Key takeaways
- The 24 percent growth describes a sample of 238 suppliers, not the whole market.
- IFR says its figures are not projected to the full industry.
- Service robot totals can include industrial AMRs, so match definitions before comparing.
- The survey covers 2024 and 2025 only, so forecasts need a separate source.
- Use industry data for context and your own floor data for the decision.
What the figures measure
The International Federation of Robotics reports that professional service robots sold almost 250,000 units in 2025, up 24 percent on 2024, according to its World Robotics 2026 Service Robots executive summary. The headline is accurate, but the scope is narrow, and the scope is what decides whether a slide holds up.
The number describes what a defined group of suppliers reported. It is not a census of every service robot shipped, and IFR states that the data is not projected to the whole industry. Keep that boundary visible wherever the figure appears.
Why a sample of 238 suppliers
Few national statistics bodies collect service robot figures, so the data came largely from the manufacturers themselves. According to IFR's questionnaire walkthrough, UNECE and IFR gathered it directly through regular mailings organized by application area.
The survey went to a statistical population of 1,001 companies worldwide, and the report's figures rest on a sample of 238 service robot suppliers. IFR notes that sample composition varies from year to year, so a growth rate can partly reflect who responded as well as what the market did.
What each supplier is asked to report
Participation requires eight numbers: robots sold and fleet size of robots provided to customers, broken down by application and type of movement, for both 2024 and 2025. The survey is backward-looking. It contains no forward-looking items, and its forecasts come from a separate survey.
Definitions carry weight too. IFR generally follows ISO 8373:2021, with some deviations, and it counts industrially used AMRs as service robots. A warehouse AMR can sit inside a service robot total, so compare it carefully against industrial robot counts before you put the two side by side.
Which numbers are safe to quote
The 24 percent headline is safe to quote when its scope travels with it: professional service robots, 2025, a sample of 238 suppliers, not projected to the whole industry. The same caveat applies to segment figures. The English release carried by UzDaily reports medical robots up 19 percent and consumer service robots up 37 percent.
Put the sample size in the same sentence as the growth rate. A reader who hears 24 percent alone will assume the entire market grew by that much, and correcting that assumption after a meeting costs far more than a clause written in advance.
Four rules for internal business cases
Leadership decks tend to stall on one unqualified number. These habits keep the argument defensible.
- Name the segment, the year, and the 238-supplier sample in the same sentence as any growth rate.
- Label forecasts as a separate source, since the IFR service survey itself reports 2024 and 2025 figures only.
- Confirm definitions before comparing service robot counts with industrial robot counts, because AMRs can fall into the service total.
- Ask IFR whether a total is projected or simply summed from respondents, because the sources reviewed for this piece do not say.
Reading vendor claims that cite IFR
Vendors often open with a market figure to show momentum. A global total can support a category argument, but it says nothing about one product's uptime, cleaning coverage, or staff hours returned. Ask for the vendor's own deployment counts, dated and tied to a named site type.
Ask what the vendor's number counts. Units sold, units in operation, and units offered in fleet arrangements are separate measures, and the IFR survey tracks sales and fleet size as distinct items. Blending them makes a story grow faster than the evidence does.
Where a lease decision actually starts
Customers often arrive with an industry growth rate in hand, and that is a reasonable place to open the conversation. The decision rests on the floor itself: square footage, the shifts that need covering, and the route a unit would run. Service Robot Co. is an OEM-neutral integrator for US businesses, and we lease robots through financing on a 3-year lease.
We select the right robot across manufacturers, then deploy, integrate, train, and service every unit through our nationwide US engineer network. The figure that belongs in a leadership deck is a fixed robot lease payment quoted after a site assessment, not a national total. Service robot leasing decisions hold up best when site data is the evidence.
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