Marketing research industry statistics at a glance
| Category | Statistic | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Size | The global insights industry turned over US$153 billion in 2024 and was expected to pass US$160 billion by the end of 2025 | ESOMAR / Research World, 2025 |
| Size | The market research sector alone was US$56 billion in 2024, 36.6% of the insights industry total | ESOMAR, 2025 (computed) |
| Size | Research software was US$62 billion and reporting US$35 billion in 2024 | ESOMAR, 2025 |
| UK | The UK research, insight and analytics sector turns over £9.5 billion; the wider Business of Evidence market is £18.7 billion | MRS, 2025 |
| UK | At least 75,000 people work in the UK sector, 52,000 of them full time | MRS, 2025 |
| US | 952,700 market research analyst jobs in the US in 2025, median pay $78,760 | BLS, May 2025 |
| Budgets | Marketing budgets sit at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, up from 7.7%, across 401 marketing leaders surveyed January to March 2026 | Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey via Sword and the Script, June 2026 |
| AI | CMOs put 15.3% of the marketing budget into AI, and 30% say their AI readiness is developed | Gartner, 2026 |
| AI | Fraud detection tools are used regularly by 70% to 88% of respondents in every GRIT segment | Greenbook GRIT, June 2026 |
| Quality | A synthetic AI respondent passed 99.8% of 6,000 attention-check trials in a PNAS study | PNAS, November 2025 |
| Quality | 12% of opt-in survey respondents under 30 claimed a licence to operate a nuclear submarine | Pew Research Center, March 2024 |
How big is the marketing research industry in 2026?
The global insights industry turned over US$153 billion in 2024 on ESOMAR's count, and ESOMAR expected it to pass US$160 billion by the end of 2025. Quote those, because ESOMAR builds them from national association returns, not a model.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| The insights industry reached US$153 billion in 2024 and was expected to surpass US$160 billion by the end of 2025. | ESOMAR / Research World, 2025 |
| The market research sector was US$56 billion, research software US$62 billion and reporting US$35 billion in 2024. | ESOMAR, 2025 |
| In 2023 the industry was US$142 billion: market research US$54bn, research software US$56bn, reporting US$33bn. | ESOMAR / Research World, 2024 |
| Inside the market research sector, 62% is full service and fieldwork, 31% is subscription and research software, and 7% is consultancy. | ESOMAR, 2025 |
| ESOMAR's national association returns covered 80% of the global industry; the remaining 20% was estimated. | ESOMAR / Research World, 2024 |
| The Insights Association has benchmarked the US insights and analytics market since 1974 and produces its 2026 report with ESOMAR, Outsell and Michigan State University. | Insights Association, 2026 |
The 2023 figures are more than 24 months old and I keep them because the two-year comparison is where the arithmetic lives. Note the 80% coverage line: a fifth of ESOMAR's headline is estimated, so the last digit of $153 billion is decoration.
Most "market research market size" numbers come from a consultancy that sells the report they appear in. ESOMAR's is different: associations counting their own members' returns, with the coverage stated. That beats a forecast with a growth rate attached.
Why do marketing research industry size figures disagree so much?
Marketing research industry size figures disagree because ESOMAR, the Market Research Society and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics count three different things: a global supply chain, a set of national SIC codes, and an occupation. None is wrong, and none is comparable to the others.
ESOMAR's US$153 billion stacks three sectors: market research, research software and reporting. Strip it back to the US$56 billion market research sector and the industry shrinks by nearly two thirds, on one publisher's choice of boundary.
| Definition | What it counts | Latest figure |
|---|---|---|
| ESOMAR insights industry | Market research, research software and reporting worldwide | US$153 billion, 2024 (ESOMAR) |
| ESOMAR market research sector | Fieldwork, full service, subscriptions and research consultancy only | US$56 billion, 2024 (ESOMAR) |
| MRS Business of Evidence | Everything in the UK that produces evidence for decisions, including in-house work | £18.7 billion (MRS) |
| MRS core sector | UK firms in SIC 732 and 722 plus research-active firms in other codes | £9.5 billion (MRS) |
| MRS SIC codes only | UK firms coded 732 (market research and opinion polling) and 722 | £6.7 billion (MRS) |
| BLS occupation | People employed as market research analysts in any US industry | 952,700 jobs, 2025 (BLS) |
| Australia trade body | The national research, data and insights industry | A$4 billion (Data and Insights Association) |
The occupational count catches people out. BLS counts analysts wherever they sit, so a pricing analyst at a retailer and a researcher at an agency land in the same bucket, and most do not work for a research supplier.
