Bloomberg’s Brooke Sutherland published a analysis on September 25 with a striking title: robot installations outpaced human hiring at US factories in 2025. The data underneath it comes from the International Federation of Robotics’ World Robotics 2026 report, published on September 24, and the comparison is worth unpacking — because the fuller picture is more two-sided than the headline.
What the IFR numbers show
The IFR counts 38,400 industrial robots installed in the United States in 2025, a 12 percent year-on-year jump — the third-strongest year on record, behind only 2018 and 2022, and enough for the US to overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest robot market. Globally, factories installed over 600,000 new robots in 2025 and the operating stock hit a record 5 million units — we covered the global census last week.
Against that, Bloomberg’s framing: US manufacturing payrolls fell by roughly 93,000 jobs across 2025, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. A record robot year landing on top of a shrinking workforce is the kind of pairing that fuels the automation-anxiety narrative, and it is a genuinely fair reading of those two data points.
The part the headline leaves out
Here is where it gets interesting for anyone tracking the jobs story rather than the robot-count story. According to the BLS’s latest Employment Situation release, manufacturing employment has been climbing since the end of 2025: the sector added 16,000 jobs in August alone and is up 58,000 since a low in December 2025. FRED’s manufacturing payroll series (MANEMP) shows the trough at 12,580,000 in December 2025 rising to 12,638,000 by August 2026.
So the sequence runs: robots at a record, factory jobs down through 2025 — and then factory hiring turning up while automation spending keeps climbing. Two things can be true: automation is absorbing routine work in a sector with chronic labour shortages, and the sector is still adding workers. Robot adoption and factory hiring are not simple opposites; IFR itself attributes the US installation surge partly to reshoring and persistent labour shortages, with food-industry robot adoption up 30 percent in 2025 as producers struggled to find workers.
Why the distinction matters for workers
The “robots outpaced hiring” framing treats the two numbers as competing for the same jobs. The evidence increasingly points to a different arrangement: robots absorbing tasks in plants that cannot fill shifts, while employment stabilises and even grows in the shadow of record automation. IFR’s density data puts the US at 307 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers — eighth in the world, well behind South Korea’s 1,220 — so the US is nowhere near the automation saturation point where displacement arithmetic gets simpler.
For manufacturing workers in New Zealand, the read-across is indirect but real. NZ manufacturers face the same two forces: robots are spreading fastest where factories are short of people, and the roles being created alongside the machines — robot servicing, integration, supervising — skew technical. The lesson from the US numbers is less “robots took the jobs” and more “the jobs are changing shape faster than the headline numbers admit.” Countries that pair automation with technician training capture the new roles; countries that don’t, don’t.
FAQ
How many industrial robots did the US install in 2025? 38,400 units, a 12 percent increase on 2024 and the third-strongest year on record, according to the IFR’s World Robotics 2026 report. The total operating stock of robots in US factories is now the second-largest in the world.
Are robots causing manufacturing job losses in the US? The picture is mixed. Bloomberg noted 2025 robot installations outpaced factory hiring, with payrolls down roughly 93,000 that year. But BLS data shows manufacturing employment rising 58,000 since December 2025, including 16,000 in August 2026, even as automation spending continues.
Which country installs the most factory robots? China, by a wide margin: 354,000 of the world’s 600,000-plus installations in 2025 — 59 percent of the global total — driven by a decade-long national robotics strategy and factory labour shortages.
What does this mean for manufacturing workers? Demand is shifting toward roles that install, service and work alongside automated systems, while routine tasks shrink. The IFR attributes much of the US surge to labour shortages — factories automating work they cannot staff.
— CJ Murden, editor of Singularity.Kiwi. Former digital technologies teacher, author of AI-focused books. Writing with a New Zealand focus.
