a site does.

Statewide, the CROC has described the freeze in wider terms. Guzmán Hernández told Noticaribe on August 17 that more than half of the state's construction workers had returned to their home states, that 70 percent of large projects were halted and that 90 percent of Tulum's developments remained unfinished or unable to start. He did not expect a reactivation before January of next year.

His own counts of what survives have varied by outlet. Noticaribe quoted him as saying 50 to 70 projects are still running statewide with minimal crews. The Heraldo, published a day later, reported that 350 to 370 workers were operating with minimum personnel. The confederation has not reconciled the two, and has separately put the number of people indirectly affected, through suppliers, haulers, and concession holders, above 250,000 without breaking the figure down.

What the union has been consistent about is the ask. It has requested that the three levels of government cut permit processing times and give local companies, unions, and haulers preference over organizations brought in from outside, with a reference to CATEM and the works executed by the Defense Ministry. Tulum's dump truck operators made the same argument on the street in July, when they drove a convoy through the municipality during a presidential visit.

Hotels at 56 percent and 70 shops closed this year

The other engine is running at a similar speed. For the week of August 15 to 21, the Quintana Roo tourism information system put Tulum's hotel occupancy at 56.4 percent, a fraction above the state average of 56.1.

Sergio Canto Contreras, the municipality's director general of inspection, told La Jornada Maya on July 28 that roughly 70 businesses in Tulum had closed during the year, most of them due to temporary suspensions, and blamed the economic slowdown, high commercial rents, and the low season.

The professional side of construction reads the same market. The Colegio de Ingenieros y Arquitectos de Tulum estimated in May that building activity had fallen 40 to 50 percent in recent months, and its president, Jesús Hernández Valencia, tied that directly to the state of tourism. He did not expect a recovery before 2027.

The permits nobody has counted

Three numbers would settle the argument, and none of them is public for Tulum.

• Building permits issued by the municipality this year, compared with last year.
• Square meters authorized for construction in the same period.
• Construction jobs registered with the IMSS inside the municipality.

Until those figures are published, the count of active building sites in Tulum comes from the people standing on them, and the wage comes from whoever is still hiring. Cortés Méndez said he expects the local economy to recover gradually and new projects to bring workers back. His confederation's state coordinator has already put a month on that hope, and it is January of next year.

Have you seen construction work slow down in your part of Tulum, and what has it meant for your household? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.