Is the Wearable Technology Market growing now?
In our wearable technology market deck, you will find everything you need to understand the market
SUMMARY
Yes. The wearable technology market is growing now, but the broad market is expanding at roughly low-single-digit speed. The bigger story is a shift in where that growth comes from: away from generic wrist devices and toward AI glasses, specialized fitness products, passive health trackers, smart rings and medical biosensors.
IDC’s current forecasts imply roughly 626 million wearable shipments in 2026, only about 2% above the comparable previous-year base. At this scale, even slow percentage growth still means millions of additional devices entering the market every year.
The headline number hides a surprisingly uneven market. Hearables are adding far more incremental units than any other category, while smart glasses are growing fastest from a much smaller base. Smartwatches and wristbands are actually expected to subtract units this year.
Smartwatches increasingly look like a replacement market. Global annual shipments have hovered around 160 million units for several years, so future growth depends less on first-time adoption and more on persuading existing owners to upgrade.
That does not prevent individual wearable companies from growing quickly. Garmin’s fitness business is expanding far faster than the overall smartwatch market because serious athletes have clearer reasons to pay for better training data, battery life, GPS, recovery metrics and sport-specific features.
Smart glasses are the clearest breakout category. Shipment trackers are showing triple-digit growth, EssilorLuxottica is already selling millions of AI glasses, and the category is attracting large technology and eyewear companies at the same time. The main caveat is concentration: Meta still dominates the market.
Smart rings have also moved beyond the experimental stage. Their unit volumes remain tiny beside watches and earbuds, but Oura has built a business with millions of paying members, recurring subscription revenue and enough scale to make the form factor commercially credible.
Health wearables may ultimately matter more economically than another consumer-electronics replacement cycle. Continuous glucose monitors generate recurring sensor revenue, can fit into clinical care and reimbursement, and are already supporting multibillion-dollar businesses such as Dexcom.
AI is helping wearables, but there is no market-wide AI upgrade cycle yet. Its strongest commercial effect is visible in glasses, where cameras, microphones and hands-free interaction make AI genuinely useful. On watches and earbuds, adding an assistant is still a weaker reason to replace hardware.
The market is also geographically uneven. China recently produced strong wristwear growth while India entered a second year of declining wearable shipments, showing how much local pricing, subsidies and earlier adoption cycles still shape demand.
The result is a wearable market that should continue getting bigger without returning to the broad device boom of earlier years. The old smartwatch-led growth cycle has matured; the next one is being assembled from several smaller markets with very different economics.
This market map, featured in our wearable technology market deck, highlights top companies and startups in the wearable technology market
Is the wearable technology market actually growing now?
Yes. The wearable technology market is growing today, although the broad market is moving at roughly low-single-digit speed rather than anything close to a new device boom.
IDC’s latest Worldwide Wearable Device Tracker counted 145.7 million devices shipped in the first quarter of 2026, up 4.3% from a year earlier. Its current full-year forecasts add up to about 626 million devices across hearables, smartwatches, wristbands, smart glasses and smart rings. Reversing the growth rates IDC gives for those categories puts the comparable previous-year base at roughly 613 million. On that basis, we get about 2% shipment growth for the year.
Put those two numbers together and the picture becomes clearer. Wearables are selling in larger numbers, but this is already a huge consumer-electronics market where relatively small percentage changes represent tens of millions of devices.
IDC expects the broad market to reach about 693 million annual shipments by 2030, equivalent to a 2.6% compound annual growth rate from 2026. The baseline answer is therefore fairly straightforward: wearable technology is growing, just slowly at the aggregate level.
| Wearable category | 2026 forecast | Growth | Approx. share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hearables | 407.6M | +4.0% | 65% |
| Smartwatches | 159.7M | -2.8% | 26% |
| Wristbands | 40.2M | -6.8% | 6% |
| Smart glasses | 13.6M | +41.4% | 2% |
| Smart rings | 4.9M | +12.8% | <1% |
What is actually making the wearable technology market grow?
Wearable technology growth is currently coming mainly from hearables and smart glasses, while smartwatches and wristbands are pulling in the opposite direction.
We calculated the implied change in shipments from IDC’s latest category forecasts. Hearables should add roughly 15.7 million devices compared with their previous-year base. Smart glasses add another 4 million and smart rings about half a million. Meanwhile, smartwatches lose roughly 4.6 million units and wristbands almost 3 million.
