Developer Burnout Statistics 2026: 30+ Data Points on the Silent Career Killer

I'm going to be blunt with you. Burnout isn't some soft, touchy-feely topic you can afford to ignore. It's the single biggest threat to your career that nobody talks about with real numbers.

I've seen it destroy talented developers. Not slowly, either. One quarter they're shipping great work. The next, they can barely open their laptop. And the worst part? Most of them didn't see it coming because they thought pushing through was the right move.

So I pulled every credible stat I could find. Haystack Analytics. JetBrains. Yerbo's massive 36,000-person study. Blind's anonymous surveys. Stack Overflow's data. Gallup. Harness. The World Health Organization's official definition. Not blog posts summarizing other blog posts. The actual source data.

If you're making career decisions, negotiating workload, or trying to convince your manager that your team is about to crack, these are the numbers you need.

How Many Developers Experience Burnout?

The headline number is staggering. According to JetBrains' 2023 State of the Developer Ecosystem report, which surveyed 26,000 developers worldwide, 73% of developers have experienced burnout at some point in their careers. That's nearly three out of every four developers you've ever worked with.

Developer Nation's 2024 State of Developer Wellness report pushed that number even higher. Their survey of nearly 1,000 developers across 86 countries found that 83% of developers reported feeling burnout at some point in their careers (Developer Nation, 2024). The methodology difference likely explains the gap, but both numbers tell the same story: burnout isn't a fringe problem. It's the default experience.

Haystack Analytics' 2021 study, conducted by research agency Survation and widely cited across the industry, found the same 83% figure among software developers. The study also found that 81% of developers reported increased burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic, with increased workload cited as the primary driver (Haystack Analytics, 2021).

Notice the distinction between "ever experienced" and "currently experiencing." The JetBrains and Developer Nation figures capture lifetime prevalence. Blind's 57% is right now. That means more than half of your coworkers are burned out at this exact moment. Think about that next time you're in a standup with 10 people. Five or six of them are running on fumes.

The Gallup data is worth noting too. Their research found that 76% of U.S. employees experience burnout at least sometimes, with 28% reporting it "very often" or "always" (Gallup, 2024). That's the general workforce. Developers aren't special here. If anything, the developer-specific data suggests we're worse off.

What the Stack Overflow Data Tells Us About Developer Happiness

Stack Overflow's 2024 Developer Survey collected responses from over 65,000 developers. The professional developer section, answered by roughly 29,000 respondents, asked point blank about job satisfaction.

The result? Only 20% of professional developers said they were happy at work. One in five. Forty-eight percent described themselves as "complacent," which is corporate-speak for "surviving but not thriving." And the rest? Actively dissatisfied (Stack Overflow, 2024).

Here's the part that should alarm engineering managers: for the first time, senior developers reported lower job satisfaction than juniors. The people with the most experience, the most institutional knowledge, the ones who mentor everyone else, are the least happy. That's a ticking time bomb for any organization.

The top frustration? Technical debt. Sixty-three percent of professional developers cited it as their biggest source of workplace frustration (Stack Overflow, 2024). Not their manager. Not their salary. The code itself is grinding people down. Complex tech stacks and unreliable tools followed close behind.

The Primary Causes of Developer Burnout

Burnout doesn't happen because developers are "weak" or can't handle pressure. The data points to systemic, organizational causes that compound over time. Here's what the research says.

Haystack Analytics' study identified the top three drivers: high workload (47%), inefficient processes (31%), and unclear goals and targets (29%) (Haystack Analytics, 2021). Notice that all three are management problems, not individual failures. The developer isn't broken. The system around them is.

Harness' 2024 survey of 500 engineering leaders and practitioners dug deeper into the "toil" problem. They found that 23% of developers work overtime for at least 10 days per month. That's not a crunch period. That's a permanent state of overwork. More than six in ten developers said they'd experienced scope creep with expanding requirements, forcing them to absorb more work with less confidence they could do it well (Harness, 2024).

