Austin, Texas, USA, June 1, 2026

Futurum releases its 1H 2026 Cybersecurity Market Sizing & Five-Year Forecast and Decision Maker Survey of 929 enterprise buyers, sizing the market at $335.8B in 2025 and forecasting $521.7B by 2031, with buyer budget growth moderating rather than reversing.

The global cybersecurity market reached $335.8 billion in 2025 and is on track to reach $521.7 billion by 2031 at a 7.6% compound annual growth rate, materially below the 14% to 18% historical trend, according to two new reports released today by The Futurum Group: the “1H 2026 Cybersecurity Market Sizing & Five-Year Forecast” and the “1H 2026 Cybersecurity Decision Maker Survey Report” of 929 global enterprise buyers.

Figure 1: Cybersecurity Market, Historical 2022-2025 and Scenarios 2026-2031

The forecast describes a market decelerating into a contested band. The base case reaches $521.7B by 2031 at 7.6% CAGR; the bull case ($601B, 10.1% CAGR) requires AI security spend to ramp ahead of schedule, accelerated regulatory enforcement, and softer platform-consolidation drag; the bear case ($449B, 5.0% CAGR) is the inverse. All three scenarios describe a market that continues growing in absolute dollars.

The buyer-side data corroborates the deceleration. 67.2% of organizations anticipate cybersecurity budget increases over the next twelve months (see Figure 2), down six points from 73.2% in 2H 2025. Within increases, the deceleration is concentrated in significant growth (greater than 15%), which fell to 19.4% from 23.1%, while the freed-up share moved into relatively flat budgets (19.3%, up from 14.9%). The decrease tail expanded only modestly.

Figure 2: Cybersecurity Budget Outlook for the Next 12 Months

Fernando Montenegro, VP and Practice Lead for Cybersecurity and Resilience at The Futurum Group, said, “This is a market finishing one expansion cycle and beginning another. The market math and the buyer behavior tell the same story. The story is not about cuts; it is about commitments. Prior-period investments are now in motion, and the dollars that are still moving are being justified on different grounds: enterprise risk discipline rather than infrastructure refresh.”

The reports identify several converging shifts shaping the 1H 2026 cycle:

The four highest-growth segments through 2031 (Cloud Security at 11.8% CAGR, Security Operations & GRC at 10.2%, Data Security at 9.2%, and Application Security at 7.8%) are all directly tied to securing AI workloads and the data feeding them, collectively adding $77 billion of incremental annual spend by 2031.

Buyer threat-concern profiles have pivoted accordingly. Phishing, business email compromise, and AI-driven impersonation (including deepfakes) registered as the second-most-concerning incident type at 25.9% top three, and compromise of non-human identities and service accounts emerged as a notable new category at 13.5%; neither existed in this form in 2H 2025.

Areas such as Identity & Access Management and Endpoint Security registered on the slower side of growth, consistent with a dynamic of seeing platform consolidation pressures as buyers absorb point-tool IAM and endpoint contracts into hyperscaler, SASE, and SecOps platforms. Surveyed organizations with 50,000+ employees report net spend intent roughly 10 points below the benchmark.

Combined vendor consolidation intent rose to 42.0% in 1H 2026 from 34.6% in 2H 2025, while combined expansion intent fell to 35.8% from 43.0%, the first period in this series where consolidation has clearly outpaced expansion.

Among organizations expecting budget growth, risk management strategy now leads the top-cited drivers at 47.8% top three, while cybersecurity modernization fell from 56.0% in 2H 2025 to 44.7% in 1H 2026, an eleven-point decline in mindshare.

The shifts arrive against a more mature governance backdrop. 32.5% of organizations report the CISO into the CIO or CTO, and another 13.8% into the Head of IT, while only 25.5% place the CISO directly under the CEO. At the same time, 65% of organizations now present cybersecurity to the board at least quarterly. Cybersecurity is increasingly board-visible, but structural independence from IT remains uncommon.

“For vendors, the implication is clear,” Montenegro continued. “Reposition go-to-market around AI-security adjacency, not perimeter heritage. Build platform-bundled commercial motions for the largest enterprises while opening a credible mid-market wedge, where Medium Enterprise buyers are growing roughly three times faster than Very Large Enterprise. And anchor vertical pitches to specific regulatory drivers, not generic regulation tailwind. Generic ‘AI-powered’ claims will not move this market; demonstrable, certified integrations and credible AI-defense narratives will.”

Taken together, 1H 2026 describes a cybersecurity function maturing into a more disciplined enterprise practice. Spending is settling into a steadier band, vendor strategies are tightening toward consolidation, governance reporting is becoming routine, and the conversation about threats is being rewritten around AI-shaped attack surfaces.

Read more in the reports “1H 2026 Cybersecurity Market Sizing & Five-Year Forecast” and “1H 2026 Cybersecurity Decision Maker Survey Report” on the Futurum Intelligence Platform.

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