Topic · Updated 12 August 2026
What does a humanoid robot cost to build?
The bill of materials, subsystem by subsystem: what each layer costs as a share of the whole, which layers have a domestic alternative, and what the public filings say about price.
40–60%
Actuation share of humanoid BOM cost
Third-party
65%
Domestic content the FCC rule requires, rising to 75% in 2029
Filing-grade
Rmb61bn
Unitree market capitalisation at IPO pricing, 6 August 2026
Filing-grade
$25,500
EngineAI PM01 entry price, mid-tier humanoid
Company-claimed
The current answer
- 01Actuation is 40 to 60 percent of humanoid bill-of-materials cost, which makes it the layer that decides almost every other economic question about the robot. Core Matter estimate, August 2026, built from factory quotes and vendor pricing.
- 02No other single subsystem comes close to actuation's share, so a cost curve for humanoids is mostly a cost curve for actuators. Compute, perception, battery cells and structure divide the remainder.
- 03The FCC's July 2026 Covered List rule applies the Buy American test at 48 CFR 25.101(a): manufactured in the United States with domestic components above 65 percent of total component cost, rising to 75 percent in 2029. It is a bill-of-materials threshold rather than a country-of-origin ban.
- 04The actuation share makes that threshold unreachable while actuators are foreign. At 40 percent of component cost and fully foreign, the highest domestic share a finished robot can reach is 60 percent. At 60 percent, the ceiling is 40 percent. Both fail 65 percent before a single other part is counted.
- 05Unitree priced its STAR Board IPO at Rmb150.80 per share on 6 August 2026, implying roughly Rmb61bn of market capitalisation, about US$8.6bn. That is the first public price carried by a profitable humanoid maker, and the first real pricing event for embodied AI as an asset class.
- 06Published humanoid prices span roughly two orders of magnitude by tier. EngineAI's PM01 starts at US$25,500, priced alongside AgiBot's A2 and Dobot's Atom, against Unitree's sub-Rmb100,000 developer tier at the low end and Droidup's Moya biomimetic humanoid at US$173,000 at the high end. All company-claimed.
The domestic-content ceiling, by actuation share
The arithmetic of the FCC test when the actuators are foreign-made. Neither end of the actuation range clears the threshold.
| Actuation share of BOM | Maximum domestic share reachable | Clears 65%? |
|---|---|---|
| 40% (low end of range) | 60% | No |
| 50% (midpoint) | 50% | No |
| 60% (high end of range) | 40% | No |
The range does not need resolving to answer the question. No actuation cost share within it clears the test while the actuators are foreign-made. The rule splits domestic from everything else, with no allied tier, so Japanese and Taiwanese sourcing fails identically to Chinese sourcing.
Published humanoid prices by tier
Entry prices as published or reported, August 2026. All company-claimed unless stated.
| Maker and model | Price | Tier | Provenance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unitree, developer tier | Under Rmb100,000 | Developer | Company-claimed |
| EngineAI PM01 | US$25,500 | Mid | Company-claimed |
| AgiBot A2 | Comparable to PM01 | Mid | Company-claimed |
| Dobot Atom | Comparable to PM01 | Mid | Company-claimed |
| UBTech UWorld companion | About US$30,000 | Consumer companion | Company-claimed |
| Droidup Moya | US$173,000 | Biomimetic | Company-claimed |
Price tier and capability are weakly correlated. The developer tier exists to seed a research market rather than to do work, which is visible in the revenue split under Deployment reality.
The research behind this answer
Every Core Matter piece that contributed to the figures above, newest first, with what each one added.
Report
12 August 2026
Unitree's IPO roadshow, translated: what Wang Xingxing told 360 investors
Put a public price on a profitable humanoid maker, and disclosed the actuator architecture and revenue split behind it.
Newsletter
4 August 2026
Home robot economics 101: what 1X, Weave and Tau cost to run
Took the BOM question into the home tier, where the buyer pool and the subsidy structure change the answer.
Newsletter
30 July 2026
The FCC did not ban Chinese robots. It set a bill-of-materials test
Walked the humanoid BOM layer by layer against the 65 percent domestic-content test, and established the actuation ceiling arithmetic.
Report
17 June 2026
17,000 humanoids shipped last year. Almost none went to work.
Established the shipment base and showed that vertical integration into motors, reducers and encoders buys iteration speed rather than only unit cost.
Newsletter
6 June 2026
NVIDIA's open humanoid runs on Chinese components
A component-level read of a US reference design, showing where the parts actually come from.
Newsletter
28 May 2026
Humanoid's two-German-supplier bet against the Tesla playbook
The asset-light case: what changes in the BOM when a maker buys actuators and assembly rather than building them.
What this answer cannot cover yet
- 01The subsystem-level cost model covering all eleven subsystems is built from factory quotes and is not yet published in full. The published figures above are the headline shares.
- 02Actuation's 40 to 60 percent range is wide, and other analysts put it higher. Resolving that spread is the subject of the actuator primer in progress.
Related topics
How to read the figures
Every figure on this page is labelled by provenance. Filing-grade means it comes from a regulatory filing. Company-claimed means the company stated it. Third-party means a tracker, retail listing, teardown, or Core Matter estimate. This page is updated as new research lands rather than republished, and the date at the top is the last time a figure on it moved.
Research access
This answer moves when new work lands
The research that updates this page is published as it is finished, built from company filings, datasheets and direct factory pricing.