SOURCE RESEARCH
UHF RFID Endpoint ICs, Inlays, and Labels
Market Data | 2Q 2026 | MD-UHFINL-101
Get The ReportHang tags remain the most prevalent form factor for RFID labels. Used heavily in the apparel industry, they still account for nearly 90% of the volume shipped into this market. There is some momentum behind care labels in the apparel market as retailers look for tags that are harder to remove, enabling additional value through use cases such as loss prevention and returns enablement. Brand labels, adopted by leaders like Zara, are still a minority of the market.
The large increase in packaging labels is driven by the growth of three verticals: general merchandise (e.g., Walmart), T&L (e.g., UPS), and the food market. Labels tend to be applied directly to a product or converted into a product/packaging label.
Sewn-in or seam labels remain a small market today. Significant projects in this space tend to focus on laundry and workwear use cases, and those are usually in the low-millions of units. Seam tags are typically (but not always, e.g., Avery Dennison) more expensive compared to regular RFID stickers, and they create difficulties in apparel manufacturing processes, so they are not widely adopted there.
Hard shell tags are used for a variety of purposes across industries. The single largest use case category is in Returnable Transport Assets (RTAs) in the retail and manufacturing industries, but some companies such as HID Global focus on these lower-volume, higher-value tags for asset tracking and maintenance purposes
Related Research
UHF RFID Technologies, Applications, and End Markets Market Data Overview: 1Q 2025
Presentation | 1Q 2025 | PT-3655
UHF RFID: Retail Software & Services Market Data Overview: 3Q 2025
Presentation | 3Q 2025 | PT-3692
UHF RFID: Technology, Ecosystem & Strategies Evolution
Presentation | 2Q 2025 | PT-3656
Smart Labels: Solutions & Commercialization
Presentation | 1Q 2026 | PT-6042
RFID Inventory Platforms for the Retail Market
Competitive Ranking | 4Q 2025 | CA-1589
