Developer Job Market Statistics 2026: 40+ Data Points on Hiring, Layoffs, and Demand

The developer job market right now is the most confusing it's been in two decades. Scroll LinkedIn and you'll see two completely opposite narratives playing out simultaneously: developers who can't get a single callback after 300 applications, and hiring managers who say they can't fill senior roles even after months of searching.

Both things are true. That's what makes this market so disorienting.

I pulled data from every source I trust: BLS employment projections, CompTIA's workforce reports, Indeed's job posting indices, Robert Half's hiring surveys, SignalFire's talent reports, and half a dozen more. No recycled Glassdoor estimates. No vague claims without a named source and a year attached.

What the data tells is a story of a market in transition. The post-pandemic hiring frenzy is over. The correction hit hard. But the long-term fundamentals haven't changed. If you understand where jobs are growing, where they're shrinking, and what skills actually command hiring budgets right now, you can position yourself on the right side of this split.

Let's look at what the numbers actually say.

The Big Picture: Long-Term Growth vs. Short-Term Pain

Start with the long view. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects software developer employment to grow 15% from 2024 to 2034, with roughly 129,200 openings per year on average over the decade. That growth rate is labeled "much faster than average" by the BLS, which uses it as their strongest positive classification. For context, the average growth rate across all U.S. occupations is about 4% (BLS, 2025).

The total count matters too. As of 2024, there were 1,895,500 software developers, QA analysts, and testers employed in the United States (BLS, 2025). Add the projected 287,900 new jobs over the decade and you're looking at an industry that's getting bigger, not smaller.

CompTIA's 2025 "State of the Tech Workforce" report paints an even more aggressive picture, projecting tech job growth from 6.09 million in 2025 to 7.03 million by 2035. Their breakdown projects 297% growth for software developers and engineers, 414% for data scientists, and 367% for cybersecurity analysts over that period (CompTIA, 2025).

But here's where the tension lives. Those are 10-year projections. The short-term reality looks very different.

According to data from Indeed via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), software development job postings are 35% lower today than they were five years ago in February 2020. The index peaked dramatically in mid-2022, then dropped sharply and has never recovered to pre-2022 levels (Indeed/FRED, 2026). There was a massive hiring bubble driven by pandemic-era digitization, low interest rates, and startup FOMO. What we're living through now is the correction.

The gap between Indeed's "postings down 35%" and BLS's "growth much faster than average" isn't a contradiction. It's two different timeframes telling two different stories. Short-term demand contracted because companies overhired. Long-term demand continues to grow because every industry needs software. Understanding this distinction is critical for making career decisions right now.

The Hiring Landscape: Who's Actually Hiring in 2026

Despite the doom scrolling, employers posted nearly 1.1 million technology jobs in the U.S. in 2025, according to Robert Half's analysis of job posting data. That's not a dead market. It's a recalibrating one (Robert Half, 2026).

Robert Half's latest Demand for Skilled Talent report found that 87% of technology leaders feel confident about their business outlook for 2026, and 61% plan to increase permanent headcount in the first half of the year. Those aren't aspirational numbers from small surveys. Robert Half tracks hiring across thousands of organizations (Robert Half, 2026).

But the composition of hiring has shifted significantly. Here's where the new demand concentrates:

The story is clear from this data. AI, cybersecurity, and data roles are exploding. Traditional software engineering roles are stable but competitive. The developers who aren't getting callbacks are mostly the ones applying to the same generalist "full-stack developer" roles that every other developer is also targeting.

CompTIA's analysis of Lightcast job posting data found that active employer job listings for tech positions reached 455,341 in June 2025, with 47% of the total (211,924) being newly added that month. Software developer roles led demand (CompTIA, 2025).

The industries doing the most tech hiring? Financial services and manufacturing each posted close to 100,000 tech roles in 2025, followed by tech/IT firms themselves, then consumer products companies expanding digital platforms. If you're only looking at FAANG and Silicon Valley startups, you're missing the majority of the market (Robert Half, 2026).

The Layoff Reality: What the Numbers Actually Show

Layoffs dominate tech headlines. And the numbers are real. According to Layoffs.fyi, over 122,000 tech employees across 257 companies were laid off in 2025. TrueUp's layoff tracker reported over 600 rounds of tech layoffs in 2025, affecting roughly 600 people per day (Layoffs.fyi, 2025; TrueUp, 2025).

