The American Cement Association’s (ACA) market intelligence team released its spring forecast for the cement industry, revising its growth rate expectations for 2026 and projecting cement consumption to decline 2.5 percent.
ACA presented the forecast Wednesday at the IEEE-IAS/ACA Cement Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
In its fall forecast shared last November, ACA’s market analysts determined the economy was on an increasingly tenuous footing but there was no clear stimulus for the U.S. to enter a recession.
With the added, unexpected start of the U.S.-Iran war in February, ACA forecasters made a slight downward revision in their numbers.
Despite this, the association says 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,” says Brian Schmidt, senior director of economic policy and analytics at ACA.
Additionally, ACA says the war has produced a restive bond market, which has pushed up borrowing costs. Also, the prevailing mortgage rate is roughly equivalent to what it was before the Fed began cutting rates last September.
ACA says all of this implies another weak year for private construction. Yet, the association’s expectations for the trajectory of cement consumption remain broadly unchanged for 2026. Forecasters predict consumption will turn positive in 2027, although growth will remain subdued due to residual effects from 2026.