That gives us a much better picture than simply saying “wearables are up.” Hearables alone create more incremental unit volume than the entire market ends up keeping after declines elsewhere. Smart glasses then provide another unusually fast source of growth from a much smaller base.
The current wearable market contains several different cycles at once. Wireless earwear is still expanding at enormous scale, wrist devices are largely in replacement mode, and glasses and rings are building newer categories. Looking only at total shipments hides most of what is changing.
| Category | Approx. change vs. prior year | Contribution to growth |
|---|---|---|
| Hearables | +15.7M | Main volume engine |
| Smart glasses | +4.0M | Fastest emerging engine |
| Smart rings | +0.6M | Small but growing |
| Smartwatches | -4.6M | Drag on growth |
| Wristbands | -2.9M | Drag on growth |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest wearable technology market report.
As this chart shows, and as featured in our wearable technology market deck, search interest in smart rings has been increasing rapidly
Are smartwatches still growing today?
Smartwatches are still a massive wearable market, but right now they look mature rather than like a dependable growth category.
The short-term data can actually look healthy. IDC counted 37.0 million smartwatches shipped in the first quarter of 2026, up 4.8%. Yet IDC expects the full year to finish at roughly 159.7 million watches, down 2.8%, as memory costs and higher prices weaken replacement demand later in the year.
The longer pattern points the same way. Global smartwatch shipments were already around 161 million devices in 2023. Three years later, we are still talking about a category of roughly 160 million annual units. That is a very big business. It just is not adding much net volume.
Apple gives us another useful check. Apple does not disclose Apple Watch revenue separately, but its Wearables, Home and Accessories segment fell from $39.8 billion in fiscal 2023 to $37.0 billion in 2024 and $35.7 billion in 2025. The business has improved lately: Apple’s latest quarterly filing shows the segment up 6% year over year for the quarter and 2% across the first nine months of fiscal 2026, with Apple specifically pointing to higher Wearables and Accessories sales.
That looks more like a mature category finding some growth again than the start of another adoption wave. Apple, Huawei, Samsung and Garmin can still have excellent product cycles, but each new watch increasingly has to persuade somebody who already owns a wearable to upgrade.
Why is Garmin growing so fast if smartwatches are slowing?
Garmin shows that premium fitness wearables can still grow very quickly even while the broader smartwatch market struggles.
Garmin’s latest results are unusually strong. Its fitness division generated $757 million in the second quarter of 2026, up 25% from a year earlier. Across the first half, fitness revenue reached $1.30 billion, up 32%. Garmin said advanced wearables were leading the increase.
That is a much stronger commercial trajectory than the roughly flat global smartwatch market. Garmin has concentrated on runners, cyclists, triathletes and serious fitness users who care about battery life, training load, recovery, GPS accuracy and sport-specific data. Those buyers have more reasons to upgrade than somebody using a watch mainly for notifications and step counts.
Garmin is also moving toward the screenless health market. The company recently introduced CIRQA, its first screenless smart band, while buying TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic, two software platforms used by athletes and coaches. Garmin increasingly has hardware, longitudinal fitness data and training software inside the same business.
Smartwatch maturity therefore does not mean every wrist-wearable company has stopped growing. The companies doing best are becoming more specialized and giving people a clearer reason to pay for another device.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest wearable technology market report.
This chart, included in our wearable technology market deck, illustrates yearly VC funding for wearable technology startups
Are smart rings finally becoming a real wearable market?
Yes. Smart rings are now a real wearable technology category, although their current scale is still tiny beside watches and earbuds.
IDC expects about 4.9 million smart rings to ship this year, up 12.8%. For perspective, IDC recorded only 880,000 global smart-ring shipments in 2023. Even allowing for changes in forecasts and category tracking, we are looking at a market that has multiplied several times over within a few years.
Oura provides much stronger evidence than forecasts alone. Oura’s current business materials show about five million paid members, up more than fourfold in two years. The company had already passed 5.5 million cumulative rings sold in 2025 and said revenue had doubled for a second consecutive year.
Oura also raised more than $900 million in its latest large financing and later confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO. Samsung has entered the category with Galaxy Ring, while companies such as Ultrahuman and RingConn have created credible alternatives.
The ceiling remains uncertain. IDC currently sees smart rings reaching only about 6.3 million annual shipments by 2030, which would leave them far below watches. Rings may also replace some smartwatch purchases because both products track sleep, activity, heart rate and recovery.
