How Much Does a Robot Cost? $700 to $2.5 Million

What a Robot Costs by Category

A robot costs between about $700 and $2.5 million.

We keep a price page for nearly every robot category on this site.

Where you land depends on which job you are buying, so find your category before you compare any two numbers. Each band below comes from a price a manufacturer or a named outlet has published.

Home Robots Cost $700 to $8,000

Home robots priced for retail sit between roughly $700 and $8,000, and lawn care sets the top of that band.

Worx Landroid and the smaller Husqvarna Automower models start near $700 to $1,000 for a quarter-acre lawn. Both follow a buried boundary wire, which keeps the price down and costs you a weekend of laying cable before the first cut.

Wire-free machines replace that cable with satellite positioning, so nothing gets buried and the mowing map can be redrawn from a phone. Segway Navimow and the Mammotion LUBA 2 use real-time kinematic (RTK) GPS and run $2,500 to $6,000 once coverage passes an acre.

Indoor machines land lower. Litter-Robot 4 lists from $699 and supports up to four cats, which removes daily scooping while leaving you the waste drawer. Sony Aibo sits near $2,899 and is a companion product with subscription cloud features, so it takes no chore off your week at all.

Robot vacuums are the one home category where the tier matters more than the total, because the money goes into dock automation rather than suction. Our robot vacuum price guide breaks down what each tier removes from your week, and the robot lawn mower price guide does the same by lawn size.

Humanoid Robots Start at $4,900

The cheapest humanoid robot with a public checkout price is the Unitree R1 at $4,900.

Unitree publishes a full ladder above it: G1 at $13,500, H2 at $29,900, H1 at $90,000, and H2 Plus at $100,000. A published price lets you build a budget before you talk to anyone. The current listings sit on the Unitree humanoid shop page.

1X Technologies sells NEO two ways. There is a $499 monthly subscription and a $20,000 ownership path, with a $200 refundable deposit holding a place in the delivery queue.

Tesla Optimus, Figure AI, Agility Digit, and Apptronik Apollo publish no consumer checkout price. That makes them watchlist entries rather than budget lines, because a quote-only machine can arrive at any number the pilot scope produces.

Shipping is the line most humanoid buyers miss. Unitree puts R1 shipping at $300 to $1,200. Customs duties, taxes, and import clearance are left to the buyer, so a $4,900 robot can land above $6,000 before it is switched on. The tier-by-tier detail sits in our humanoid robot price guide.

An Industrial Arm Costs Triple Its Price Once Installed

An industrial robot arm costs about a third of the production cell it ends up working in.

A small-payload arm runs $25,000 to $40,000 on its own. The same arm installed and running as a cell costs $65,000 to $120,000. The ratio holds as payload climbs: a heavy arm is $110,000 to $200,000 or more by itself, and $300,000 to $1,000,000 or more once it is integrated.

Across the price pages we maintain here, this multiplier is the figure readers get wrong most often. They budget the arm, get a quote for the cell, and find the project has doubled before anyone has written a line of robot code.

Four line items account for the gap, and one of them overruns more than the rest.

Fixtures are the item to watch. Part presentation depends on how repeatably your parts arrive at the robot, which nobody can price from a catalog, so it is quoted last and revised most. Our industrial robot cost guide gives the full band by payload and reach.

• End-of-arm tooling such as a gripper, welding torch, or dispensing head: $3,000 to $40,000. This is the part that touches your product, so a custom shape costs the most and a standard gripper the least.
• Safety hardware and a risk assessment to ISO 10218 and ANSI R15.06: $8,000 to $40,000, which is what lets people work near the cell.
• Fixtures, guides, and part presentation: $5,000 to $60,000, the largest overrun line in real projects.
• Controls integration into a programmable logic controller, human-machine interface, vision, and the plant network: $10,000 to $50,000. This is what lets the cell take a job from your existing production system instead of needing an operator to start every run.

Security Robots Are Rented, Farm Robots Are Sold

Patrol robots in the United States are almost always rented rather than sold.

Knightscope prices its autonomous security robots as annual subscriptions at an effective $1 to $11 per hour. That figure divides an annual contract across all 8,760 hours in a year, so it is not a metered rate and the robot is not billed per shift. Two buyers quoting the same machine at $9 an hour and $79,000 a year are quoting the same contract.

The K5 outdoor unit sits at the top of that band, and the low end belongs to Knightscope's stationary blue light towers rather than to anything that patrols. New York City leased a K5 at about $9 an hour in 2023, and NBC News reported annual rentals of $70,000 to $80,000. You can compare the current line on the Knightscope K5 product page.

