Current trends indicate that the RFID market will grow fast in the next 10 years. With 600 million tags being sold in 2005 alone, the value of the market, including hardware, systems and services, is expected to increase by a factor of ten between 2006 and 2016. The number of tags delivered in 2016 will be over 450 times the number delivered in 2006!

Business applications using RFID such as transport and logistics, access control, real time location, supply chain management, manufacturing and processing, agriculture, medicine and pharmaceuticals, are expected to grow strongly. But RFID devices will also influence Government (e.g. eGovernment, national defence and security), and consumer sectors (e.g. personal safety, sports and leisure, smart homes and smart cities). RFID and bar codes will coexist for many years, although the former technology is likely to gradually replace the latter in some sectors.

The widespread item-level tagging of products, though not imminent, is likely to progress as costs go down, standards for RFID frequency and power are defined, end-user knowledge about how the technology works improves and technical hitches such as reader accuracy and interference from external substances, are overcome.