Where the numbers come from
Those figures come from IMARC Group, which expects the market to reach about US$103 billion by 2034.
Other research firms land in a similar range, but they don't all measure the same thing. Some include hardware like smart cards, while others only count signing software.
- Market size. Estimates for 2025 range from about US$7 billion to US$12 billion.
- Growth. Forecasts range from 23% to 44% a year.
- The biggest player. DocuSign alone reported US$3.2 billion in revenue for its 2026 financial year, up 8%.
Whichever report you read, the direction is the same. More businesses sign digitally every year.
Why it keeps growing
- The law is settled. In New Zealand, the Contract and Commercial Law Act 2017 recognises electronic signatures for most documents. Australian law does the same, and since 2022 Australian companies can sign deeds electronically too.
- Work isn't in one place anymore. Clients, contractors and new hires are rarely in the same room, so posting paper back and forth doesn't work.
- It saves real time. A Forrester study in Australia found a paper agreement took about 90 minutes of staff time across four people. With e-signatures, it took 9.
- There are fewer mistakes. The same study found agreements coming back incomplete or wrong dropped from 25% to 2.5%.
Our guide to whether electronic signatures are legal in New Zealand covers the law in more detail.
The growth is around the signature
Putting a signature on a PDF is the easy part now, and most tools do it well.
Where teams still lose time is everything around it. That means picking the right documents, changing the wording for each person, and chasing signatures in the right order.
That's what we built Flowsign for. Templates, workflows and dynamic documents handle the paperwork before anyone signs, and every completed package comes back sealed with a full audit trail.
Our post on why signing is solved, but the workflow isn't goes into more detail.
What it means for your team
If your team still prints, signs and scans, you're paying for it in time, paper and mistakes.
The good news is that switching is quick. Most teams can send their first package the same afternoon.
Want to see how it would work for you? Book a demo and we'll walk your team through it, or create a free account and try it yourself.
