The American Red List · edition 2026-1

The four categories

What each category means, and every trade currently in it. The categories are produced by a published rule with thresholds fixed in advance; none of them is a judgment made case by case.

A trade at serious risk of ceasing to be passed on. The national base is small enough that the loss of a few practitioners ends it, and no functioning training route was located — either no registered apprenticeship sponsor at all, or so few that a route exists on paper and not in fact. Where a credential series exists, it is falling.

A trade with enough practitioners to pass on the work today, and serious reasons to doubt it will still have them. The base is shrinking, or the projected ten-year change is negative, or the training route has thinned to a handful of sponsors nationally. Endangered is not a prediction that the trade will go; it is a statement that nothing currently in the data prevents it.

A trade the rule could not categorize, because no federal occupation series reaches it at any level of detail. There is no employment count to threshold, no projection and no sponsor count. This is a finding, not a gap. A trade invisible to every federal instrument is one no policy, funding stream or workforce program is counting either, and that is frequently why it is nearly gone.

A trade in which enough people are working, and enough are being trained, that transmission to the next generation is not presently in question. Currently viable does not mean risk-free. It means the rule found nothing in the federal data that fires. A trade can be viable in aggregate and critical in a region, a technique or a shop, and the assessment operates at none of those resolutions.