Sensors grow fastest among components in $14.8 billion HVAC controls forecast

On November 2, 2026, Research and Markets announced that a report on the advanced HVAC control market had been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. It puts the global advanced HVAC control market at about $4.7 billion in 2025 and roughly $14.8 billion by 2035. The 2030 marker is $8.67 billion. Growth runs at a 13% compound annual rate through 2030, then eases to 11.3% for the five years after.

For a facilities director or controls contractor, the more practical detail sits underneath the total: which pieces of a control system the report expects to grow fastest, and what it says slows buildings down.

The report puts the advanced HVAC control market at approximately $4.7 billion in 2025. Growth since 2020 came at a compound annual rate of 13.8%. That run was carried by attention to indoor air quality, green building certifications, rising energy costs and retrofit spending. Two things held adoption back: high installation and integration costs, and the difficulty of connecting new controls to legacy building systems. For the next decade, the report expects demand to come from smart buildings, IoT connectivity, commercial construction, data center expansion and stricter energy codes.

The release, issued as a paid press release through GlobeNewswire, names Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Carrier and Siemens as the companies leading the industry. The report covers a historic period from 2020 to 2025 and forecasts to 2030 and 2035. That is why its growth story comes in three five-year blocks: 13.8%, then 13%, then 11.3%.

One market, very different price tags

Put the baselines other research houses publish next to Research and Markets' $4.7 billion and the spread is hard to miss. Market Research Future puts the 2025 market at $62.6 billion, up from $60.09 billion in 2024. Its report was last updated September 17, 2026, and projects growth to $94.3 billion by 2035 at 4.18% a year.

The other firms land somewhere in between, or below. Future Market Insights puts the broader HVAC control system market at $22.9 billion in 2025 and $25.1 billion in 2026, reaching $63.3 billion by 2036 at 9.7% a year. Market.us, in a report published in July 2024, sized the advanced HVAC control market at $18.7 billion in 2023 and expects $32.8 billion by 2033 at 9.2% a year. Prophecy Market Insights, publishing in May 2024, valued it at $3.6 billion in 2024, growing 8.8% a year to $7.7 billion by 2034.

Research and Markets divides its market by component (controllers, sensors and actuators) and by technology, including building management systems, variable refrigerant flow, smart thermostats and demand-controlled ventilation. Market Research Future segments by protocol (BACnet, Modbus, LonTalk, KNX) and by end user. Market.us treats new installations and retrofits separately. Future Market Insights covers the broader HVAC control system category in a November 3 release on openPR.

Prophecy's cut is the narrowest of the group: programmable versus smart controls, commercial versus residential applications. It and Research and Markets sit at the bottom of the range. That pattern suggests the totals track what each firm counts as a control more than any real disagreement about the same purchases.

Growth rates don't line up either. Market Research Future projects 4.18% a year from 2025 to 2035, while Research and Markets projects 13% a year from 2025 to 2030. The other three forecasts sit between 8.8% and 9.7%. So Research and Markets pairs one of the smallest starting figures with the highest near-term growth rate in the set.

The reports do agree on who the players are. Market Research Future's list of major players includes Johnson Controls, Honeywell, Siemens and Carrier Global, the same four the Research and Markets release puts at the head of the industry. It also names Schneider Electric, Trane Technologies, Lennox International, Daikin Industries and Mitsubishi Electric. The firms argue far more about how big the market is than about who sells into it.

For a facilities team using a market statistic to justify a building management system budget, or a vendor putting one in a pitch deck, the defensible version quotes the figure together with its source, its base year and its scope.

Where the growth lands inside a building

In Research and Markets' segment data, controllers held 40.3% of the market in 2025, about $1.89 billion, but sensors are the fastest-growing component, at 16.5% a year through 2030. Centralized controls held 67.4%, about $3.12 billion. Distributed controls are growing fastest, at 15.6% a year, which the report links to demand for flexible, scalable control setups.

According to the report, sensor growth comes from demand for accurate environmental monitoring and automated system response. Among technologies, building management systems had the largest share in 2025 at 42.3%, or about $1.99 billion. The report projects the fastest growth of any technology for smart thermostats.

What a sensor actually does explains why it leads the growth table. HVAC365, an online HVAC equipment seller that summarized the report, describes connected sensors collecting temperature, humidity and occupancy data and feeding it to cloud monitoring platforms that send alerts and tune system performance. Demand-controlled ventilation applies the same idea room by room. Sensors detect occupancy and adjust fresh air intake, so air is supplied only when it is needed.