For context, here's the multi-year layoff trajectory:

The 2025 total is actually lower than both 2023 and 2024. The bleeding is slowing. But "only" 122,000 layoffs still represents a painful market for anyone caught in the waves. IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta were among the biggest names cutting headcount (Salesforce Ben, 2026).

Here's what most people miss about these layoff numbers: 54% of tech hiring managers said they were "likely to conduct layoffs" in 2025, with 45% saying roles that can be replaced by AI are most at risk. Another 44% said employees with outdated skill sets were more likely to be let go (General Assembly, 2025). The layoffs aren't random. They're targeted at specific skill profiles.

The emotional impact is real too. Indeed's 2025 Tech Talent Report found that 31% of tech employees report concerns about being laid off, and 41% say they'd start looking for a new job if their company conducts layoffs that don't even affect them directly (Indeed, 2025). The uncertainty itself drives turnover.

The New Grad Crisis: Entry-Level Is in Trouble

If there's one group getting hit hardest by this market, it's new graduates. The data is brutal and consistent across multiple sources.

SignalFire's 2025 State of Tech Talent Report, which tracks over 650 million professionals through their Beacon AI platform, found that new grad hiring in Big Tech has dropped over 50% from pre-pandemic levels. In Big Tech, new grads now account for just 7% of all hires, down 25% from 2023 alone. At startups, new grads make up under 6% of hires (SignalFire, 2025).

According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for recent computer science graduates has reached 6.1%. That's 70% higher than the overall recent graduate average of 3.6%, and it puts CS grads in the same territory as fine arts graduates (Encoura, 2025; Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2025).

Computer engineering grads fare even worse at 7.5% unemployment (Encoura, 2025). These numbers represent a dramatic reversal from just a few years ago when CS was considered the safest possible degree.

The share of new graduates landing roles at the Magnificent Seven (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla) has dropped by more than half since 2022. And 55% of employers say Gen Z struggles with teamwork, while 37% of managers said they'd rather use AI than hire a Gen Z employee (SignalFire, citing Newsweek, 2025). Whether those perceptions are fair is debatable. The hiring impact is not.

What's driving this? Multiple factors are compounding. Series A tech startups are 20% smaller than they were in 2020, according to Carta data (SignalFire, 2025). Companies are hiring leaner and later. AI tools are replacing some of the routine tasks that used to be assigned to junior developers. And the end of the low-interest-rate era means less "free money" sloshing around to fund speculative hiring.

But there's also something SignalFire calls the "experience paradox." Companies post junior roles but fill them with senior individual contributors. You need experience to get the job, but you need the job to get experience. It's a vicious cycle that's left an entire generation of developers struggling to get a foothold.

The Skills That Command Hiring Budgets

Not all developer skills are created equal in this market. The data makes the winners and losers very clear.

The AI Workforce Consortium (led by Cisco) reported that 78% of ICT roles now include AI technical skills. Seven of the ten fastest-growing ICT roles are AI-related, including AI/ML engineer, AI risk and governance specialist, and NLP engineer (AI Workforce Consortium, 2025).

Demand for AI governance skills specifically is up 150%, and AI ethics skill demand is up 125% (AI Workforce Consortium, 2025). Companies aren't just building AI. They're building the frameworks to deploy AI responsibly. That's creating entirely new job categories.

According to IEEE-USA InSight, Python, AWS, APIs, CI/CD, and AI ranked as the top five tech skills with the largest year-over-year increase in job listings, and strong demand for all five is expected to continue into 2026 (IEEE-USA InSight, 2025).

Meanwhile, Gartner predicts that by 2027, 80% of the engineering workforce will need to upskill to keep pace with generative AI (Gartner, 2024). That's not a gradual shift. It's a wholesale retraining of the profession.

The Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey, which collected over 49,000 responses from 177 countries, shows AI tool adoption accelerating. While only 14% of developers use AI agents at work, 84% of that usage is specifically for software development tasks (Stack Overflow, 2025). The developers who learn to work effectively alongside AI aren't being replaced by it. They're becoming more productive than their peers who refuse to adopt.

The $5.5 Trillion Skills Gap

Here's the paradox that defines this market: companies are laying off developers AND struggling to fill roles. Both things happening simultaneously. The explanation is the skills gap.

