A six-metre conference table seats twelve people, and underneath it sits a nest of power strips and cable trays. Over the past two years furniture makers started burying coils directly in the tabletop, and in 2026 that habit moved from luxury hotels into ordinary offices. Whether to follow depends on the numbers.
10% and 25%: Furniture Makers Already Schedule Coils as Standard
By Market Reports World's count, roughly 10% of high-end office furniture and 25% of premium hospitality tables now ship with Qi2 coils pre-installed. PW Consulting's wireless charging tables report sizes the market at about USD 323 million in 2025, reaching roughly USD 828 million by 2032 at a 14.38% compound rate. North America accounted for about USD 114.5 million in 2025, and inductive charging alone represented USD 246 million. That is one of the faster-moving shelves in furniture, but the absolute size is still small, which makes built-in charging a differentiator today rather than a requirement.
Suppliers have already divided the work. Powermat builds turnkey embedded platforms, FreePower holds patents on embedded charging surfaces, Shenzhen firms Huagon and Conson make 10W to 15W modules for furniture integration, and InvisQi sells on range, claiming to push power through 30mm of wood, stone or glass. The more telling signal is the roadmap. Powercast and Etherdyne demonstrated an embedded desk power zone of up to 100W at CES 2026, including a 50W receiver for laptops. The industry is not aiming at charging a phone on a table, it is aiming at powering the whole table.
Three Decisions Before Installation: Cutout, Wattage, Certification
The cutout style drives retrofitting cost. A flush mount sits level with the surface under tempered glass or a wood veneer for the cleanest look, which suits executive boardrooms. Pop-up units stay flat when closed and lift to expose AC outlets, USB ports and a wireless zone from a single hole. Grommet swaps suit older tables by reusing the existing hole, and under-table rails avoid touching the top at all, which is the practical pick for leased space.
Density follows a workplace convention worth copying: one power module per 1.2 to 1.5 metres of table length, so a six-metre table for twelve people takes four or five modules to keep everyone within reach.
Wattage should follow real need. Qi2 delivers 15W, and WPC published a 25W Qi2.2 specification in 2025, but embedded modules still cluster at 10W to 15W today. Moving to 25W means changing the transmitter, alignment tolerance, under-surface cooling and metal clearance together, not just swapping a module. The last item is the one buyers skip most often: certification. In commercial settings, third-party marks such as CE, UL, VDE and CB belong at the top of the checklist, because an uncertified power product involved in an electrical incident can void a building's insurance.
There is also a hidden cost in handover. The acceptance test is not whether a phone charges, but whether foreign object detection avoids false trips through a metal surface, whether several devices charging at once degrade each other, and whether any cabling is visible on the table. Put the owner of that test in the contract.
So who should install now? Companies with assigned desks, frequent visitors and heavy meeting-room use get a real experience gain. Who can wait? Teams built around hot-desking and remote work, on short leases, are better served by buying a few desktop multi-device chargers first. No hole in the table, and they travel to the next office.
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