America's housing industry is turning to robotics and automation as homebuilders face a growing shortage of skilled workers and pressure to increase housing supply.
But the biggest gains so far are not coming from humanoid robots replacing workers on construction sites. Instead, the most measurable improvements are coming from narrower applications, including machines that reduce mistakes, coordinate different trades and automate repetitive tasks. Factory-based construction, which moves more of the building process into controlled environments, is also showing significant potential, according to industry experts cited by CNBC.
The US is short roughly 1.2 million homes, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). Nearly 300,000 construction jobs remained open at the end of 2025, while the industry needs to attract about 740,000 workers each year to account for growth, retirements and workers leaving the field. The labour shortage is adding to a long-standing productivity problem. Residential construction productivity has risen only about 16% since 1993, compared with gains of more than 50% across the overall economy, according to NAHB chief economist Robert Dietz. Labour shortages alone cost homebuilders about $11 billion a year through higher costs and lost production, while adding roughly two months to the average construction timeline, Dietz said.
Yet robotics has not reached a point where it can significantly address the US housing shortage. Asked whether robotics is already meaningfully improving homebuilding productivity, Dietz told CNBC, “It’s too early.” “There’s no single, simple, scalable solution,” he said, pointing to labour, regulatory costs, land availability, supply chains and financing as additional constraints on housing production.
Construction sites are fundamentally different from factories, making widespread automation difficult. Tessa Lau, founder of Dusty Robotics, said factories are relatively easy to automate because robots can perform the same task repeatedly in a fixed environment. Construction sites, by contrast, change continuously as buildings take shape. Patrick Murphy, chief investment officer of Florida-based Coastal Construction, said every project can involve different designs, soil conditions, architects, subcontractors, materials and owner requirements. That lack of uniformity makes repetitive automation difficult.
This is why the clearest robotics gains are currently being seen in highly repetitive and well-structured tasks. Vineet Kamat, a University of Michigan professor who studies construction robotics, said these include layout, factory automation and specific tasks such as drilling, fastening and material handling. The biggest benefits are not necessarily replacing workers, but improving precision, reducing errors and increasing throughput. “The key question is not whether a robot can work in a pilot,” Kamat said, “but whether it can do so reliably across varied conditions with a positive business case.” Murphy said the popular image of humanoid robots carrying out construction work is still far from reality. “The biggest misconception is people imagining humanoid robots walking around job sites hanging drywall and painting. We’re years out before we’re in that world,” he said.
For Dusty Robotics founder Lau, the idea behind the company's technology came from a mistake she encountered while renovating her own home. A plumber had installed the wrong fixtures in two bathrooms, but Lau only discovered the problem after the tubs had been tiled. Workers then had to remove the tiles, take out the fixtures, reinstall them and retile the bathrooms. “That’s an information mistake,” Lau said. The problem, she realised, was not necessarily workmanship but information being lost between building plans and the workers carrying them out.
Dusty Robotics developed the FieldPrinter to address that problem. The system takes digital building plans and prints them directly onto floors, marking walls, plumbing, electrical and mechanical locations, as well as text, images and QR codes. The aim is to give different trades the same information and show workers exactly where components and systems should be installed. “If you’re not thinking about it very deeply, the shallow take is that labor replacement is the solution,” Lau said. “But when we actually dug in a little deeper into the construction problems, the problem is not labor replacement. It’s standardization.”
Dusty Robotics says one operator can lay out roughly 10,000 to 15,000 square feet a day, up to 10 times faster than traditional methods. After using Dusty's multi-trade layout system, global construction company Skanska reported a 75% reduction in rework and a 35% reduction in its layout schedule, according to the company. Aaron Love, president and CEO of Oh Snap Layout, is using the technology in Southern California homebuilding alongside prefabricated wall panels, precut materials and other off-site construction methods. Love said replacing a worker who snaps chalk lines with a robot represents only part of the potential benefit. Larger gains can come when framers, electricians, plumbers and HVAC contractors all work from the same coordinated layout, reducing duplicated work and back-and-forth between trades.
One example is RapidShell, a homebuilding system offered by Reliable Wholesale Lumber. It combines Dusty's robotic layout technology with precut material packages, prefabricated wall panels, stairs and other components prepared off site. Love said the process reduced shell construction time from roughly 21 days to about 11 to 12 days. However, he said builders are still determining how much those efficiencies ultimately save across the entire construction process. Achieving the full benefit requires coordination and participation from multiple trades, while the industry does not yet have enough data to quantify all the savings. “We’re in that prove-it phase,” Love said.
Some of the biggest gains from robotics are taking place away from construction sites, inside factories. Japan has become a global leader in residential construction robotics as it deals with an ageing workforce and shrinking labour pool. Developers there have moved much of the homebuilding process into controlled factory environments, using an approach that resembles an advanced automotive assembly line. Japanese developers are building about 80% of a home entirely by robots inside factories before completing final assembly on site. Companies such as Sekisui Heim use automation for welding, structural framing and material handling. At one factory, industrial robots increased production from 55 to 65 housing units a day while reducing the number of operators by 20, according to Kawasaki Robotics, which supplies the equipment. Sekisui Heim estimates that its robotics investment will pay for itself in about three years.
Murphy said the US is also seeing advances in factory automation, although the approach is less visible than humanoid robots working on construction sites. “It’s a little bit less sexy,” Murphy said of factory automation, “but we are seeing some nice breakthroughs.” He pointed to factory-built wall systems and prefabricated bathroom, kitchen and laundry pods as examples. Murphy is also managing director of Renco USA, a composite structural building system whose components are manufactured at an automated facility in Palm Beach County, Florida. He said the facility can produce enough material for roughly 7,000 homes annually. According to Murphy, Renco structures can be erected in about one-sixth the time required for traditional wood, concrete or metal framing, while total building schedules can be reduced by roughly 30% to 40%.
Factory production can speed up construction even when the work itself is not fully automated. Murphy said that if a room designed to measure 10 feet by 10 feet comes out at exactly those dimensions, windows, doors, cabinets, tiles and other components can be fabricated in advance. “Time is money,” he said. “Shorter schedules mean lower financing costs and fewer expenses associated with keeping a job site operating.” However, these efficiencies depend on designs remaining consistent. Murphy said the time and cost benefits of prefabrication can disappear when designs change. If an owner alters dimensions, fixtures or finishes, manufacturers may have to redesign and reprogram the system, reducing the advantages created by repetition. This makes tract housing, multifamily developments and other projects involving repeated designs among the potential early beneficiaries of automation at scale, Murphy said.
Kamat expects robotics to increase housing output in the US over the next five to 10 years, but through targeted productivity gains rather than a wholesale transformation of the industry. Factory automation, prefabrication and robotic layout are likely to advance fastest, he said, while job-site robots are expected to spread first in repetitive, physically demanding or precision-sensitive tasks.
Even as automation expands, industry experts do not expect construction workers to disappear. Murphy said skilled workers will continue to be needed for jobs where conditions vary and human expertise remains important. “I think the blue-collar jobs are going to have probably the best decade they’ve ever had,” he said. “The welders, the electricians, the plumbers — where the rubber meets the road in construction — we’re going to have humans there doing that for some time.”
For now, the US homebuilding industry is therefore looking beyond the idea of replacing workers with robots. The focus is increasingly on using automation to make construction more precise, reduce rework, speed up repetitive tasks and shift more work into controlled factory environments. But with the industry facing a 1.2 million-home shortage and hundreds of thousands of unfilled construction jobs, the scale of those gains remains a key question. As Dietz put it, “It’s too early” to say robotics is already meaningfully transforming homebuilding productivity.
