The world’s leading IoT analyst firm, Transforma Insights, estimates that global smart meters will grow from 2.1 billion in 2025 to 3.9 billion in 2035, by which time they will generate revenue of USD46 billion annually. Smart electricity metering will continue to dominate but with smart water metering increasingly important.
In the last few months, Transforma Insights has published a series of reports on the markets for smart water, gas, and electricity metering as part of its ongoing IoT market forecasts. The research demonstrates that smart metering will continue to be one of the most significant IoT use cases.
The key highlights of the reports are:
Electricity dominates the smart metering space throughout the forecast period, accounting for over 60% of all meters. Of the 1.42 billion electricity smart meters today, 1.27 billion (89%) are residential, a figure which equates to a penetration of 55% of households globally. A lot of countries have ostensibly completed their smart meter deployments, notably many countries in the EU and China. In developing nations there is still much to be done. By 2035, the projected 2.1 billion residential smart meters will equate to a global household penetration of 85%, as illustrated in the graphic below.
Smart gas metering is restricted to countries where Piped Natural Gas (PNG) is used, most prominently in Europe. There were 306 million gas meters in 2025 of which 95% were residential and the remaining 5% were for commercial premises. Around 49% of gas households have smart meters today, a figure which is expected to rise to 76% in 2035. Without access to mains power, gas smart metering tends to favour using Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies such as NB-IoT and LoRaWAN.
Water smart meters rollouts have been patchy due to varying levels of governmental focus, although with increasing pressure on water resources mean that smart water metering numbers will grow faster than either electricity or gas over the period, growing at a CAGR of 8%. As will gas smart metering, water will also favour LPWA technologies.
The three Forecast Insight reports cover the smart electricity, gas and water metering markets. Each of the three reports provides, for the respective market, a detailed definition of the sector, analysis of market development and profiles of the key vendors in the space. It also provides a summary of the current status of adoption and Transforma Insights’ ten-year forecasts for the market. The forecasts include analysis of the number of IoT connections by geography, the technologies used (including splits by 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, LPWA, short range, satellite and others), as well as the revenue split between module, value-added connectivity and services.
Full detail of country-by-country forecasts with revenue and technology splits are accessed via Transforma Insights’ ultra-granular IoT Forecast Database.
If you have questions concerning the methodology, either general or specific to a particular application or vertical sector, don’t hesitate to contact our analysts via enquiries@transformainsights.com.
On the 14th May 2026, Transforma Insights analysts will provide our annual snapshot of the current state and future prognosis for the IoT market, giving you the most grounded perspective on what we can expect over the next decade. Transforma Insights has long had a reputation for the most granular and rigorously researched forecasts of IoT and in the webinar we will share the highlights.
More details here: Webinar – Transforma Insights’ annual global IoT market forecast update.
