Ask five people how long an industrial robot lasts and you'll get five confident, incompatible answers. For an equipment lender the question isn't academic: the loan term, the advance rate, and the residual assumption all hang on it. So instead of opinions, here is what the citable authorities actually say — and why they disagree.
The tax authorities
United States — 7 years (by default). The word "robot" does not appear anywhere in IRS Publication 946, the governing document for MACRS depreciation. There is no named asset class for industrial robots. In practice they land at a 7-year recovery period — either through the manufacturing activity class the robot serves, or through the explicit rule that property with no assigned class life defaults to 7-year treatment. (Bonus depreciation and Section 179 can accelerate the cash timing, but the class life is the structural answer.)
Australia — 10 years (explicitly). The Australian Taxation Office is, as far as we can find, the only major tax authority that names robots directly: its effective-life tables list "Robots (industrial)" at 10 years (20% diminishing value), effective since July 2014, alongside roughly twenty industry-specific robot line items such as palletizing robots in food manufacturing. If you want a government document that says "an industrial robot" and "useful life" in the same row, this is it.
Germany — named in the industry tables. Germany's AfA depreciation tables include Industrieroboter in branch-specific schedules — another explicit government recognition of robots as a depreciable class with defined lives.
The auditors
Public-company financial statements give shorter answers, because GAAP useful life reflects economic service in a specific deployment, not tax convention. The clearest example: Serve Robotics depreciates its delivery-robot fleet over four years, straight-line — stated plainly in its FY2025 10-K, against a robot fleet carried at $47.2 million gross. Service robots working outdoor duty cycles are not six-axis arms bolted to a factory floor, and their accounting shows it. RaaS operators generally cluster in this 3–5 year range.
The economists
The most rigorous depreciation evidence comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, whose rates for metalworking machinery — the closest official analog to industrial robots — were estimated from actual used-asset transaction prices (the Hulten-Wykoff studies). The BEA applies geometric decay of roughly 7% to 16% per year depending on the using industry, implying service lives from about 14 to 25 years. Two things matter in that: the shape (value falls fastest early, then flattens — not straight-line), and the dispersion (the same machine depreciates at twice the rate in one industry as another, because duty cycle drives economic life).
The used market
Dealer practice, observable in the secondary market we track weekly, is blunter: refurbished legacy arms from the major brands typically ask somewhere between a fifth and half of new price, with 25–30-year-old arms still trading — at scrap-adjacent prices — in European auction channels. The single biggest gap versus other equipment classes: operating hours are almost never disclosed in robot listings. There is no odometer convention in this market yet, which is why age-based curves have to carry wide bands.
What a lender should actually use
Reconciling all of the above into practice:
- Term: the 7-year (IRS) to 10-year (ATO) band is the defensible envelope for a standard industrial arm or cobot; five years is comfortable. Shorter for mobile/service robots (the 4-year audited example), and treat cloud-dependent humanoids as a different asset class entirely.
- Curve shape: geometric, not straight-line — front-loaded value decline, consistent with both BEA methodology and observed used asks.
- The honest caveat: robot economic life is duty-cycle-driven, and the market currently hides duty cycles. Until hours disclosure becomes standard, residual assumptions deserve a conservatism buffer that vehicle and construction-equipment lenders don't need.
Sources & method: IRS Publication 946 (2025) and Rev. Proc. 87-56 (full-text checked for robot asset classes — none exist); ATO effective-life determination, Table B "Robots (industrial)" and associated Table A entries; German AfA branch tables (Industrieroboter); Serve Robotics FY2025 Form 10-K (robot assets note); BEA "Rates of Depreciation, Service Lives, Declining-Balance Rates, and Hulten-Wykoff Categories" (metalworking machinery, Type A — transaction-derived); Pexara weekly used-robot listing collection (ask prices, multi-source, July 2026). Dealer refurb ranges are published dealer marketing figures, not transaction data.