Smart City Technologies: What US Cities Actually Bought in 2026

Last updated: October 6, 2026

Smart city technologies are the connected systems a city uses to run its physical assets. Sensors, cameras, traffic signals, meters, networks, and the software that ties them together. Across 53 city technology contracts recorded in 2026, US cities spent a median of $177,313. The total was $92.7 million across 48 agencies in 26 states. Here is what they bought, from whom, for how much, and what they cancelled.

What counts as a smart city technology?

A smart city technology is any connected system a city buys to watch or control its physical assets. What makes it smart is the network link, not the intelligence. A water meter that radios a reading counts. A water meter someone walks up to and reads does not.

Most category lists come from vendor sales decks. The six below come from what US cities actually signed for in 2026.

• Traffic and mobility. Signal controllers, signal retiming, adaptive control, freeway and arterial management, parking.
• Public safety and surveillance. Licence plate readers, gunshot detection, fixed cameras, in-car computing.
• Utilities, metering and water. Advanced meter systems, smart water meters, remote control and telemetry.
• Connectivity and networks. City broadband, fibre builds, public Wi-Fi, network hardware.
• Streetlights and energy. LED conversion, streetlight controls and maintenance.
• Data platforms and dashboards. The integration layer that collects from the other five.

One category shows up in every analyst framework and almost never in the contracts. That is the citywide digital twin. Cities are buying sensors and meters. They are not buying the simulation layer that vendors put at the heart of the pitch.

What cities spent in 2026, by category

The median city smart tech contract in 2026 was $177,313. The spread is wide. A quarter of awards fall below $62,849. A quarter run above $1,147,500. This market holds both a $1,039 firewall bill and a $34,000,000 broadband build.

Source: Civic IQ municipal contract records, 53 awards with a stated value and a named agency, dated 2026, across 48 agencies in 26 states. Streetlights (n=3) and data platforms (n=2) are small samples and the medians should be read as indicative only.

Here is the surprise. City size predicts the spend far less well than category does. Syracuse, Utah has about 35,000 people. It approved $1,600,000 to replace its streetlights. New Haven, Connecticut is four times the size and spent less than that on gunshot detection. What a city buys matters more than how big it is. These are asset swaps, priced per unit.

Traffic and mobility

A city traffic tech contract runs about $490,887 at the median. That is the highest of any category. Scope sets the range. Wylie, Texas approved $1,428,393 for traffic control signal equipment. Regional bodies go higher. The Maricopa Association of Governments is rolling out a $14,400,000 freeway management system. The Wichita Area Metropolitan Planning Organization has $4,200,000 of smart transport work.

At the other end, signal retiming is cheap and routine. A retiming programme in Saginaw, Texas appears at $9,240. Retiming is software and labour. Swapping the controller is capital.

Public safety and surveillance

Public safety is the largest category by count, at 14 of 53 awards. The median is $411,210. Gunshot detection deals cluster tightly: New Haven, Connecticut at $2,084,431, Bibb County, Georgia at $1,572,000 for three years, Peoria, Illinois at $948,105 for a three year renewal, and Glendale, Arizona at $62,849 for an annual renewal.

Licence plate reading sells on longer terms. Statesboro, Georgia signed a five year Flock Safety contract covering cameras and gunshot detection at $1,147,500. Notice the five year term. It is exactly what the cancellations later in this article push against.

Utilities, metering and water

Metering has the lowest median of any category, at $78,000. It also has the widest gap between a service bill and a full programme. Burleson, Texas approved $9,407,810 to replace its advanced metering infrastructure. Most cities pay far less, because they are paying for one year of a system they already own. High Springs, Florida paid $78,000 for annual upkeep. Palos Heights, Illinois paid $116,000 to install antennas and $15,750 for software.

A meter swap is a once in fifteen years event. Everything in between is a subscription.

Connectivity and networks

Network contracts have a median of $159,156. They also have the longest tail. Quincy, Massachusetts is weighing a city broadband plan worth $34,000,000. That is the largest award in the set. Livingston County, New York expanded a broadband contract to $3,633,943. Against that, Taneytown, Maryland appears twice at $1,040 and $1,039 for city fibre and firewall services.

This is where the word city hides the most. A county fibre build and a small town internet bill are not the same buy.

Data platforms and dashboards

Only two awards in 2026 are for the layer that joins everything up. That is the most telling number here. Opelika, Alabama accounts for both. It spent $1,500,000 on a city operations platform and $600,000 on a Cisco upgrade. With only two records, this is not a market rate. It is here to show how rare the buy is.

Who is selling: the vendor landscape

Two vendors appear more often than any others in the 2026 records. Flock Safety in licence plate reading, and SoundThinking, once called ShotSpotter, in gunshot detection. Both sell subscriptions on multi-year terms. Both take a large share of the public safety category.

