US Industrial Robot Installations Return to Double-Digit Growth
38,000 units were installed in 2025, an 11% rise, lifting US robot density to 307 per 10,000 manufacturing employees — still a quarter of South Korea's.
The International Federation of Robotics reported on 18 June 2026 that 38,000 industrial robots were installed in the United States during 2025, an 11% increase year on year and a return to double-digit growth.
The sector mix is the more interesting part. Automotive remained the largest adopter at 13,500 units, though 1% below its 2024 result. The food industry surged roughly 30% to about 3,000 units, with metal and machinery and electrical and electronics each also around 3,000. A flat automotive number alongside sharp growth in food is a different pattern from the one that has driven US robotics for decades, and IFR president Takayuki Ito attributes the rebound to reshoring, labour shortages and demand for flexible automation in food production.
Robot density — installed robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees — reached 307 in the US, moving it up two places to eighth worldwide. The comparison figures put that in proportion: South Korea 1,220, Germany 449, Japan 446, China 166.
Those numbers reward a moment's care. Density is a ratio, so a country with a large manufacturing workforce can be heavily automated in absolute terms and unremarkable per capita. China installed 295,000 units in 2024 for a 54% global market share, roughly ten times US annual volume, while sitting at 166 per 10,000 employees.
For an automation integrator the useful signal is the food industry number. Food and beverage has historically been a hard sector to automate — wet environments, washdown requirements, deformable products, high mix, thin margins — and 30% growth suggests the machines and the end effectors have got good enough for work that used to defeat them. That is where the near-term project pipeline is, and it asks for a different skill set from the automotive body shop that most robotics experience was built in.