IN Brief:
- Under-30 cardholders now account for more than a quarter of CSCS cards, up from 17% in 2021.
- Smart Check data also shows the share of skilled or advanced scanned cards rising above 39% by 2025.
- With tens of millions of scans now logged, live competence data is starting to shape workforce planning more directly.
CSCS data suggests the profile of the UK site workforce is shifting, with more than one in four cards now held by people under 30 and a larger share of scanned cards classed as skilled or advanced.
The latest figures put the under-30 share at 25.16% in 2025, up from 17% in 2021. That change points to movement in the age mix of people arriving on site, rather than a broad industry estimate. CSCS says Smart Check is producing a near real-time view of the workforce entering projects, giving contractors and clients a more immediate picture of who is turning up to work.
The quality signal has also strengthened. When Smart Check records began in 2023, 27% of scanned cards belonged to skilled or advanced workers. By 2025 that figure had risen to more than 39%, indicating that the workforce passing through site gates is not only younger in profile, but also carrying a higher proportion of competency-backed credentials.
That dataset is growing quickly. CSCS Group says Smart Check processed 34 million scans in 2025, across 118 service users and 26 IT partners, while the wider CSCS Alliance data pool now spans 37 member schemes, more than two million cardholders, and over 1,500 occupations. CSCS has also been positioning its digital skills passport and verification tools as part of the sector’s competence evidence base under the Building Safety Act.
For site delivery, the immediate implication is better visibility of labour mix, skills concentration, and potential shortages by trade and region. The age profile alone does not solve long-running productivity or retention issues, but it does challenge the assumption that site labour is simply getting older without replacement. A stronger flow of trainee, apprentice, and early-career entrants is now showing up in verified site-access data.
The more difficult question is whether that shift can be sustained as workloads fluctuate and recruitment pressure moves between sectors. For now, the numbers suggest the workforce is renewing itself more visibly than many in the industry had assumed, and that digital competence checking is beginning to give the sector a firmer evidence base for workforce planning.