Source: Civic IQ municipal contract records, 2026. Vendor names as recorded in the awarding document.

Two findings matter more than the list.

The categories are not consolidating at the same speed. At city scale, public safety is close to a two-supplier market. Metering, traffic and networks are split up. Local dealers and engineering firms take work that never reaches a national brand. Enter metering and you face a different rival in every state. Enter licence plate reading and you face one.

Several names that fill industry coverage are not in these records at all. We searched the 2026 awards for Motorola Solutions, Verkada, Axon, Itron, Badger Meter, Granicus, Verra Mobility, Miovision, StreetLight Data and Cartegraph. None of them came back. That says something about this sample, not about those firms. Several of them are large public sector suppliers. We would rather say so than fill the gap with names the records do not support.

Where the investment went

The money in this market went to the exact category cities now argue about. Flock Safety raised $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation in March 2025. Andreessen Horowitz led the round. The company said it had passed $300 million in annual recurring revenue, growing about 70 percent year over year.

That is the tension to grasp before selling here. The fastest growing city tech company sells the product cities cancel most. Its growth rests on five year subscriptions. Councils are now reopening five year subscriptions.

Smart city platforms and data management

A smart city platform is software that pulls data from meters, cameras, signals and sensors into one place. In the 2026 records, almost nobody bought one.

Two awards out of 53 are for that joining layer. Both are Opelika, Alabama. One is $1,500,000 for a city operations platform. The other is $600,000 for a Cisco upgrade. Every other city in the set bought a single tool with its own console.

That is the real state of city data management. A city runs a gunshot portal, a meter system, a signal system and a camera system as four separate products. Each has its own login, contract and renewal date. The joined up platform is what the category is sold on. It is not what cities buy.

For vendors the lesson is direct. The buyer is the department, not the city. Public works buys meters. Police buy cameras. Traffic engineers buy controllers. A platform sale has to clear all of them at once. That is why so few close.

There is one exception, and it is the regional body. The Regional Transportation Commission in Nevada bought a traffic platform at $558,000. Planning bodies in Kansas, Texas, Ohio and North Dakota show up again and again in the traffic records. Where a platform does sell, it sells to the agency that already sits above several cities.

What the analyst reports don’t tell you

The best known free guide here is IBM’s explainer. It ranks well and gets cited often. It carries no contract values, no vendor awards and no buying detail. Its newest named source is from 2018. The other big market map, Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Smart City Technologies, sits behind a paywall. So does the most cited academic result on page one of search.

So here is the method behind every number above, stated plainly.

• The records are city contract awards, agenda items and purchase records surfaced by Civic IQ. We pulled them on September 13, 2026.
• A record counts only if it states a dollar value and names an agency. We drop awards with no named buyer. That is why some cancellations below carry no figure.
• Civil construction was removed. A road widening with a signal in it is not a technology contract.
• We removed duplicates by agency and value, because the same award often shows up in several meeting papers.
• That leaves 53 contracts, 48 agencies, 26 states, all dated 2026, totalling $92,696,432.

What this is not: a measure of all US city tech spending. It is a sample of awards visible in public meeting records in 2026. Where a category has two or three records, we say so. We do not dress it up as a market rate. No figure here comes from a forecast.

What happened to the smart city projects that failed

Some were cut by councils under public pressure. Some fell apart in the buying process. At least one was cut and then restarted. Nearly all the cuts are in cameras.

In the 2026 records, 22 jurisdictions across 13 states appear cutting, declining to renew, or reviewing a licence plate reader or camera contract.

Source: Civic IQ municipal records, September 2025 to September 2026. We drop records with no named agency. Most cancellation records carry no value, because the document that ends a contract rarely states one.

Outside trackers point the same way. Newsweek cited the group DeFlock in July 2026. It reported 95 cities that had turned down licence plate reader systems, 47 that cancelled contracts, 25 that rejected proposed deals and 22 that switched cameras off. The Institute for Justice launched a public database tracking these cuts in August 2026. The counts differ between trackers, because the methods and date ranges differ. Do not add them together.

Cancellation is not a one way trend

Cambridge, Massachusetts voted to end its ShotSpotter contract in May 2026 on a 5 to 2 vote. Only about 35 percent of alerts over a decade were confirmed as gunfire. On July 4 a city public works employee was shot and killed. On August 3 the council voted 6 to 3 to switch it back on for 90 days. A randomly picked residents’ panel is now reviewing it. The system was back online on August 22.

Treat these cuts as contested and reversible, not settled.