Developer Nation's 2024 wellness survey confirmed the overtime epidemic: 84% of developers had to work overtime at least occasionally. While 53% said they found it "acceptable," 39% expressed dissatisfaction, and 8% called it "overwhelming" (Developer Nation, 2024). The fact that over half of developers accept overtime as normal tells you how deep the problem runs.

And then there's the "toil" factor from Harness' data. Nearly half of developers said they can't release code to production without risking failures. Four in ten said their code fails to push to production at least half the time. When it needs to be rolled back, two-thirds do it manually. These repetitive, manual tasks eat hours and kill morale. Forty-two percent of the developer community identified slow, inefficient deployment as a critical issue (Harness, 2024).

Burnout by the Numbers: The Full Data Breakdown

Yerbo's State of Burnout in Tech (2022) is the largest dedicated study on tech burnout, covering 36,200 IT professionals across 33 countries. It breaks burnout into four components: exhaustion, self-inefficacy, cynicism, and depersonalization. Here's what they found.

62% of tech professionals feel physically and emotionally drained at the end of the workday. Not tired. Drained. There's a difference. Tired recovers with a good night's sleep. Drained is the kind of exhaustion that follows you into the weekend and still hasn't lifted by Monday morning (Yerbo, 2022).

More than half (56%) of tech workers said they were unable to relax once the workday was over. This is the work-life boundary problem in raw form. You're not just working 9 to 5. You're mentally working until you fall asleep. And 51% of tech workers feel they're achieving less than they should, while a third feel flat-out inefficient at their job (Yerbo, 2022).

Cynicism was the factor most likely to push someone out the door entirely. 43% of respondents said they felt less engaged in their work, and 27% said they don't see the value or purpose in what they do (Yerbo, 2022). When someone stops caring about the "why" behind their work, they're already halfway to the exit.

That last stat deserves attention. Twenty-two percent of high-burnout tech workers said they've become harder and less sympathetic toward the people they work with. Burnout doesn't just hurt the individual. It poisons team dynamics. When over a fifth of your burned-out employees are taking it out on colleagues, you've got a culture problem that compounds on itself.

The Gender Gap in Developer Burnout

Burnout doesn't hit everyone equally. The Yerbo data reveals a significant gender disparity. 46% of women in tech had a high burnout risk, compared to 38.2% of men (Yerbo, 2022). That's nearly an 8 percentage point gap, and it shows up in the symptom data too.

69% of women in tech reported feeling "run-down and drained of physical and emotional energy" at the end of a workday, versus 56% of men (Yerbo, 2022). The researchers pointed to a combination of factors: women in male-dominated tech environments face more pressure to perform, more scrutiny of their work, and often shoulder a disproportionate share of childcare and household responsibilities on top of their professional workload.

A 2023 survey by DiversityQ found that 46% of female cloud technology professionals were experiencing burnout at the time of the survey (DiversityQ, 2023). These aren't career-spanning figures. That's current, active burnout in nearly half of women in the field.

This isn't just a wellness issue. It's a retention crisis. If women are burning out faster and harder than men, that directly undermines every diversity initiative in the industry. You can't hire your way out of a problem that's pushing people out the back door.

Burnout by Company: Where It's Worst (and Best)

Blind's survey of 11,487 tech workers didn't just measure aggregate burnout. They broke it down by company, narrowing to 30 firms with the most employee responses. The results are revealing.

25 out of 30 companies had burnout rates above 50%. That means the majority of employees at the majority of major tech companies are burned out. Credit Karma topped the list at 70.73%. Twitch, Nvidia, Expedia, and Oracle also ranked among the worst (Blind, 2024).

Netflix had the lowest burnout rate at 38.89%. Blind users frequently describe Netflix as having high compensation, balanced hours, and supportive coworkers. Uber, Meta, and PayPal also fell below the 57% average. The pattern is clear: companies that pay well, respect boundaries, and build supportive cultures have less burnout. It's not rocket science. But most companies still get it wrong.

The 16 companies above the 57% average are spending millions on recruiting, employer branding, and retention programs. Meanwhile, more than half their engineering teams are running on empty. The math doesn't work.