The trends Research and Markets lists run on the same data. It names artificial intelligence, connected building ecosystems, cloud computing and big data platforms as supports for real-time monitoring and automated optimization. In industrial settings, it says, Industry 4.0 technologies enable predictive maintenance and continuous equipment monitoring. Each of those depends on a steady stream of readings from the building, which suggests sensor spending could be the entry ticket to the analytics layer rather than a purchase that stands on its own.

Future Market Insights reaches a similar picture from a different angle. In its 2026 figures, sensors and thermostats make up 41.4% of component demand. Under that broader definition the sensing layer is already the largest component group as well as the fastest-growing one.

Central platforms and new builds still dominate

There is a case against reading too much into the fast-growing segments. Centralized controls accounted for 67.4% of Research and Markets' 2025 market, and distributed controls are forecast to grow 15.6% a year through 2030 from that smaller base. Future Market Insights draws a similar picture from different data: integrated control systems make up 47.8% of system demand in 2026, and new construction makes up 58.6% of implementation demand, ahead of retrofits.

The technology split points the same way. Building management systems, which HVAC365 describes as connecting HVAC components under centralized control, are the largest technology segment. Future Market Insights describes integrated systems as centralized platforms that coordinate heating, cooling and ventilation across multiple zones and give facility managers better visibility into building performance.

Seen that way, the figures suggest many controls decisions could be made at the design stage. Future Market Insights says developers are increasingly building automated HVAC controls into design and construction, and that integrating controls at that stage can reduce the need for later retrofitting. It also reports that building owners and facility managers are replacing conventional manual thermostats with connected digital zone controllers, and that office landlords, hospital facility directors and industrial plant managers are adopting automated controls that regulate heating and cooling based on occupancy, operating schedules and indoor conditions.

Future Market Insights adds that automated scheduling, zone-based temperature control and occupancy-responsive operation matter most in offices, hospitals, hotels and industrial facilities where occupancy varies. Those are the buildings where a fixed schedule wastes the most heating and cooling.

For existing portfolios, HVAC365 suggests property managers pilot a building management system or add a sensor layer in one building before expanding. That approach fits the segment data. The sensor layer is the fast-growing add-on, and a single-building trial is where the legacy integration problem the report flags would show up first, before it gets multiplied across a portfolio.

Codes and rebates do some of the selling

Research and Markets counts stringent energy-efficiency regulations and building codes among the forces pushing organizations to modernize HVAC operations. Market.us cites a specific example: the U.S. Department of Energy introduced new energy conservation standards in 2023 aimed at reducing energy consumption across HVAC systems. Market Research Future names regulatory compliance and rising demand for energy efficiency as growth drivers in Asia-Pacific.

HVAC365 adds the incentive side. Many utilities offer rebates for smart thermostats and demand-response systems, though programs vary by location. Efficiency standards such as SEER2, it says, reward controls that track and document system performance through logs. That makes a sensor and logging layer compliance paperwork as well as an energy tool, which could make the fast-growing segments easier to defend in a capital plan.

Regulation works in both directions, though. Prophecy Market Insights names high capital and R&D costs, along with burdensome regulatory clearances, as the main things holding back the global market.

Contractors and the technician gap

Research and Markets lists practical restraints for the coming decade: tariffs and trade disruption, cybersecurity and data privacy risks, and a lack of skilled technicians and system integrators. On data, HVAC365 points out that controls in multi-site buildings collect and share information, which means privacy and basic cybersecurity policies should be part of the plan from day one.

The labor constraint falls hardest on the group with the most to gain. HVAC365's summary of the report puts HVAC contractors as the fastest-growing end-user segment, with their use of smart controls projected to grow 19.3% a year through 2030. Market Research Future also tracks HVAC contractors as a distinct end user, alongside building owners and facility managers.

Much of that opportunity is in services, not boxes. HVAC365 points to bundles of commissioning, setup and ongoing monitoring as new revenue beyond equipment sales. For contractors selling setup and monitoring as a service bundle, the model only works if the labor is there.

The numbers make the squeeze plain. Contractor adoption at 19.3% a year outpaces every component and control-type growth rate in the report, including sensors at 16.5% and distributed controls at 15.6%. That suggests the technician and integrator shortage would bite hardest exactly where demand is rising fastest.