When procurement itself fails

New Orleans is the clearest case, and it is the template. In April 2021 the city put out an RFP for broadband, smart streetlights, traffic management and Wi-Fi kiosks. It picked Smart+Connected NOLA, a group made up of Qualcomm, Jacobs Engineering and JLC Infrastructure. The losing bid came from Cox Communications and was worth more than $150 million. Cities Today reported two problems. A firm advising the city for free was a partner of members of the winning group. And two city staff ran an outside consulting business that had done work for Qualcomm. The council president cited a lack of transparency and the risk of contract rigging. The council subpoenaed a city official on April 11, 2022 and held a hearing on April 27. The group withdrew days later, citing significant uncertainty.

No technology failed in New Orleans. The buying process did. Big bundled smart city deals put everything in one award. That raises the scrutiny on how the award was made.

What comes next: the approval gate

The clearest forward signal in the 2026 records is not a technology. It is a process change. Cities are adding an approval step in front of camera purchases. It did not exist when these contracts were first signed.

The same pattern shows up in four forms.

• Local bylaws. A Massachusetts select board ordered a camera contract cancelled. At the same meeting it backed a bylaw requiring a public hearing before any camera technology is approved.
• Data audits. Berwyn, Illinois ordered an outside audit of how camera data is held and shared, to check it against state privacy law and city rules.
• Policy rewrites at renewal. San Fernando, California moved to tighten its rules on releasing licence plate data and to check them against the state civil code. Newburgh, New York paired its review to end a contract with a policy review.
• Resident panels. Cambridge, Massachusetts will only keep gunshot detection if a randomly picked panel of residents backs it after reviewing the evidence.

For vendors this changes the shape of the sale, not the size. The technical review is no longer the last gate. Three more now sit between a good staff write up and a signed contract. A data sharing policy. A retention schedule. A public hearing. The deal can die at any of them, after the product has already won.

Two things follow. Long default terms are now a risk, not an asset. The five year subscription is the thing councils reopen. And the renewal date is the danger date. Almost every cut in these records surfaced at a renewal or a study session, not mid-term.

Where the money is still moving

Nothing here says city tech spending is falling. It says the money is moving. The categories nobody fights over are the dull ones. Meter swaps, signal controllers, fibre and streetlights. Syracuse, Utah approved $1,600,000 to replace its streetlights and drew no recorded objection. A $1,147,500 camera contract in a city of 33,000 did.

The pattern holds. Cities still buy kit that measures things. The fights are about kit that identifies people.

Frequently asked questions

What are smart city technologies?

Connected systems a city buys to watch or control its physical assets and the data they produce. The 2026 city contract records show six groups. Traffic and mobility. Public safety and cameras. Utilities and metering. Networks. Streetlights. And data platforms. The network link is what makes them smart, not the intelligence.

What cities are turning into smart cities?

Mostly ordinary ones, not showcase projects. The 53 contracts recorded in 2026 span 48 agencies in 26 states. They include Quincy in Massachusetts, Burleson in Texas, Opelika in Alabama and Syracuse in Utah. Small and mid sized cities buy the same things as large ones, just at smaller scale.

What happened to the smart city project?

It depends which one. The most common failure now is a council cutting a camera contract. In 13 states, 22 places appear in the 2026 records doing exactly that. The best documented buying failure is New Orleans. A broadband and streetlight group withdrew in 2022 during a council inquiry into conflicts of interest.

Are there any downsides to smart cities?

The recorded objections are narrow, not general. They focus on licence plate readers and gunshot detection. The concerns are data sharing, how long data is kept, and measured accuracy. Cambridge, Massachusetts found only about 35 percent of gunshot alerts over a decade were real gunfire. Meter, fibre and streetlight deals draw almost no recorded objection.

How much does a smart city project cost?

The median city contract recorded in 2026 was $177,313. A quarter fell below $62,849 and a quarter ran above $1,147,500. Category matters more than city size. Traffic work runs about $490,887 at the median. Metering runs about $78,000. The largest single award was $34,000,000 for city broadband.

Who are the main smart city technology vendors?

In the 2026 city records, two names come up most. Flock Safety in licence plate reading, and SoundThinking, once called ShotSpotter, in gunshot detection. Meter, traffic and network work is far more split up. It goes to firms like Landis+Gyr, Eaton and Core and Main, and to local engineering contractors.

Related reading: our analysis of where cities and counties are actually spending on AI, our breakdown of licence plate reader alternatives for government agencies, our look at Motorola Solutions public safety contracts, the Verkada government camera market, fleet management software pricing, and data centre modernisation RFPs.

For the biometric side of this market, see facial recognition contracts and what the NIST testing shows.

For the license plate reader layer specifically, see where the Flock cameras are and what cities paid.

Contract figures come from individual municipal records surfaced by Civic IQ from council agendas, award recommendations and purchase records, pulled September 13, 2026. Vendor funding figures come from the company announcement. Cancellation counts from independent trackers are attributed to those trackers and are not combined with our own. Civic IQ tracks 100,000+ agencies, $14T+ in tracked spend, 1.5M+ documents per month, all 50 states.