Summarizing IFR Service Robot Figures for Your Board

What the 2026 IFR figures say in brief

IFR published its World Robotics 2026 Service Robots report on 30 September 2026. Its headline figure is that global sales of professional service robots rose 24% in 2025 to almost 250,000 units. That is IFR's own figure, reported in its press release, and it is the sentence a board should hear first.

The largest professional application was transportation and logistics, at 117,500 units, up 21% and about 47% of the professional market. Scale, pace and mix fit into one short paragraph, which makes them easy to brief.

If the memo can carry only one growth figure, make it the 24%, and attach the qualifiers in the sections that follow. A bare percentage invites readers to treat it as a measure of demand across the economy, which the supplier survey does not measure.

Which other figures belong in a board memo?

Four more figures from the same report help a leadership group see the shape of the market. Each rests on a different base, so each deserves its own line in the memo.

• Medical robots rose 19% in 2025.
• Surgical robots rose 57%, to 8,400 units.
• Consumer service robots rose 37%, to about 34.2 million units.
• About 7,000 full size humanoids, above 140 cm, were sold for commercial and professional use in 2025, and IFR treats the segment as an emerging market.

What does the supplier survey basis mean for the numbers?

The figures come from IFR's own survey of suppliers, not from end users. The 2026 edition is the 26th run of that survey, with a statistical population of 1,001 companies worldwide, and its figures cover 238 service robot suppliers.

In plain terms, the numbers record what suppliers sold. They do not say how many robots are working in a given hospital, hotel or warehouse, and they do not measure how those robots perform after installation. A memo that calls them deployments has moved past what was measured.

Supplier sales are a useful read on supply side activity. Say so in the same sentence as the number, so no reader has to guess the base.

Why IFR figures need care before you compare years

The brief behind this memo points to IFR advice against comparing figures across its reports. I could not confirm that exact wording in the IFR documents checked for this piece. The documents do show that the method moves between editions, which is reason enough to check before charting a trend.

IFR's 2026 definitions document says the institute adopted the newer ISO definition from World Robotics 2024. Medical robots moved from an application group to a robot category, while the statistical classification did not change and the old AP6 label was kept. IFR's 2025 sources document also says service robot statistics deliberately deviate from ISO definitions in specific details.

Sample size moved too. The 2026 figures cover 238 suppliers. A secondary outlet, Rocking Robots, reported a sample of 294 suppliers for the 2025 edition and said that edition should not be compared directly with earlier ones. I could not confirm that wording in an IFR document, so label it as a secondary claim or leave it out.

How should the memo word the figure?

A usable memo line names the source, the date, the base and the limit in one sentence. For example: According to IFR's World Robotics 2026 Service Robots report, released on 30 September 2026, global sales of professional service robots rose 24% in 2025 to almost 250,000 units. These are supplier sales from IFR's survey, not a count of robots in operation.

Put the source link in an appendix, not in the sentence itself. Then add one comparability line: this memo does not chart these figures against earlier IFR editions, because definitions and sample sizes changed.

What should stay out of the board pack?

Several tempting moves overstate the data. Do not extend the 2025 growth into a forecast for your own sector. Do not turn unit counts into revenue estimates, because the research behind this piece verified no prices or market values for these robots.

Do not present a supplier survey as proof of what a given site will save or how many staff hours it will return. Label any local reasoning as your own assumption, and name its inputs so the board can test them.

Where does a site level number come from?

IFR's figures describe a market. A board also needs a number for its own floors, and that comes from a site assessment. Service Robot Co. is a vendor neutral robot integrator for US businesses. We select robots across manufacturers, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service each unit through a nationwide US engineer network.

We offer robot lease options only. A three year lease carries one fixed robot lease payment, quoted after a site assessment, so leadership gets a figure tied to its own facility rather than to a survey of suppliers.