There are 15,976 hotel projects in the world right now, an all-time high, and 5,975 of them are in the United States.
Lodging Econometrics released its Q2 2026 global pipeline count on Aug. 19. The headline is the record, but the number worth writing down is 37%: that’s the U.S. share of global hotel projects. China is second at 3,588 projects and 22%. Between them, two countries hold 59% of every hotel project on earth.
Every figure here is LE’s proprietary count. It’s single-sourced, unaudited, and LE sells the underlying database.
What’s actually under construction
6,174 projects and 1,043,290 rooms are under construction globally. Another 3,743 projects are scheduled to start within 12 months. Early planning hit a record 6,059 projects, up 5% by projects and 8% by rooms year over year.
The conversion ratio is the number contractors should watch. Q2 produced 974 new project announcements but only 602 construction starts. Announcements aren’t starts, and they never have been, but a 62% ratio is a useful discount rate for anyone building a backlog forecast off press releases.
Conversions are the growth segment
Brand conversions hit a record 2,927 projects and 351,257 rooms, up 12% by projects and 17% by rooms. Add renovations and the combined figure is 3,760 projects.
That’s the fastest-growing category in the report, and it’s a different business than ground-up. Conversion work is phased, occupied, heavy on FF&E and MEP, light on structure, and it lives or dies on how well the existing building was documented. Contractors who’ve built a renovation practice are pointed at the part of this market that’s actually growing.
Records showed up across chain scales too: luxury 1,385 projects, upper upscale 1,923, upscale 3,918, upper midscale 4,632.
Where the projects are
Dallas leads globally with 183 projects and 22,840 rooms, then Atlanta at 157, Chengdu at 127, Nashville at 122 and Guangzhou at 120. Three of the top five cities are U.S. metros, and two of those three are in the Southeast.
Outside the U.S., India is the story: a record 1,033 projects and 137,601 rooms, up 36% by projects and 39% by rooms. Saudi Arabia added 13% to reach 387 projects; Canada hit a record 345.
The forecast, including a first look at 2028
2,438 hotels opened globally in 2025. LE forecasts 2,742 for 2026 and 2,590 for 2027, and debuted a 2028 forecast of 2,499 hotels across 361,430 rooms.
Note the shape: project counts decline across those three years while room counts hold up or rise. Average property size is going up, which usually means the pipeline is tilting toward larger urban and resort assets and away from the roadside select-service build that carried the last cycle.
Why it matters
Hospitality has been the quiet counterweight to a nonresidential market otherwise dominated by data centers and manufacturing. It’s labor-intensive, geographically distributed, and it hires the interiors and MEP trades that data center work doesn’t.
One caution: this is LE’s global report. Its separate U.S.-only Q2 pipeline count, released in late July, showed the domestic pipeline down. Both can be true, they measure different things, and mixing them will produce a contradiction. Broader momentum is real either way, with construction starts up 25.6% in July, though residential is going the other way after housing starts fell 12.4%.