Farm robots are sold outright and cover the widest range in robotics. Naio Technologies has had its Oz weeder reported near $30,000 and its larger Dino at $200,000 to $300,000. Carbon Robotics sells the LaserWeeder G2 line from roughly $1.4 million, rising above $1.7 million at the widest cut. Neither maker publishes a price list. Treat both as reported figures, and check the LaserWeeder G2 band on Carbon Robotics' own product page before budgeting.

Dairy is the other farm category sold by quote, and it prices per box rather than per machine. A robotic milking system is bought one box at a time, and each box milks a fixed number of cows. Herd size therefore sets the box count before any vendor is compared. No manufacturer publishes a list price. Lely, DeLaval, and GEA all quote through dealers.

Three lines move a milking quote more than the robot does. The shed is the first. A retrofit into an existing barn costs more than the same boxes in a new build, because cow flow has to be rebuilt around the machine. The service contract is the second, and it matters more here than in most robotics. A milking box that stops working becomes a welfare problem within hours. Dealer distance is the third. Ask for the response-time commitment in writing before comparing two quotes.

The payback case is labour, and it is worth doing with your own numbers rather than a vendor spreadsheet. Compare the quoted cost per box against the wage bill for the milking shifts it removes. Add the service contract to the robot side. Then set a realistic number of years the boxes run before a major rebuild.

All three price by quote for the same reason. A patrol robot is sized to a site, a field robot to an acreage, and a milking system to a herd, so the configuration is the price. Our security robot cost guide separates published figures from contract evidence for the patrol category.

Medical Robots Bill More in Disposables Than in Capital

A busy surgical robot program spends more on single-use instruments each year than the robot cost to buy.

A soft-tissue system in the Intuitive Surgical da Vinci class runs about $1.5 million to $2.5 million new, and $700,000 to $1.2 million refurbished or a generation behind. Buying refurbished halves the capital line and leaves the recurring lines untouched.

Disposables run about $1,500 to $3,500 per case. A program running 400 cases a year at roughly $2,000 a case spends $800,000 on consumables alone, which is on the order of the arm itself. Service contracts add another 10 to 12 percent of capital per year after the first year, or roughly $150,000 to $190,000.

That arithmetic is why case volume decides whether a surgical robot pays, and the capital number barely enters it. A low-volume program pays the same service contract as a busy one. The five-year math by system sits in our medical robot cost guide.

The Four Costs a Sticker Price Leaves Out

Four costs sit outside the purchase price in nearly every robot category we price.

Price a full year of all four before you compare two machines, because the cheaper purchase is often the more expensive year.

• Delivery and import. Unitree puts R1 shipping at $300 to $1,200 and leaves duties and customs clearance to you, which can add a quarter to the landed price.
• Installation. On an industrial arm this is the biggest line of all: the whole gap between the $25,000 arm and the $65,000 working cell is installation.
• Consumables and wear parts. A home machine eats brushes, filters, and dock bags. A weeder replaces laser optics. A surgical system buys instruments at $1,500 to $3,500 a case.
• Service and software. Knightscope folds support into the subscription, while several farm and industrial makers sell the autonomy software on a separate line from the hardware.

Who This Guide Does Not Serve

This guide will not help you price a robot you intend to build yourself.

A build budget is set by motors, controllers, and a frame rather than by a finished product's margin, so the bands here are the wrong reference. Use our DIY robot cost calculator instead, which prices a build from its parts.

It is also the wrong page for a used purchase. Resale figures swing far below every band above, and used LaserWeeder units have appeared at auction for a small fraction of a new machine. Our used robots guide covers what to inspect before bidding.

If you already know your category, skip the table and open that category's price page. The bands here route you to the right one, and each linked guide carries the model-by-model detail.

What Would Change These Numbers

Three developments would move the bands on this page.

A humanoid maker publishing a consumer checkout price would reset the top of that band immediately. Tesla Optimus, Figure AI, and Apptronik Apollo publish none today, so the $100,000 ceiling reflects Unitree's catalog rather than the state of the category.

Tariff and duty changes move every imported robot at once. Because Unitree leaves duties to the buyer, a rate change lands on an individual invoice within one shipment rather than at the next model launch.

A working resale market would compress the top bands. Used farm and surgical equipment already sells at auction far below new pricing. A reliable resale channel would pull the practical entry price for both categories down with it.