China’s home decoration market is expected to reach 3.65 trillion yuan in 2026, and is expected to exceed 4.5 trillion yuan in 2030, a figure that exceeds the annual GDP of many provinces.
What deserves more attention is that what supports this number is structural changes, reflecting three key new trends in China’s economy.
Recently, relevant reports rely on the platform’s tens of millions of fulfillment orders and 500 million construction node data to give a complete answer from “how to install” to “why to install”. Lin Xianping, associate professor at Zhejiang Metropolitan University, pointed out that this round of home decoration consumption upgrade is driven by four core factors: the era of real estate stock, residents’ consumption upgrade, mature digital technology, and short video reshaping aesthetics.
In terms of consumption concepts, nearly 90% of consumers give priority to environmentally friendly building materials, and more than 60% are willing to pay a 10%-20% premium for green home decoration.
This reflects the fundamental change in the consumption concept from “living as long as you can” to “living healthily”.
In 2025, the per capita disposable income of residents across the country will reach 43,377 yuan, providing an economic foundation for “willingness to spend more”.
At the same time, iiMedia Consulting data shows that the scale of the domestic emotional economy market will exceed 4.5 trillion yuan in 2029, of which the home furnishing track accounts for 28% and the annual growth rate exceeds 30%.
The decision-making logic of home decoration consumption has shifted from “external display” to “internal pleasing”, and “self-adaptation” has become a key word.
Young consumers pay more attention to the emotional healing function of space. The home decoration industry has also upgraded from “selling materials and construction” to “selling life solutions”. More and more parts of the decoration budget are paid for emotional value.
In terms of market structure, in 2026, the renovation and renovation business of existing houses in Beijing accounted for more than 55%, surpassing the renovation of new houses for the first time; the renovation of old houses in Nanjing accounted for a breakthrough 62%, an increase of 11 percentage points from 2024. Nationwide, the proportion of existing renovation demand in the wall coating field has exceeded 60%, and the total area of urban residential buildings to be renovated exceeds 60 billion square meters.
Decoration of existing houses has replaced the decoration of new houses and has become the absolute mainstream in the home decoration market.
This is because residential buildings in core cities are intensively entering the renovation cycle, and consumers are more concerned about how to make old houses more comfortable.
The business models of home decoration companies have also been adjusted accordingly.
For example, B&Q launched a “7-day kitchen and bathroom renewal service”, JD.com Home Decoration released a bureau renewal strategy, and Higgold Group focused on hardware renewal, driving a compound annual growth rate of revenue of more than 25% from 2022 to 2025. For ordinary owners, future decoration decisions will focus more on “partial renovation” and “functional upgrade”.
In terms of digitalization, Tubatu’s dynamic quotation model covers 300+ cities and implements “algorithmic price verification” to replace manual valuation based on millions of real completed orders. The complaint rate of platform users due to quotation disputes has dropped by 62% year-on-year.
The AI design tool “Home Decoration Magic Box AI” shortens the plan confirmation cycle from an average of 7 days to 30 seconds, improving design efficiency by more than 100 times.
Digitization brings efficiency improvement and trust reconstruction, and solves the pain point of “opaque quotations and random addition of items” in the traditional home decoration industry.
The per capita annual output value of digital cosmetics companies has jumped from 200,000 to 300,000 yuan in the traditional model to 500,000 to 800,000 yuan.
The penetration rate of the national smart home decoration market is expected to reach 18% in 2026, an increase of 12 percentage points from 2023. Policy dividends and technological base are superimposed.
For ordinary people, if you are considering renovation, give priority to local renovation and aging-friendly plans, and leave more money for “environmental protection premium” in the budget; if you have an old house, pay attention to “fund custody” and “closed contract” when choosing a renovation company; GB 18580-2025 will be enforced by the new national standard starting from June 2026, and you must keep an eye on the standards when choosing boards. At the same time, you can enjoy trade-in subsidies when replacing home appliances during renovation.
These three major new economic trends show that home decoration is no longer a “once-in-a-lifetime” chore, but a continuous consumption of “micro-iterations in 3-5 years”. Each “small renovation” is a true footnote to China’s economic structural transformation.