Always ask which layer a number describes before it goes on a slide. I have sat in meetings where one person argued the industry was shrinking and another that it was booming, both quoting ESOMAR. One had the market research sector, the other the whole insights industry. Same report, different page.
How many people work in marketing research, and what do they earn?
The United States had 952,700 market research analyst jobs in 2025 with median pay of $78,760, while the UK's whole research sector employs at least 75,000 people. The two count different things, which is why they are 13 times apart.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 952,700 market research analyst jobs in the US in 2025; median pay $78,760 in May 2025. | US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025 |
| US market research analyst employment is projected to grow 7% from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations. | BLS, 2025 |
| About 82,000 openings for market research analysts are projected each year over the decade. | BLS, 2025 |
| At least 75,000 people work in the UK research, insight and analytics sector: 52,000 full time and 23,000 part time. | MRS, 2025 |
| 51,000 of those sit in SIC 732 or 722 companies: 37,000 full time and 14,000 part time. | MRS, 2025 |
| More than 4,000 UK enterprises are in the sector, including 2,980 coded SIC 732 and 675 coded SIC 722. | MRS, 2025 |
| The UK sector's gender pay gap was 13.3%, below the UK average of 14.3%. | MRS, January 2024 |
| The BLS headcount times the BLS median gives a US pay bill of about $75.0 billion a year, 1.34 times ESOMAR's US$56 billion global sector turnover. A national payroll and a global turnover are different measures, so read it as scale, not market share. | Computed from BLS 2025 and ESOMAR 2025 |
The gender pay gap figure covers 2022 and is marked dated. The rest is current: 82,000 US openings a year against 952,700 jobs means the occupation turns over about one in twelve people a year, mostly through moves rather than growth.
The $75 billion wage bill is my favourite number here and the most uncomfortable one. Handle it carefully: it is US salaries for one job title, while ESOMAR's $56 billion is what suppliers bill worldwide. Even so, one country's research payroll outweighs the global supply side. Research moved in house.
Which part of the marketing research industry is growing?
Research software grows at roughly two and a half times the rate of traditional market research, and it produced about 55% of the insights industry's 2024 growth while making up 40.5% of its size.
| Segment | 2023 turnover | 2024 turnover | 2024 growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Market research | US$54bn | US$56bn | 4.8% |
| Research software | US$56bn | US$62bn | 11.5% |
| Reporting | US$33bn | US$35bn | 8.0% |
Source: ESOMAR / Research World. The 2023 column is dated and shown for comparison. ESOMAR rounds segments to the whole billion, so the growth rates do not recompute exactly from the columns.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Research software grew 12.4% in 2023 and 11.5% in 2024, against 4.6% and 4.8% for market research. | ESOMAR, 2024 and 2025 |
| MRS estimates UK sector turnover changed by about 1% between 2024 and 2025. | MRS, 2025 |
| The top 100 UK agencies returned £5.44 billion of turnover in 2024. | MRS, 2025 |
| The UK sector grew 9.9% in 2022, adding £1 billion in a single year to reach £9 billion. | MRS, January 2024 |
| YouGov reported revenue of £388.9 million for the year to 31 July 2025, up 16% as reported but 1% on an underlying basis. | YouGov RNS, October 2025 |
Put the UK's 1% next to the global 4.8% and the gap is the story. A mature agency-heavy market grows at inflation or below while money moves to platforms. YouGov says the same in one line: 16% headline growth, 1% underlying, the difference bought rather than earned. The marketing mix modelling statistics page tracks the modelling side of the same shift.
Agency owners keep asking me why their pipeline feels harder while the industry reports growth. This table is the answer. The industry is growing, the part of it that sells projects by the day is not. Four point eight per cent globally, one per cent in the UK, and the difference sitting in software licences.
How much of a marketing budget goes to research?
Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey puts total marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue, up from 7.7% in 2025. Gartner fielded it from January to March 2026 among 401 CMOs and marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe, most at companies above $1 billion in revenue. Gartner publishes no separate research line, which is itself the finding.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Marketing budgets are 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, against 7.7% in 2025, from 401 marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe. | Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey via Sword and the Script, June 2026 |
| CMOs allocate 15.3% of the marketing budget to AI. | Gartner, 2026 |
| 30% of CMOs describe their AI readiness as developed; that group puts 21.3% of budget into AI and runs marketing at 8.9% of revenue. | Gartner, 2026 |
No survey I could verify publishes research as a named percentage of the 2026 marketing budget. Gartner breaks out paid media, martech, labour and agencies, and research sits inside the labour and agency lines. Anyone quoting "research is X% of marketing spend" is recycling an old vendor slide. Budget authority also turns over fast at the top, which the CMO tenure statistics page covers.
