Harry Moser
President

2025 Reshoring Survey: A Winning Formula for Successful Reshoring

The 2025 USA Reshoring Survey, a collaboration between the Reshoring Initiative and Regions Recruiting, accumulated results from 500 U.S. manufacturers, including original equipment manufacturers (OEMs, 55% of respondents) and contract manufacturers (CMs, 45% of respondents.

The 2025 USA Reshoring Survey, a collaboration between the Reshoring Initiative and Regions Recruiting, accumulated results from 500 U.S. manufacturers, including original equipment manufacturers (OEMs, 55% of respondents) and contract manufacturers (CMs, 45% of respondents and defined as manufacturers of parts, components or tooling for use in an OEM end product). The survey offers insights into the opportunities and challenges to reshoring manufacturing, and reveals the foundational elements needed for U.S. reshoring: lower costs; a larger, more highly skilled workforce; use of total cost of ownership (TCO) when comparing domestic to offshore sourcing; and preparation for geopolitical risk. These are the core components needed for successful American reindustrialization.

The survey reached two actionable conclusions. First, a sufficient quantity and quality of U.S. workforce would bring back more manufacturing than any of the other surveyed options, including tariffs, a lower U.S. dollar, lower tax rates and fewer regulations. If we boost global competitiveness but don’t have factory workers, it’s futile.

Second, successful reshoring requires an established ecosystem of suppliers and intermediaries, such as the CMs surveyed, encompassing all steps from raw materials to finished product.

Barriers to U.S. Reindustrialization

• Tariff uncertainty.  Although tariffs are encouraging some companies to site more manufacturing in the United States, tariff uncertainty is discouraging reshoring. Without a stable, long-term policy framework, companies are hesitant to make irreversible commitments to increase U.S. manufacturing. If tariffs are to be used, we would rather see a 25 to 50% tariff on China and a more modest 10 to 15% tariff on the rest of the world, firmly instituted on a long-term basis, e.g. 10 yr, so that companies feel confident making investments.
  
  
• Skilled labor shortage. The survey confirms that the skilled labor shortage is a significant barrier to foreign direct investment (FDI) and reshoring efforts.  Some U.S. factory-startup and expansion projects have experienced delays because of difficulties in finding skilled workers.
  
  
• Manufacturing costs. Manufacturing costs in the United States run about 50% higher than in China, and about 10 or 20% higher than in almost all other developed countries in the world. This makes the United States extremely uncompetitive, a problem that, if not addressed, will lead companies to continue sourcing and siting abroad.

With all of that said, let’s explore the key factors driving U.S. competitiveness, profitability and sustainability in contract manufacturing. First, the survey finds that 59% of CMs either have already reshored for their customers, are actively reshoring or are quoting reshoring (Fig. 1). When asked about quoting against imports, CMs say they are competing with imports on about 31% of quotes, with only 7% facing no offshore competition and 3% competing with imports on every quote. Too, 91% indicate that the primary reason they lost orders to imports was price (Fig. 2), and 68% of CMs say that for orders they lost to imports, the import FOB price was 20 to 50+% lower than their own. As a weighted average, prices of winning imports were about 24% lower than CM prices.