The Financial Cost of Developer Burnout

Let's talk money. This is where burnout stops being a "wellness initiative" topic and becomes a board-level business problem.

Harness' 2024 research estimated that developer burnout costs employers approximately $300 billion per year globally (Harness, 2024). That number accounts for lost productivity, increased error rates, delayed deployments, and the massive cost of replacing developers who quit.

Harvard Business School researchers found that workplace stress costs U.S. employers $125 billion to $190 billion annually in healthcare spending alone (Harvard Business School, as cited by Blind). The American Journal of Preventive Medicine put a finer point on it: burnout costs between $4,000 and $21,000 per employee per year in lost productivity and turnover (Forbes, 2025, citing AJPM).

Now apply that to software engineers specifically. The tech industry has an annual turnover rate of 13.2%, the highest of any sector (LinkedIn, 2024). And according to SHRM, replacing a single employee costs between six and nine months of their salary. For a software developer earning the median $133,080 (BLS, 2024), that's $66,540 to $99,810 per departure.

Gartner's 2024 Workforce Productivity Report adds another dimension: each developer turnover sets a team back by 4 to 8 weeks in delivery time (Gartner, 2024). And Harness found that onboarding a new engineer takes at least two months according to 71% of respondents, which actually creates more work for the remaining team in the short term.

Here's the calculation that should keep CTOs up at night. Take a 100-person engineering team. At 13.2% turnover, that's about 13 developers leaving per year. At $80,000 average replacement cost, that's over $1 million annually in turnover costs alone. And that doesn't count the productivity hit to the developers who stay but are too burned out to do their best work.

Burnout and the Intention to Quit

The link between burnout and turnover isn't theoretical. The data is direct and damning.

Yerbo found that 42% of tech workers facing high levels of burnout are considering quitting within six months (Yerbo, 2022). Not "someday." Within six months. And overall, one in four tech workers wanted to leave their workplace in the short term, regardless of burnout status.

Harness' 2024 study confirmed this: just over half of developers said burnout was a primary reason their colleagues had left their jobs (Harness, 2024). Burnout isn't just causing discomfort. It's the number one driver of voluntary attrition in engineering organizations.

ICONIC's research found that 73% of tech employees who leave their roles cite burnout as a contributing factor (ICONIC, 2024). That puts burnout nearly on par with salary dissatisfaction (75%) as a reason for departure. Think about that. Burnout is essentially tied with money as the reason developers walk out the door.

The WHO Definition and Why It Matters

In 2019, the World Health Organization officially included burnout in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). They defined it as "a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed" (WHO, 2019).

WHO's definition specifies three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from one's job or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job, and reduced professional efficacy. It's classified as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition, but it can cause or be caused by medical conditions like depression and anxiety.

This distinction matters because it puts the responsibility squarely on the workplace. Burnout isn't a personal failing. It's not "you need to meditate more" or "just take a vacation." The WHO says, explicitly, that it results from chronic workplace stress. The problem is organizational. The solution has to be organizational too.

How Developers Are Coping (and What's Not Working)

JetBrains' 2023 survey found something encouraging buried in the burnout data: close to half (47%) of developers who have experienced burnout actively attend to their mental health, compared to 40% of those who haven't experienced it (JetBrains, 2023). Among developers familiar with burnout, 47% use self-monitoring apps or devices to track physical activity, sleep quality, and health, versus 41% who haven't faced the affliction.

Developer Nation's 2024 data on physical activity was surprisingly positive. 34% of developers exercise once or twice per week, while 40% exercise at least three times per week. More than half get 6 to 7 hours of sleep per night (Developer Nation, 2024). Those aren't terrible numbers. But they're clearly not enough to offset the systemic pressures.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: individual coping strategies can't fix a broken system. You can meditate every morning, run five miles, and drink green juice, but if your company expects 60-hour weeks and ships half-baked requirements with hard deadlines, you'll still burn out. The data shows this clearly. Companies that reduced toil and fixed processes saw burnout drop. Individual wellness programs without systemic change didn't move the needle.