Flat budgets with a 15.3% AI carve-out mean one thing: the money for AI came from inside marketing, not from finance. Research is one of the lines it came from. If you run an insight function, get measured in decisions influenced rather than studies delivered, because the line you sit on is the one being harvested.
How bad is the survey data quality problem?
Survey data quality is the most serious measured problem in the industry, and the evidence is peer reviewed: a synthetic AI respondent built at Dartmouth passed 99.8% of 6,000 attention-check trials and made no logic-puzzle errors, in a study published in PNAS in November 2025.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| An autonomous synthetic respondent passed 99.8% of 6,000 attention-check trials, committing 10 errors, and made no errors on standard logic puzzles. | PNAS, November 2025 |
| Between 10 and 52 synthetic responses were enough to flip predictions in seven major 2024 election polls with an average sample of 1,599 respondents. | PNAS, November 2025 |
| An Insights Association webinar in January 2026 claimed 40% of nonprobability interviews in 2025 were likely fraudulent, which NORC converts to about 2 billion interviews. | NORC at the University of Chicago, February 2026 |
| 12% of opt-in survey respondents under 30 claimed to hold a licence to operate a nuclear submarine; among opt-in cases identifying as Hispanic the figure was 24%. | Pew Research Center, March 2024 |
| Among adults under 30, 20% in an opt-in poll agreed the Holocaust is a myth, against 3% in a probability-based survey of 5,140 US adults in January 2024. | Pew Research Center, March 2024 |
| Kantar says researchers discard on average 38% of survey data over quality concerns, drawing on six years of panel quality research. | Kantar, 2026 |
Three caveats. The 40% fraud claim is one NORC repeats from a January 2026 Insights Association webinar, not one NORC measured. Kantar's 38% is a vendor estimate with a described programme but no published sample, so treat it as directional. Pew published in March 2024 and fielded the submarine question in February 2022, so it is dated, and nobody has repeated it. PNAS is the hard evidence.
The Pew nuclear submarine question is the most useful thing in this dataset. It is a joke question with a serious job: 12% of young opt-in respondents said yes. The cheap sample under your tracker may be describing a population that does not exist. Run one absurd screener in your next wave and read that answer first.
How far has AI moved into marketing research work?
AI is standard equipment in the research workflow rather than a pilot: Greenbook's 16th GRIT Insights Practice Report, fielded in the first quarter of 2026, found fraud detection tools in regular use by 70% to 88% of respondents in every segment it tracks.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Fraud detection tools are used regularly by 70% to 88% of respondents across every GRIT segment. | Greenbook GRIT Insights Practice Report, June 2026 |
| 8 in 10 insights professionals say insights operations now plays a significant role inside research organisations. | Greenbook GRIT, June 2026 |
Greenbook keeps its headline adoption percentages inside the paid report, so I am not quoting figures I could not read. The public page still carries the direction: AI sits in the operational layer, not the experimental one. ESOMAR's segment growth says the same, with software growing more than twice as fast as services two years running.
The AI story in research has an ugly shape: agencies are buying AI to catch AI. Seventy to eighty-eight per cent using fraud detection is not an efficiency statistic, it is a defence budget, and PNAS shows what it defends against. That money buys back data quality you used to get free.
How we calculated the original numbers
Four figures here are computed, with the arithmetic shown so you can check it or swap inputs.
- 2.7x: the insights industry against the market research sector inside it. ESOMAR reports the 2024 insights industry at US$153 billion and its market research sector at US$56 billion. 56 / 153 = 36.6%, and 153 / 56 = 2.73. Both are US dollar figures from the same ESOMAR edition and year, so the gap is a definition, not a disagreement.
- £126,700 of revenue per UK sector worker. MRS puts UK sector turnover at £9.5 billion and employment at 75,000 people or more, both for the same UK sector and both in pounds. 9,500,000,000 / 75,000 = £126,667, and because 75,000 is a floor this per-worker figure is a ceiling. Restricting to SIC 732 and 722 gives £6.7 billion across 51,000 people, or £131,373 each, so the two cuts agree within 4%.
- About 55% of 2024 growth came from research software. ESOMAR's segments moved from US$54bn, US$56bn and US$33bn in 2023 to US$56bn, US$62bn and US$35bn in 2024, on the same definitions. ESOMAR rounds segments to the whole billion, and those rounded deltas (+2, +6, +2) sum to 10 against a headline move of 142 to 153, so I worked from the published growth rates: software adds 6.4, market research 2.6, reporting 2.6, total 11.6. Software is 6.4 of that, or 55%, on 40.5% of the industry (62 / 153).