IDC's research predicts that by 2026, more than 90% of organizations worldwide will feel the pain of the IT skills crisis, amounting to $5.5 trillion in losses from product delays, impaired competitiveness, and lost business (IDC, 2024). Skills gaps in IT operations, cloud architecture, data management, and software development triggered digital transformation delays of up to 10 months for nearly two-thirds of organizations.

Robert Half's surveys confirm this at the ground level. 87% of tech leaders currently face challenges finding skilled workers. And 65% of technology hiring managers say it's more challenging to find skilled professionals than it was a year ago (Robert Half, 2026).

Look at that table carefully. Experienced security analysts have 2.1% unemployment. Database architects sit at 2.4%. These are near-zero unemployment rates. If you have these skills and experience, companies are fighting over you. But recent CS graduates with a general degree and no specialization? 6.1% unemployment. The market is simultaneously desperate for specialists and flooded with generalists.

Harvard Business Review quantified how fast the problem is accelerating: the half-life of technology skills is now as short as 2.5 years (Harvard Business Review, 2023). Half of what you know today will be outdated by 2028. That means continuous learning isn't a nice-to-have. It's basic survival.

Where the Talent Is Going: The AI Lab Talent War

While many companies are cutting engineers, the top AI labs are in an all-out war for the best talent. SignalFire's engineering talent retention report revealed fascinating dynamics.

Anthropic leads all AI labs with 80% talent retention (meaning 80% of employees hired at least two years ago are still there). DeepMind follows at 78%. OpenAI trails at 67%, roughly on par with Meta's 64% (SignalFire, 2025).

Google, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are the overall retention leaders among Big Tech, each maintaining engineering orgs of over 2,000 engineers. But the more striking data point is where talent is flowing. Engineers are 8x more likely to leave OpenAI for Anthropic than the reverse. From DeepMind, the ratio is nearly 11:1 in Anthropic's favor (SignalFire, 2025).

Meanwhile, SignalFire also found that firms like Meta, Netflix, Uber, and Google are hiring engineers faster than people are leaving. Their hiring ratios sit well above 100, which means engineering headcount at these companies is growing, not shrinking (SignalFire, 2025). The layoffs at Big Tech are real, but they're often about restructuring (cutting in some areas while hiring aggressively in AI and infrastructure) rather than a net reduction in engineering.

SF and NYC now account for 65% of AI engineer concentration, according to SignalFire's geographic analysis (SignalFire, 2025). If you want to be at the center of the AI talent race, those two cities are where the density is highest.

The Global Developer Workforce

Zooming out from the U.S., the global software developer population reached 28.7 million in 2025, according to Statista. The U.S. has 2.9 million developers (the highest-paying market), while China leads with 7 million developers and India has 2.6 million (Statista, 2025; Keyhole Software, 2026).

The global software market itself reached $823.92 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $2,248.33 billion by 2034 at an 11.8% compound annual growth rate (Precedence Research, 2025). That's nearly tripling in under a decade. Custom software development specifically is growing at 22.6% CAGR, and low-code platforms are the fastest growing segment at 37.7% CAGR (Grand View Research / Research and Markets, 2025).

The education profile of the global workforce is also shifting. According to Stack Overflow's 2025 survey, 41% of developers hold a bachelor's degree, while a significant portion is self-taught. The developer population skews heavily male at 80%, with female developers slowly increasing to 19% (Stack Overflow, 2025). The experience distribution shows 35% of developers have 10+ years of experience, meaning the majority of the workforce is mid-senior level (JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Survey, 2025).

An important ratio to understand: there are approximately 1 CS graduate for every 3.5 open positions, according to Deloitte surveys. Talent acquisition remains the top challenge for 50% of executives (Deloitte / Keyhole Software, 2026). The raw supply of developers globally is growing, but it's not keeping up with demand, especially for specialized roles.

Skills-First Hiring and the Degree Debate

One of the most significant shifts in this market is the move toward skills-first hiring. General Assembly's State of Tech Talent 2025 report found that the number of HR leaders likely to use skills-first hiring (focusing on certifications and non-degree education) has tripled in two years (General Assembly, 2025).

Eighteen percent of HR professionals now say they're increasingly likely to use skills-first approaches specifically for remote roles in software engineering, data analytics, data science, and UX design. And 95% of respondents said it's harder now than three years ago to find candidates with the right mix of technical and soft skills (General Assembly, 2025).