Burnout in the AI Era: New Pressures on Developers

AI tools were supposed to make developer life easier. The early data suggests it's more complicated than that.

A 2024 DevOps industry survey of 604 software developers and engineering professionals found that while 61% work for organizations employing AI in some capacity, nearly two-thirds (65%) still experience burnout (DevOps.com, 2024). AI hasn't solved the burnout problem. In some ways, it may be making it worse.

The Appknox AI and Developer Burnout Report 2025 highlighted a troubling dynamic: when AI tools increase output expectations without reducing workload, they add pressure rather than relieving it. You can write code faster, sure. But now you're expected to write more code faster. The goalpost moved (Appknox, 2025).

Gartner found that 58% of workers report being stressed, 48% are worried about work, and 41% work 9 extra unpaid hours per week (Gartner, via Unleash). The "always-on" culture that AI enables, where you can theoretically be productive at any hour, erodes the boundaries that used to protect against burnout.

What the Data Tells You to Do About It

I don't write fluff advice articles. So here's what the data actually supports, broken into what you can control as an individual and what needs to change organizationally.

For individual developers: The JetBrains data shows that developers who actively monitor their mental health are better off. That doesn't mean downloading a meditation app and calling it a day. It means tracking your hours honestly, noticing when you can't relax after work, and treating those as red flags rather than "just part of the job." The developers who burned out and recovered almost universally point to one thing: they stopped accepting overwork as normal.

The Yerbo data shows that cynicism is the strongest predictor of quitting. If you've stopped caring about the purpose of your work, that's not laziness. That's a burnout signal. Either the purpose needs to be restored, or you need to find an environment where your work matters to you.

For engineering leaders: The Harness data is crystal clear. Reduce toil. Fix your deployment pipeline. Stop expecting developers to manually roll back failed releases. Invest in automation. The companies with the lowest burnout rates in Blind's survey (Netflix, Meta, Uber) share common traits: high compensation, balanced hours, and supportive culture. None of those are secrets. They're choices.

Haystack's data shows that unclear goals (29%) drive burnout almost as much as workload (47%). You can't always reduce workload. But you can always make goals clearer. That's free. Most managers don't do it.

Data Sources and Methodology

Every statistic on this page comes from a named, verifiable source. Here's a complete list of the data sources used in this resource:

JetBrains State of the Developer Ecosystem (2023) surveyed 26,000 developers globally. Their lifestyle and mental well-being section provided burnout prevalence data (73%), coping strategies, and self-monitoring behaviors. JetBrains has run this survey annually since 2017.

Yerbo State of Burnout in Tech (2022) surveyed 36,200 IT professionals across 33 countries. It's the largest dedicated tech burnout study and provides granular data on exhaustion, self-inefficacy, cynicism, depersonalization, gender disparities, and quit intent.

Haystack Analytics (2021) conducted their study via Survation, an accredited member of the UK Market Research Society and British Polling Council. The study focused specifically on software developers and found the widely cited 83% burnout figure.

Blind (2024) surveyed 11,487 tech workers across 30 major tech companies anonymously. The anonymous format likely produces more honest responses about burnout than employer-administered surveys.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey (2024) collected responses from 65,000+ developers, with 29,000 participating in the professional developer section covering productivity and satisfaction.

Harness (2024) surveyed 500 engineering leaders and practitioners on developer experience, toil, burnout, and deployment practices.

Developer Nation State of Developer Wellness (2024) surveyed nearly 1,000 developers across 86 countries during March 2024, focusing on burnout, overtime, physical activity, and employer wellness support.

Additional sources: Gallup (2024 burnout prevalence), World Health Organization (ICD-11 burnout definition, 2019), Gartner 2024 Workforce Productivity Report, SHRM employee replacement cost data, LinkedIn turnover rate data, Harvard Business School workplace stress cost research, American Journal of Preventive Medicine burnout cost data (via Forbes, 2025), ICONIC retention research (2024), DiversityQ female tech professional burnout survey (2023), Appknox AI and Developer Burnout Report (2025), and DevOps.com industry survey (2024).