Still, we can stop treating smart rings as an experimental form factor. Millions of people are already paying for them, and Oura has built a subscription business around the device.
Are smart glasses becoming the next big wearable category?
Yes. Smart glasses are currently the clearest breakout category in wearable technology, and the latest commercial numbers are getting difficult to dismiss as launch hype.
Counterpoint’s latest first-half 2026 update estimates that global smart-glasses shipments jumped 212% year over year. Meta accounted for about 84% of shipments, so the market is still heavily concentrated, but the growth rate is exceptional.
IDC sees the same acceleration from another dataset. It counted roughly 2.25 million display-less smart glasses shipped in the first quarter alone, up 167%. That one quarter almost matched the roughly 2.7 million units shipped during the whole of 2024. IDC expects display-less glasses to reach about 13.6 million units this year and 27.3 million by 2030.
Actual company sales support those shipment trackers. EssilorLuxottica sold more than seven million AI glasses across Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta during 2025. In its latest quarterly results, the company said AI-glasses revenue almost doubled again year over year in the second quarter of 2026, while its traditional eyecare and eyewear business grew only around mid-single digits.
The product range is broadening too. Meta and EssilorLuxottica now span ordinary Ray-Ban Meta glasses, Oakley performance models, prescription-focused versions and display-equipped glasses. Google is preparing Android XR glasses with eyewear partners including Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Chinese brands such as Xiaomi, RayNeo, Rokid and XREAL are attacking different price points and display formats.
Meta concentration is still a real weakness, but smart glasses have crossed the threshold where commercial sales are large enough to change the wearable market. Right now, they are the strongest candidate for its next major form factor.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest wearable technology market report.
This chart, included in our wearable technology market deck, shows why Whoop is leading in wearable technology
Are earbuds making wearable technology growth look stronger than it really is?
Yes. Including hearables makes the wearable technology market look much larger and somewhat healthier than a narrower market of watches, rings, glasses and body sensors would look.
IDC expects about 407.6 million hearables to ship this year. That represents roughly 65% of all the devices in its wearable forecast. By comparison, watches account for around 160 million, while smart rings and glasses together remain below 20 million.
This definition changes the answer considerably. Our calculation from IDC’s forecasts suggests hearables add almost 16 million annual shipments by themselves. Without that increase, shrinking smartwatches and bands would make the overall wearable growth rate much weaker.
Earwear is also changing internally. IDC’s latest quarterly tracker counted 95.2 million earwear devices, up 3.9%, while open-ear headphones jumped almost 40% to 10.7 million units. Ear-clip designs now represent more than half of that fast-growing open-ear segment.
Earbuds deserve to be counted when we talk about devices worn on the body, especially as translation, voice assistants and biometric sensing move into audio products. But anyone asking whether new wearable computing categories are booming should separate that story from the hundreds of millions of Bluetooth earphones sold every year.
Is wearable health becoming a real medical market?
Yes. Wearable health is increasingly moving into regulated medicine, and this gives the market a much stronger growth engine than basic fitness tracking.
Consumer watches have already crossed part of that boundary. The FDA has cleared sleep-apnea features for Samsung and Apple watches, while Apple has also received clearance for a hypertension notification feature. These products still screen and notify rather than replace clinical diagnosis, yet they bring regulated health functions onto devices worn by millions of ordinary consumers.
Continuous glucose monitoring goes much further. Dexcom’s latest quarter produced $1.31 billion of revenue, up 13% year over year. Revenue reached $2.50 billion for the first half of 2026, up 14%, and Dexcom now expects more than $5.1 billion for the full year. International revenue grew 19% in the latest quarter.
Dexcom has also expanded Stelo, its over-the-counter biosensor platform, while the FDA has opened the consumer CGM market more broadly. Abbott has followed with its own consumer-facing glucose products.
This part of wearables has very different economics from a watch. Sensors need frequent replacement, people may use them to manage chronic conditions, clinicians can incorporate the data into care, and reimbursement can expand the addressable market. Revenue can therefore keep growing without waiting several years for somebody to replace a piece of electronics.
Health is already one of the strongest reasons to believe the wearable market can keep expanding even as simpler activity trackers mature.
This chart, included in our wearable technology market deck, illustrates yearly funding for wearable technology startups
Can wearable subscriptions keep growing when hardware sales slow?
Yes. Subscription-based wearables are already showing that companies can increase recurring revenue even when industry hardware shipments barely move.