- $75.0 billion: the US pay bill for market research analysts. BLS reports 952,700 US market research analyst jobs in 2025 and median annual pay of $78,760 in May 2025. 952,700 x 78,760 = $75.03 billion, and median pay understates the mean in most professional occupations, so this is a floor. Against ESOMAR's US$56 billion global market research sector the ratio is 1.34. The two are not like for like: one is US wages across all industries, the other worldwide supplier turnover. Read the scale, not an equivalence.
What the 2026 numbers say
Definitions move the headline more than growth does. ESOMAR's two published figures for 2024, US$153 billion and US$56 billion, sit 97 billion dollars apart. Agree on the layer before you argue about the trend.
The supply side is not where the work is any more. A $75 billion US wage bill for people with "market research analyst" on their contract sits against $56 billion of global supplier turnover. Payroll and turnover are different measures, but the gap says the centre of gravity moved in house. UK turnover growing 1% while software grows 11.5% points the same way.
Data quality is now a cost line, not a footnote. Between 70% and 88% of GRIT respondents run fraud detection regularly, Kantar says buyers discard 38% of survey data, and PNAS showed a synthetic respondent beating 99.8% of attention checks. A 2027 research budget without a quality line is out of date.
FAQ
How big is the marketing research industry in 2026?
ESOMAR valued the global insights industry at US$153 billion in 2024 and expected it to pass US$160 billion by the end of 2025. The narrower market research sector was US$56 billion of that. Say which of the two you mean: they differ by a factor of 2.7.
Who publishes reliable marketing research industry statistics?
ESOMAR publishes the Global Market Research report from national association returns, the Market Research Society sizes the UK sector using SIC 732 and 722, the Insights Association has benchmarked the US market since 1974, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts the occupation. Consultancy "market size" downloads are not in that group.
How many people work in market research?
The United States had 952,700 market research analyst jobs in 2025 (BLS), and the UK research, insight and analytics sector employs at least 75,000 people (MRS, 2025). The US figure counts an occupation across all industries, the UK figure a sector, so the two are not comparable.
What is the average market research analyst salary?
Median pay for US market research analysts was $78,760 in May 2025, on Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. BLS projects 7% growth from 2025 to 2035 and about 82,000 openings a year.
Is the market research industry growing or shrinking?
It is growing unevenly. ESOMAR measured 4.8% growth for market research services in 2024 against 11.5% for research software, which produced about 55% of the industry's growth on 40.5% of its size. The agency-heavy UK sector grew about 1% between 2024 and 2025 (MRS).
How much survey data is fraudulent?
Nobody has a verified global rate. Pew Research Center found 12% of opt-in respondents under 30 claiming a nuclear submarine licence (2024), PNAS showed a synthetic respondent passing 99.8% of 6,000 attention checks (November 2025), and NORC repeated a January 2026 webinar claim that 40% of nonprobability interviews were likely fraudulent.
For more benchmarks on marketing spend, browse the statistics hub.
Sources
- ESOMAR / Research World, Inside the $153bn insights industry (2025)
- ESOMAR / Research World, Drivers of our $142bn insights industry (2024)
- ESOMAR, Global Market Research 2025 (2025)
- Market Research Society, Industry size and growth rates (2025)
- Market Research Society, UK research sector grows by £1 billion to a record £9 billion (January 2024)
- BLS, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Market Research Analysts (May 2025 data)
- Insights Association, 2026 Insights & Analytics Market Report (2026)
- Greenbook, GRIT Insights Practice Report, 16th edition (June 2026)
- Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey, via Sword and the Script (June 2026)
- PNAS, The potential existential threat of LLMs to online survey research (November 2025)
- NORC, The Fraud Problem Reshaping Survey Research (February 2026)
- Pew Research Center, Online opt-in polls can produce misleading results (March 2024)
- Kantar, The state of online research panels (2026)
- YouGov plc, Results for the year ended 31 July 2025 (RNS, October 2025)
- Data and Insights Association (Australia), Global Market Research Report (2025)
- Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend Survey press release (May 2026, fielded January to March 2026)
Methodology. Numbers were collected in September 2026 and checked on the original publisher's page, not in statistics roundups. The Gartner budget figures were read on Sword and the Script; the survey name, sample and January to March 2026 fielding window come from Gartner's press release. Consultancy market-size reports sold as downloads were excluded: their samples and methods are not published. A vendor figure with a method but no stated sample, such as Kantar's 38% discard rate, is labelled an estimate. Figures older than 24 months are marked dated. The BLS page blocks automated checks and was verified by hand. Last updated 21 September 2026.