U.S. Cement Industry’s Economic Forecast Reflects the Uncertainty Caused by War with Iran
The American Cement Association’s (ACA) Market Intelligence team has released its Spring Forecast for the industry, revising its growth rate expectations for 2026, and projecting that cement consumption will decline by 2.5 percent.
The forecast was presented last month at the industry’s 2026 IEEE-IAS/ACA annual cement conference, held this year in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. More than 1,300 industry participants from 32 countries registered for this year’s event, which is a new record for the technical conference.
In their Fall Forecast shared last November, the market analysts for ACA, formerly known as the Portland Cement Association, determined the economy was on an increasingly tenuous footing, but there was not a clear stimulus for the U.S. to enter a recession. However, with the added, unpredicted start of the U.S.- Iran War in February, forecasters made a slight downward revision in their numbers. Despite this, the baseline forecast still does not expect the conflict to push the economy into a recession.
“A black swan event has come in the form of the conflict with Iran, and it’s clear the longer hostilities in the Middle East continue, the weaker the cement forecast becomes,” said Brian Schmidt, ACA’s senior director of economic policy and analytics.
The war has produced an uneasy bond market, which has pushed up borrowing costs. The prevailing mortgage rate is roughly equivalent to what it was before the Fed began cutting rates last September. All of this suggests the likelihood of another weak year for private construction. Yet, ACA’s expectations for the trajectory of cement consumption remain broadly unchanged for this year, while forecasters predict consumption will turn positive in 2027, despite growth being subdued by residual effects of 2026.
For more information on ACA’s Spring Forecast, click here.
For more information, visit www.cement.org.
About the Author
Michael Roth
Editor
Michael Roth has covered the equipment rental industry full time for RER since 1989 and has served as the magazine’s editor in chief since 1994. He has nearly 30 years experience as a professional journalist. Roth has visited hundreds of rental centers and industry manufacturers, written hundreds of feature stories for RER and thousands of news stories for the magazine and its electronic newsletter RER Reports. Roth has interviewed leading executives for most of the industry’s largest rental companies and manufacturers as well as hundreds of smaller independent companies. He has visited with and reported on rental companies and manufacturers in Europe, Central America and Asia as well as Mexico, Canada and the United States. Roth was co-founder of RER Reports, the industry’s first weekly newsletter, which began as a fax newsletter in 1996, and later became an online newsletter. Roth has spoken at conventions sponsored by the American Rental Association, Associated Equipment Distributors, California Rental Association and other industry events and has spoken before industry groups in several countries. He lives and works in Los Angeles when he’s not traveling to cover industry events.