U.S. Industrial Robots Return to Growth

The International Federation of Robotics published preliminary results on June 18 showing that the U.S. industrial robot market returned to clear growth in 2025. Installations rose 11% year over year to 38,000 units. The figure is useful because it is not just a rebound headline. It suggests that automation demand is moving beyond its traditional automotive base into sectors where robotics has often been harder to deploy at scale.

The strongest signal comes from food manufacturing. IFR says robot adoption in that sector jumped 30%, putting it roughly level with metal and machinery and electrical-electronics, each at about 3,000 installations in 2025. Automotive is still the largest user, with 13,500 installations, but it was almost flat, only 1% below the previous year. In other words, the 2025 recovery does not look like a simple restart of spending by carmakers. It points to a broader need for flexible automation in production lines facing cost pressure, labor shortages, quality demands and traceability requirements.

IFR also highlights robot density, the number of operational industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees. The United States reached 307 robots per 10,000 employees, moving up to eighth place worldwide. That leaves the country behind highly automated manufacturing economies such as South Korea, Germany and Japan, but ahead of China on this density metric. Market size tells a different story: China installed 295,000 robots in 2024, representing 54% of global annual installations that year, and IFR estimates that China’s 2025 installations remain roughly ten times higher than the U.S. total.

That comparison is why the U.S. statistic is also a policy signal. The Association for Advancing Automation has presented a “Vision for a National Robotics Strategy” to lawmakers, proposing a federal robotics office, a national commission, tax incentives, workforce retraining, updated safety standards and public procurement favoring domestic robotics technology. The raw number, 38,000 robot installations, therefore sits inside a wider competition over manufacturing capacity. For robotics suppliers, the takeaway is practical: U.S. demand is improving, but the next phase will depend on making automation easier to justify and operate across a wider set of factories, not only inside the automotive sector.