Oura is the best-developed example. The company currently reports about five million paid members. Around 80% renew after one year, members wear the ring for an average of 23.5 hours a day, and 80% open the app at least five days a week.
Those numbers explain why the business can support economics that look very different from ordinary consumer hardware. Oura sells the ring once and can continue earning membership revenue while collecting years of sleep, recovery, stress and activity data.
WHOOP pushes the subscription approach even further. Its hardware exists primarily to support the membership. The company raised $575 million in 2026 at a $10.1 billion valuation, with investors including major institutional funds, Abbott and Mayo Clinic.
Garmin is taking a different route by keeping many core wearable functions subscription-free while expanding into training software through TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic. The models vary, but the valuable relationship increasingly continues after the device leaves the store.
That gives wearable companies another way to grow. More devices help, of course, but revenue can also rise through software, coaching, health insights and services attached to an installed base.
Is AI actually making people buy more wearables?
AI is already helping some wearable categories grow, but today the clearest commercial proof is concentrated in glasses rather than spread evenly across the whole market.
Smart glasses fit AI unusually well because the device can hear what the user hears, see what the user sees and respond without requiring a phone in the hand. Translation, visual questions, content capture, messaging and voice assistance all become natural hands-free tasks. The recent triple-digit shipment growth in smart eyewear suggests consumers are finding enough value to buy the hardware.
The evidence is much weaker elsewhere. IDC says always-on AI assistants are still an emerging use case in smart glasses rather than the primary driver of demand. In open-ear audio, IDC also describes practical AI adoption as early. Adding a chatbot to an earbud or watch does not automatically create a reason to replace the device.
Health wearables may eventually have a stronger AI case. Oura has released its first proprietary AI model for personalized health guidance. Dexcom is putting AI-driven insights into Stelo. Garmin and WHOOP increasingly turn streams of physiological data into recommendations rather than leaving users to interpret charts themselves.
For now, we would credit AI with accelerating one genuinely fast wearable category and improving several others. A market-wide AI replacement cycle has yet to appear in the numbers.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest wearable technology market report.
This chart, included in our wearable technology market deck, compares the main business model options for wearable technology brands
Why are wearable sales growing in China while falling in India?
China and India show how differently the wearable technology market can behave once cheap smartwatches reach different stages of adoption.
China had a very strong 2025. IDC counted 73.9 million wrist-worn devices, up 20.8%. Smartwatches rose 17.2% to 50.6 million units and wristbands rose 29.4% to 23.3 million. Government subsidies and major platform promotions supplied a large part of that acceleration.
India moved the other way. IDC says total wearable shipments fell 4% in 2025 to 114.2 million units, marking a second consecutive annual decline. Smartwatch shipments dropped 17.6% after an even steeper contraction the year before.
The contrast says quite a lot about saturation. India experienced a huge wave of extremely cheap smartwatches earlier in the decade. Once that first adoption rush faded, replacing those products proved harder. China is currently getting more help from subsidies, promotions and stronger demand for mid- and high-end watches, although even there the first quarter of 2026 slowed to only 3.5% wrist-wear growth.
Global wearable growth should therefore never be read as one universal consumer trend. Some countries are still adding users, some are upgrading, and others have already gone through the cheap-device boom and entered consolidation.
| Market | Latest useful data | What we see |
|---|---|---|
| China wristwear | 73.9M units in 2025, +20.8% | Strong growth, heavily helped by subsidies and promotions |
| China Q1 2026 wristwear | +3.5% | Growth has already cooled sharply |
| India wearables | 114.2M units in 2025, -4.0% | Second consecutive annual decline |
| India smartwatches | -17.6% in 2025 | Cheap-watch boom has clearly reversed |
What could stop the wearable technology market from growing?
Wearable technology can keep growing, but a few weaknesses make sustained high growth unlikely from here.
The first is simple saturation. Smartwatches already ship at roughly 160 million units a year, and many potential buyers in developed markets own one. Improvements in screens, processors and sensors are becoming incremental enough that consumers can keep devices longer.
Price is another constraint. IDC expects higher memory and component costs to weigh on smartwatch replacement demand this year. Emerging markets are particularly sensitive because much of their past growth came from inexpensive watches and earphones.
The faster categories have their own limits. Smart glasses are currently dominated by Meta, which means much of the apparent category boom still rests on one ecosystem. Cameras worn on the face also create obvious privacy concerns. Smart rings remain small and overlap heavily with watches. Medical wearables face regulation and have to prove that increasingly ambitious health claims actually work.
