Passive RFID Market: Growth Dynamics Explained
This market value reflects passive RFID tags across all major form factors including labels, cards, fobs, and secure documents, and highlights the distinction between the two dominant frequency segments: Ultra High Frequency (UHF) and High Frequency (HF). While UHF tags will account for more than 88% of total shipments, HF tags will dominate in terms of revenue, making up around 60% of total market value due to higher tag pricing in secure applications.
Passive UHF RFID market in 2025 by tag volume and market value. Source: "RFID 2026-2036: Forecasts, Players and Opportunities" from IDTechEx
The UHF RFID market continues to be driven primarily by the retail apparel sector, which represents approximately two-thirds of UHF tag volume and over half of total market value. By 2025, IDTechEx forecasts that nearly 32 billion RFID labels will be deployed in apparel tagging. Despite this scale, apparel tagging currently represents only about 40% of the total addressable market, indicating considerable potential for expansion.
However, UHF reader infrastructure remains an area for development. Today, readers are largely business-focused tools, and UHF-capable consumer smartphones are not yet widely available. However, this may change over the next several years, following the adoption path of NFC in consumer electronics.
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