47 Software Development Statistics, Trends, and Insights

Software development is a rapidly growing sector and will continue to see growth as more companies shift to virtual environments.

It is a critical component for a large number of businesses because it can improve customer experiences, bring more feature-rich and innovative products to market, and implement new revenue and cost-saving opportunities.

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To demonstrate the growth within this sector and how it's shaping the general economy, we've researched and compiled some of the most interesting software development statistics, trends, and insights.

Key Software Development Statistics

1. Worldwide IT spending is expected to total $5 trillion in 2024, an increase of 6.8% from 2023, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc.
2. With year-on-year growth often exceeding 10%, the enterprise software market is the fastest-growing segment in the IT industry.

3. The global software development market is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.9% from 2024 to 2030.
4. The number of software developers in the world is expected to grow to 28.7 million in 2024.
5. The price range for software development projects often ranges from $3,000 to $120,000.

Software Development Market Overview

How big is the software development market? What does the future hold? How many software developers are there in the world?

In this section, we'll address some of the top questions that surround the software development market and explore its future outlook.

6. Revenue is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2023-2027) of 5.72%, resulting in a market volume of US$812.90 billion by 2027.
7. 84.70% of surveyed companies from the software industry develop Enterprise Applications for clients.

8. 53.90% of the participant agencies receive software projects for business process automation.
9. About 15.40% of agencies stated that they provide Customer Relationship Management software.
10. 7.70% of software development companies surveyed help their clients in building, managing, and maintaining educational software.
11. 38.50% of the developers surveyed produce back-end software and front-end web/app for E-Commerce owners.

Time to Build and the Cost of Software

With blazing fast websites, smartphones, and the ability to access content and data online within seconds, we often take technology for granted. From a user standpoint, we see simple frontend components that are intended for ease of use. But that doesn't mean that they are, in fact, as easy to develop.

Custom software is a lot like Rome — it wasn't built in a day. There is a lot of careful planning, design, architecture, programming, and quality assurance work that goes into development. Needless to say, all of these things have implications for development time. And time is money! In this section, we'll explore some interesting statistics on average software development times and how that impacts cost.

12. Software development project takes between one to nine months. On average, a custom software development project is expected to take about 4.5 months.

13. 7.70% of the developers surveyed can deliver software with basic features in less than 2 months.
14. 38.50% of the agencies deliver software in 2-4 months.
15. 61.60% of the development companies established an average developing time period of 4-6 months.
16. 10.81% of the software firms deliver fine software with maintenance and support, in a time span of more than 6 months.
17. Software development costs for a small app are from $30,000 to $45,000, for a medium-sized project from $70,000 to $100,000, and for a large-scale complex application, $100,000 or more.
18. CMS software development costs anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 for a basic platform with design, a few custom features, configuration, etc.
19. ERP software development costs $100,000 or more, depending on the number of features and size of the company.
20. Software development costs for a custom eCommerce system built from scratch start at $50,000 for a simple product, and up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for more complex solutions.
21. SaaS software development costs anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000, and even more for complex SaaS products.
22. The industry average accepted cost to maintain software is roughly 15-20% of its original development cost.

Technologies Used in Software Development

With over 700 programming languages to choose from, businesses investing in software, and developers themselves, have a lot of options to consider. In this section, we'll cover some of the most popular technologies and tools used in software development.

23. According to a study by Statista, JavaScript is the most popular language to learn in 2024, with 12.4 million active developers.
24. Python comes in second, with 9 million active developers.
25. Java comes in third place, with 8.2 million developers.
26. AWS was the most used cloud platform among software developers worldwide in 2024, used by 32.4% of developers.
27. Microsoft Azure comes in second place, used by 20.7%.
28. Google Cloud comes in as the third most used cloud platform among software developers worldwide, with 10.5%.

Programming Stats

The following statistics cover various topics surrounding software development. We utilized a number of surveys, aggregate data, and insights from key players in tech to understand the demographics behind software developers and the biggest challenges in the industry.

29. The average age of an employed software engineer is 39 years old.

30. Software engineers are 50% more likely to work at private companies in comparison to public companies.
31. 22.0% of all software engineers are women, while 78.0% are men.

32. The most common ethnicity of software engineers is White (48.5%), followed by Asian (34.0%), Hispanic or Latino (8.1%), and Unknown (4.8%).
33. 8% of all software engineers are LGBT.
34. 97% of applications leverage open-source code.
35. GitHub, a popular internet hosting service for software development, has 94 million developers and more than 85.7 million new repositories.
36. 98 million new projects were started globally in GitHub in 2023.
37. There are over 100 million developers on GitHub in 2024.
38. 263 million automated jobs run on GitHub Actions every month, with more than 41 million build minutes a day.
39. GitHub alone had 301 million open-source software (OSS) contributions in 2023.
40. There is a shortage of software developers. By 2030, global consulting firm Korn Ferry estimates the U.S. may lose $162 billion worth of revenue annually due to a shortage of tech talent. Globally, that number rises to $8.5 trillion.

Software Developer – Bureau of Labor Statistics

41. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “software developer” is the number one job in 2024.
42. The median salary for software developers is $127,260 per year.
43. the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects 26% growth in software developers over the next 10 years (about 371,000 jobs.)
44. About 162,900 openings for software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers are projected each year, on average, over the next decade.
45. The mean hourly wage for software developers in 2022 (the most recent data available) was $59.71.

How many software engineers are in the U.S.?

46. As of 2024, there are 4.3 million software developers in the US, with the largest percentage of developers residing in Washington.

What is the highest-paying developer job?

47. The top software development job in 2024 is the role of “Big Data Engineer,” with an average yearly salary of $160,000.

Sources:

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