There is also substitution inside wearables. Someone who buys a smart ring may decide against replacing a smartwatch. AI glasses can absorb functions previously handled by earbuds. A screenless band can replace a more expensive watch for users mainly interested in sleep and recovery. Growth in one form factor can therefore cannibalize another.
These constraints make a return to broad double-digit wearable growth difficult. The market does not need to shrink for that to be true; it can simply keep expanding slowly while a few categories underneath it grow much faster.
This chart, featured in our wearable technology market deck, illustrates how revenue is divided among customer segments in the wearable technology market
Is the wearable technology market growing now?
Yes. The wearable technology market is growing now, and the evidence is strong enough for us to say that confidently, although the aggregate growth rate understates how sharply the mix is changing underneath.
As seen above, IDC’s latest tracker has global wearable shipments up 4.3% in the most recent quarter and still expects the market to reach about 693 million annual devices by 2030. Our calculation from its current category forecasts gives roughly 2% underlying full-year shipment growth across the major form factors. That is genuine expansion, but the mature market as a whole is moving slowly.
The more interesting growth is happening several levels below that headline. Counterpoint has smart-glasses shipments up 212% in the latest half-year data. EssilorLuxottica says AI-glasses revenue almost doubled in its latest quarter. Garmin’s fitness business grew 25%. Oura has reached about five million paying members. Dexcom is growing a multibillion-dollar biosensor business at a double-digit rate.
At the same time, smartwatches are expected to shrink for the full year, wristbands are declining, India has gone through two years of wearable contraction, and Apple’s broad wearables business only recently returned to modest growth after two annual declines.
Our final judgment is clear: the wearable technology market is growing, but its old growth engine has largely run its course. The next phase is being built around AI glasses, specialized sports devices, passive health trackers, smart rings, medical biosensors and recurring software. The broad market should keep getting bigger while most of the interesting growth moves away from the generic smartwatch.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest wearable technology market report.
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis tests whether the wearable technology market is growing now by looking beyond a single market-size forecast. We break the question into overall device growth, category-level contribution, mature versus emerging form factors, company performance, health and medical adoption, subscription economics, AI-driven demand and geographic differences.
We use IDC’s wearable definitions as the main framework for the broad shipment market, including hearables, smartwatches, wristbands, smart glasses and smart rings. Because hearables represent most of the units in that definition, we also examine the categories separately rather than treating aggregate wearable growth as evidence that every type of wearable is expanding.
The roughly 2% full-year growth figure discussed above is our calculation from IDC’s current category forecasts and reported growth rates. We reverse those growth rates to estimate the comparable previous-year shipment base, then compare it with the combined 2026 forecast. We use that calculation as a directional view of the broad market rather than as a separate third-party forecast.
We distinguish scale from momentum throughout the analysis. A 40% increase in a category shipping a few million devices has a very different effect on the market from a 4% increase across hundreds of millions of hearables. We therefore look at absolute shipment changes alongside percentage growth, multi-year category trends and actual company revenue or sales where those data are available.
For health and subscription wearables, hardware shipments alone are not enough. Dexcom’s recurring sensor revenue, Oura’s paid membership base, Garmin’s fitness revenue and software expansion, and regulated health features cleared by the FDA provide additional evidence about businesses whose economics continue after the initial device purchase.
We prioritized recent primary disclosures and established market trackers: company filings and earnings releases for financial performance, FDA material for regulated health functions, and IDC and Counterpoint for shipment data. Company announcements are used for specific product, membership and strategic developments, while broader conclusions are based on several pieces of evidence rather than one company claim.
Key sources used for this analysis include IDC’s Worldwide Wearable Device Tracker, IDC’s smart-glasses market analysis, Counterpoint Research’s H1 2026 smart-glasses update, Apple’s 2025 Form 10-K, Apple’s Q3 2026 Form 10-Q, Garmin’s Q2 2026 results, Garmin’s TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic acquisition announcement, Oura’s company and financing disclosures, Oura’s proprietary AI-model announcement, Dexcom’s Q2 2026 results, the FDA’s clearance of the first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor, Apple’s sleep-apnea feature announcement, Apple’s hypertension-notification announcement, and Google’s Android XR smart-glasses update.
This chart, included in our wearable technology market deck, shows how health monitoring wearable technology has evolved over time
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