New market analysis from CEDIA, conducted in partnership with The Farnsworth Group and presented at CEDIA Expo 2026, sizes the U.S. residential technology integration industry at $33.8 billion, a figure built from the bottom up on real, reported revenue rather than a top-down guess. Home networking, distributed audio, and lighting/shading emerge as the largest product categories, while a small population of large firms continues to capture an outsized share of industry dollars.
The study is the first of its kind released under Ryan Bardach, CEDIA’s new director of research.
The 2026 Professional US Smart Home Market Analysis draws on 287 completed interviews with custom electronics installers, security/alarm installers, home network/IT professionals, electrical contractors, and remodelers/general contractors, fielded between May 26 and June 30, 2026. To qualify, respondents had to influence purchasing or installation decisions, spend at least half their time on AV, networking, or security work, derive at least 21% of their business from residential projects, and have completed at least three residential technology installations in the past year.
Sizing the Market
CEDIA and The Farnsworth Group built the estimate from respondents’ own reported residential revenue across 13 categories, then weighted the results by firm size (small: 1 to 5 employees, medium: 6 to 20, and large: more than 20) before scaling each tier to its estimated population of U.S. firms. The total firm count started from CE Pro’s directory of core AV integrators, supplemented with Bureau of Labor Statistics establishment data and adjacent trades (electricians, IT companies, security dealers, and remodelers) that do meaningful integration work.
The resulting $33.8 billion splits roughly evenly across firm size tiers in dollar terms: $9.7 billion from small firms, $9.5 billion from medium firms, and $14.6 billion from large firms. But the distribution of firms tells a different story. Large firms represent only about 15% of the roughly 23,000 establishments in the market, yet they account for 43% of total revenue. Small firms make up 65% of establishments but generate just 29% of the dollars.
By category, home networking leads at 15% of the market (about $5.2 billion), followed by distributed audio at 11% ($3.8 billion) and lighting/shading at 11% ($3.7 billion). Integrated control systems, media rooms, dedicated home cinema, security systems, design services, and recurring monthly revenue (RMR) services each capture roughly 7% to 9% of the market.
A Mixed Operating Environment
The research paints a business climate defined by cross-currents. Housing activity has softened and construction material costs are climbing again. The report notes that tariffs have pushed up prices for several key building materials even as broader inflation has moderated. On the labor side, industry unemployment has historically run above the national rate during slow months but tightens considerably during peak season, pointing to a persistently constrained pool of skilled trades workers.
Despite those headwinds, sentiment among integrators remains upbeat. Nearly 78% of firms expect revenue to increase over the next 12 months, while only 4% anticipate a decline. Among those expecting growth, the leading driver by a wide margin is simply more customer demand, followed by more homeowners adding technology and firms expanding their service and product offerings. Non-integrators and medium/large firms are especially likely to cite rising demand and AI as growth drivers. Of the smaller group expecting revenue to fall, the leading culprits are economic conditions, inflation, and tariff-driven material costs, external factors rather than industry-specific ones.
Direct client referrals remain the single biggest source of new business (cited by 76% of firms), followed by general contractors (55%), interior designers (25%), and architects (16%). Referrals directly from clients skew higher among smaller firms and integrators, while general-contractor relationships matter more to medium and large firms.
Asked about their biggest opportunity for the year ahead, integrators pointed most often to lighting, followed closely by AI integration and broader product diversification. On the challenge side, one issue dwarfs all others: staffing skilled workers was named by 27% of respondents as their most significant business challenge, nearly three times the next most common answer (finding new clients or staying current on technology, tied at 8% each).
AI Adoption Accelerates on Both Sides of the Business
For the first time, the study asked firms directly about artificial intelligence, and the results suggest AI has moved from buzzword to daily reality faster on the operations side than on the demand side. Seventy-nine percent of firms report increased use of AI in running their own businesses over the past year, compared with 58% reporting increased customer requests for AI-related products or features. Large firms and non-integrators are more likely to report growth in customer-driven AI demand, while small firms are more likely to say they don’t use AI-related products at all.
What Firms Are Installing
Home networking is not just the largest revenue category. It’s also the most commonly installed system, cited by 88% of firms in the past year, ahead of integrated control systems (77%), media rooms (77%), distributed audio (76%), security systems (72%), outdoor AV (70%), and lighting/shading (70%). Integrators are significantly more likely than non-integrators to have installed the top systems, reflecting the added complexity of those projects.
Within whole-house integration projects specifically, audio, home networking, and video form the consistent core: each is “always” or “frequently” included in the vast majority of projects, regardless of firm type, size, or region. Lighting, security/surveillance, shading, access control, HVAC/climate integration, and voice control show up less universally, and are notably more common among non-integrators and larger firms than among smaller integrator-only shops.
On the business-software side, QuickBooks (45%) and Excel (34%) remain the most widely used tools for customer quoting, well ahead of dedicated design/proposal platforms like D-Tools Cloud (19%), Visio (18%), and ProjX360 (11%), though many firms report stacking multiple tools together.
Brand Leadership Concentrated at the Top
Across most categories, brand preference concentrates around a small set of familiar names, while a handful of categories remain genuinely competitive. In whole-house control, Control4 is the clear leader, named a top-three installed brand by 63% of qualifying respondents, followed by Crestron (43%), Savant (33%), and Josh.ai (32%). Control4’s strength is concentrated among integrators, while Crestron over-indexes with large firms.
Lutron dominates both lighting control systems (76% top-three share, more than double second-place Control4’s 53%) and lighting fixtures, where it leads DMF Lighting 67% to 49%. Lutron also tops motorized shading and window treatments at 77%, with Crestron a distant second at 34%.
The report notes that brand preference splits meaningfully by company type: integrators more often install Control4, Sonance, Ubiquiti, Sony, Epson, and IC Realtime, while non-integrators more frequently reach for JBL, Honeywell, Nest, and Ring, a pattern consistent with non-integrators’ broader focus on more accessible, less custom-configured product lines.
A Snapshot of the Channel
The typical respondent profile underscores how established this research base is: nearly three-quarters of respondents have more than 10 years in the industry, 59% are their firm’s sole decision-maker on product purchasing, and 52% of firms report earning 81-100% of their integration revenue from residential projects (96% earn at least 41%). Geographically, the South accounted for the largest share of respondents (43%), followed by the West (24%), Northeast (17%), and Midwest (15%), roughly tracking regional population distribution with some overrepresentation in the South.
CEDIA and The Farnsworth Group plan to track these metrics over successive waves of research, which should allow the channel to begin watching category share, brand preference, and business sentiment shift over time rather than viewing the market as a single snapshot.
