No company selling humanoid robots to warehouses publishes an hourly price. Agility Robotics, which has the longest-running paid humanoid deployment in the United States, has disclosed hours worked, totes moved and the value of its order book. It has not disclosed what its customer GXO pays for Digit. Any article that puts a dollar-per-hour figure on a humanoid and sets it against a worker’s wage is supplying its own assumptions.

That does not make the question unanswerable. It means the answer has to be built from the few numbers that are public, with the gaps left in view.

The labor side is well measured

The human side is the easy half. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counted about 2.95 million people employed as hand laborers and freight, stock and material movers in May 2025, the occupation closest to the tote handling Digit does. Their median wage was $19.35 an hour and the mean was $20.32, or $42,260 a year. Those are wages only. Benefits, payroll taxes, overtime, recruiting and training sit on top and vary by employer.

The robot side is mostly hours and claims

The robot record is thinner. Agility says Digit has logged more than 65,000 hours of operation across its customer programs. At GXO’s site in Flowery Branch, Georgia, where the two companies signed a multi-year robots-as-a-service contract in June 2024, Digit has moved more than 100,000 totes, according to both companies. Neither number comes with a robot count or a time base, so an outsider cannot work out totes per robot hour.

Agility’s pitch for its next robot is about utilization. It says batteries from Nyobolt are designed to let Digit 5 recharge in nine minutes and “deliver more than 20 hours of productive work in a 24-hour day.” That is a design target for a robot that is not shipping yet. Early customer access is planned for the first half of 2027.

Why utilization moves the answer

Vendors talk about hours because of simple division. A fixed yearly cost, whether a lease or a subscription, is spread across the hours of useful work. A robot that works 20 hours a day spreads that cost over two and a half times the hours of one that covers a single eight-hour shift. A robot that waits for late upstream work, or for someone to clear a fault, spreads it over fewer.

The most detailed public deployment report so far comes from Figure AI. Describing an 11-month Figure 02 deployment at BMW’s Spartanburg plant, Figure reported more than 1,250 hours of runtime, more than 90,000 parts loaded and a schedule of one 10-hour shift, Monday to Friday. It also published the targets it was judged against: an 84-second cycle, placement accuracy above 99% per shift and zero human interventions per shift. Those are numbers a buyer could price. Figure did not say what BMW paid or how many robots shared those hours.

What the price tags tell you

The humanoid prices that are easy to find belong to research hardware. Unitree lists its G1 from $13,500, before tax and shipping. The same specification table gives a battery life of about two hours and an arm load of about 2 kg. Agility says Digit 5 is built to lift up to 50 pounds repeatedly. The two prices describe different machines for different jobs.

Agility itself lists “uncertainty regarding future financial performance, capital requirements and unit economics” among the risks in its listing announcement. Boilerplate, but here the public numbers back it up.

Agility began trading on Nasdaq on November 5 and will now file quarterly results. The number of robots earning revenue, revenue per deployed robot and how much of its more than $300 million in conditional Digit 5 orders turns into sales would be the first hard inputs for this comparison. Until a vendor or a customer publishes cost per completed task, nobody outside those contracts can say whether a humanoid is cheaper than the person it works beside.