FM Has Grown Up: Experience, Growth and Alignment in the UK Market

Being a regular attendee at the annual Workplace Futures conference, you become familiar to the discussions around AI, decarbonisation and digital acceleration. What I did not expect at this year's event was about how fundamentally our profession has shifted. FM has quietly become one of the UK’s most resilient and economically significant sectors. The scale is substantial, but more importantly, so is the responsibility that comes with it.

We learnt from the conference, that the total UK FM volume stands at £77.2 billion. Of that, £36.5 billion is outsourced, with outsourcing penetration at 47.2%. By 2032, outsourced FM revenue is projected to reach £45.1 billion, growing at 3.1% CAGR*. This is not peripheral activity - it is core infrastructure shaping how millions of people experience their working day.

Where does this growth sit? Integrated FM is expanding fastest at 4.5%, ahead of bundled services at 3.2% and single services at 2%. High growth sectors include private healthcare at 5.6%, logistics at 5.3%, technology at 4.7% and life sciences at 4.5%. Growth is concentrated where complexity, regulation and operational intensity are highest*.

Digging deeper into the detail, the data tells us something important. Organisations are not simply buying services; they are looking for partners who understand the pressures of their sector; regulatory shifts, workforce sustainability, ESG scrutiny and operational resilience. Providers operating across multiple sectors, with the scale and insight to connect those pressures to delivery are better positioned to respond. For a business like Sodexo, operating at national scale across public and private sectors, that breadth creates perspective and which allows us to anticipate pressures rather than simply reacting to them.

At the same time, FM itself has evolved. The organisations delivering integrated services at scale have had to evolve with it. Although discussions haven’t moved away from maintenance and cost control, other aspects have become of equal importance; user experience, data transformation, workplace optimisation and ESG performance. We are no longer measured on what we maintain, but on what we enable. Clients are asking harder questions about productivity, retention and culture because they are feeling the cost of getting it wrong. Poor workplace experience is no longer an inconvenience; it is a retention risk, a productivity drag and in some sectors, a reputational exposure.

Alignment and partnership with a client’s strategy will also help differentiate an FM provider. As a sponsor of the Workplace Futures 2026 event, Sodexo had an opportunity to share our story. 

It reflects how progress can be made when clients and providers work through shared challenges together.

Sodexo's carbon reduction progress and supplier engagement milestones across the UK and Ireland have been achieved in partnership with clients operating in complex, high-growth sectors. In a £77 billion market, impact is amplified when capability and ambition move in the same direction.

FM has grown up. The question now is not whether we are part of that evolution, but how deliberately we help shape it. Working hand in hand with our clients, we have an opportunity not just to respond to growth, but to define what good looks like for the next phase of FM.

^*Source: Market research: insights, now and for the mid-termJohn Raspin, Global Head Growth Opportunity Analytics, Frost & Sullivan