Indeed's research backs this up: 45% of managers report a lack of skilled applicants as their main hiring challenge. Not a lack of applicants. A lack of skilled applicants (Indeed, 2025). Companies get hundreds of resumes. They just can't find people who can actually do the work at the level they need.

This is good news if you have demonstrable skills and bad news if you're relying on credentials alone. A portfolio of shipped projects, open-source contributions, and practical AI implementation experience is increasingly more valuable than a degree from a mid-tier university with no practical work to show for it.

The Pay Picture

Compensation data grounds all of this in dollars. The BLS reports the median annual wage for software developers was $133,080 in May 2024, with QA analysts and testers at $102,610. The broader category of software developers, QA analysts, and testers has a combined median of $131,450 (BLS, 2024).

CompTIA's analysis shows the median tech wage at $112,667, which is 127% higher than the median national wage across all occupations (CompTIA, 2025). Computer and IT managers had the highest median pay at $169,510, followed by computer hardware engineers at $155,020 (BLS, 2024).

The salary range within tech is enormous. BLS data shows salaries ranging from approximately $50,000 at the 10th percentile to nearly $200,000 at the 90th percentile. Your specific compensation depends heavily on your specialization, location, and negotiation skills. For detailed salary breakdowns by state, language, and experience level, see our Software Developer Salary Statistics 2026 resource.

What This Means for Your Career

I've spent weeks compiling these numbers. Here's my honest interpretation of what they mean for working developers:

The long game is still strong. 15% projected growth over the next decade. 317,700 annual openings in computer and IT occupations. A nearly $1 trillion global software market heading toward $2.2 trillion. Software development is not a dying profession. Anyone telling you to abandon ship is reading the wrong data.

The short game is painful and selective. Job postings down 35% from the bubble peak. 122,000+ layoffs in 2025. New grad hiring cut in half. If you're in the job market right now, you're facing real headwinds, especially for generalist and entry-level roles. The correction is real. But corrections end.

Specialization is your insurance policy. Look at those unemployment numbers again. Security analysts: 2.1%. Database architects: 2.4%. CS graduates with no specialization: 6.1%. The market is punishing generalists and rewarding specialists. Pick a lane. Go deep. Become the person companies can't find enough of.

AI skills aren't optional anymore. 78% of ICT roles now include AI technical skills. GenAI postings up 170%. 80% of engineers will need to upskill by 2027. You don't need to become an ML researcher. You need to learn how to use AI tools effectively in your day-to-day work and understand enough about AI systems to integrate them into products. That's the bar. It keeps rising.

The experienced engineer premium is growing. Companies are trading junior hires for experienced ones. The "experience paradox" means senior developers have more options than ever while juniors fight over crumbs. If you're early career, the best investment you can make is gaining practical experience through any means necessary: side projects, open source, freelance work, or smaller companies that still hire entry-level.

Don't read layoff numbers in isolation. 122,000 tech layoffs sounds catastrophic until you note that 1.1 million tech jobs were posted in the same year. Or that 1.89 million software developers are employed in the U.S. alone. Layoffs are concentrated at specific companies doing restructuring. The broader market is still active.

Sources

Every statistic in this resource is cited from the following sources:

• Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) - Occupational Outlook Handbook, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, November 2025 projections
• CompTIA - State of the Tech Workforce 2025, Lightcast job posting analysis
• Robert Half - Demand for Skilled Talent Report 2026, 2026 Salary Guide
• Indeed / Indeed Hiring Lab - 2025 Tech Talent Report, 2026 US Jobs & Hiring Trends Report, FRED job posting index
• SignalFire - 2025 State of Tech Talent Report, Engineering Talent Retention Report
• IDC - IT Skills Shortage Survey (2024)
• Layoffs.fyi / TrueUp - Tech layoff tracking data (2022-2025)
• AI Workforce Consortium (Cisco) - ICT AI skills report (2025)
• General Assembly - State of Tech Talent 2025
• Stack Overflow - 2025 Developer Survey (49,000+ responses, 177 countries)
• Federal Reserve Bank of New York - College labor market data, graduate unemployment rates
• Encoura - Recent college graduate labor market analysis
• Gartner - Engineering workforce upskilling predictions (2024)
• Harvard Business Review - Technology skills half-life research (2023)
• Statista / Precedence Research - Global software market size, developer population
• Keyhole Software - Software Development Statistics 2026 compilation
• IEEE-USA InSight - 2026 Tech Hiring Outlook