1 in 3 cleaning contractors plan to add robot floor machines

About 1 in 3 commercial cleaning contractors in the US either run robotic floor equipment already or plan to add it in the next 12 months. That is the headline number from the 2026 Building Service Contractor Market Study, run by Contracting Profits magazine and the Building Service Contractors Association International, and it is roughly double the share from the 2025 study.

The study came out in May. It went back into circulation on September 15, when the floor care supplier Nassco published a review of it aimed at facility managers. The number is worth a second look, because it comes from the people who clean commercial buildings for a living, not the people who sell robots.

The numbers

The survey went out to contractors between March 9 and April 6, 2026 and drew 181 responses, with a margin of error of plus or minus 7.2%. These are mostly small and local businesses. Just under half serve a single local market, and about 57% have 50 or fewer employees.

Asked what technology they have implemented or plan to add in the next 12 months, 31.86% said robotic floor equipment. Another 14.16% said robotic carpet equipment. For comparison, 69.91% named scheduling and timekeeping software, so robots are still well behind the office tools, but they are no longer a fringe answer.

The reasons sit a page later in the report:

• 72.54% expect wage and salary demands to rise this year, and not one respondent expects them to fall
• 69.01% expect the overall cost of cleaning to go up
• 44.60% expect labor challenges to get worse
• 38.30% expect clients to ask for more automation and technology in their contracts, a jump of nearly 13 points from 2025

Nassco's review is careful about what these figures do not show, and it is right to be. They do not say how many buildings run an autonomous scrubber today, and they do not prove labor pressure is what is driving the purchases. They show contractors planning around rising wages and a tight labor pool, and a third of them putting a robot in that plan.

What the customer wants

One more figure matters for anyone who buys cleaning. Asked what is most important to their customers, 46.75% of contractors said a healthy, sanitary and safe building, 25.97% said a clean appearance, and 25.32% said a low price. Floor care is still the core of the work: 98.03% of contractors strip and refinish floors, and 97.99% clean carpet.

That is the job a robot scrubber is built for. It does the same route the same way every night, and it does not skip the back hallway when a shift runs short.

What this means for a building in Utah

If you manage a building in Salt Lake County or Utah County, expect this to come up the next time your janitorial contract is out for bid. It tends to come up one of 2 ways.

The first is a contractor who brings the robot. The machine is theirs, it is in their price, and they run it. That is simple, but you are paying for it inside a monthly number you cannot see into, and if the contractor leaves, the robot leaves with them.

The second is the building owning the machine and the contractor or in-house crew running it. That is the model we sell. A CC1 Pro scrubber is $24,000 on our published price list, with RoboCare service at $240 a month, and the MT1 sweeper for larger hard floors is $19,000. The robot stays with the building, and the floor gets cleaned the same way no matter who holds the contract.

Neither is right for every site. The honest test is the one Nassco lands on too: count the hours that go to repeatable floor routes each week. If a lot of your cleaning budget is a person walking a scrubber up and down the same corridors, a robot has something to take over. If most of the work is restrooms, break rooms and detail cleaning, it has less, and nobody should tell you otherwise.

Put the question in your next RFP either way. Ask every bidder whether they plan to use robotic floor equipment on your site, who owns it, and what happens to the machine and the price if they do not renew. A third of them are already thinking about it.

What to watch

The next edition of this study, and whether that 32% turns into robots actually on floors rather than plans. Watch your own renewal too. If 38% of contractors are right that clients will start asking for automation in contracts, it is better to be the building that wrote the terms than the one that accepted them.

Robots in this story, sold and serviced from Provo: CC1 Pro floor scrubber · MT1 sweeper