How Many Software Developers Are There in the US?

Evans Data Corporation reported there were around 4,4 million software engineers in North America in 2019.

According to DataUSA, the number of people employed as software developers, applications & software in the US reached 1,36 million in 2017.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job gives an estimate pretty close to Evans Data Corporation – 4,2 million software engineers in the USA as of 2019. This was calculated while trying to figure out how many developers there are across different US states.

The Number of Software Developers in the US By Different Sources

It’s worth noting that estimated in 2017 the 4,2 million includes technical writers, electrical and hardware engineers, CAD programmers, actuaries, statisticians, economists, mathematicians, and generally anyone who writes or reads code on a daily basis, in addition to software developers. If we only take the “classic” definition of a software developer, we’re actually only looking at around 3,4 million people.

Top 10 US states with the highest percentage (%) of software developers

The highest percentage of programmers is concentrated in the Washington DC area (6.46%). Virginia and Maryland followed next, with 4.43% and 4.41% respectively.(Source)

Top 10 US states with the highest number of software developers

In terms of raw numbers, California leads the way with 628 thousand developers. Texas and New York come in second and third with 325 thousand and 218 thousand respectively.

How Many Software Developers Are There in Europe?

According to StackOverflow, the number of software developers in Europe in 2016 was 4,7 million, which in 2018 reached 5,5 million. Germany has the largest number of software developers – around 901K. The UK and France round up the list of top 3 countries with the largest number of software developers reaching 849K and 533K respectively.

The number of software developers in Europe

How Many Software Developers Are There in Ukraine?

Ukraine is the 2nd largest talent pool in Eastern Europe by the number of software developers. As of now, there are 200,000 IT professionals, and this number is expected to reach 225,000 by 2022 and 242,000 by 2025.

IT Ukraine Association Report 2021 states that the IT industry in Ukraine exceeded $5 bln in 2020 compared to $4,1 bln in 2019.

The software developers population is obviously growing, and European tech is moving forward extremely fast too. Ukraine has become a popular outsourcing destination for businesses worldwide, given its broad talent pool and optimal price.

The number of software developers in Ukraine

The software developers population is obviously growing and European tech is moving forward extremely fast too. Despite the fact that there are 5,5 million developers in Europe, the European Union countries are still estimated to suffer a shortage of 500,000 software developers by 2020.

Number of Software Developers by Country

• Ukraine has an estimated 200,000 developers and tech universities graduates, so there is a growth of approximately 10,000+ tech professionals each year.
• Romania, with an estimated 100,000 software engineers, is among the countries with the highest number of software developers in Central and Eastern Europe.
• There are approximately 5.8 million developers in India according to GitHub.
• According to Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower, its country’s ICT sector employs almost 200,000 experts.
• There are over 500,000 software developers in Brazil.
• More than 100,000 software engineers graduate from Mexico’s universities yearly so, apparently, Mexican software development market should comprise no less than 1 million developers.

Number of Software Developers by Coutry

The Number of Software Developers by Technology

Still, we’ve found some rough estimates online that you may find useful:

Java developers:

• According to Developer Economics, in Q3 2020, the number of software developers who use Java reached 8 million software developers worldwide.
• The number of Java developers varies significantly. In 2003, Java developers were totaled between 1,5 and 3 million; in 2007, when Java became open source, this number had risen to 6 million. The Global Developer Population and Demographics Survey, conducted by Evans Data Corporation, reported that the Java developer population was 9 million in 2009 making Java one of the most used programming languages worldwide (source).
• According to SlashData, the number of Java developers in the world was 7,1 million as of September 2018 (source).
• As for 2019, the number will reach 7,6 million (source).

PHP developers:

• The number of PHP developers was 5 million as of 2013 (source) and 5,5 million as of September 2018 (source).
• The Register counted 6.1 million PHP developers in 2019.

JavaScript developers:

• In Q3 2020, according to Developer Economics, the number of software developers using JavaScript was 12.4 million. This means that 53% of all developers in the world were using JS at some point.
• According to the 2016 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, “JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language on earth. Even Back-end developers are more likely to use it than any other language.” Meanwhile, the most recent data provided by SlashData showed that there were 10,7 million JavaScript software developers in the world in 2018 (source).

Mobile app developers:

• In 2016, the number of mobile app developers in the world was 12 million. As of 2018, the global mobile application market size was estimated to be $106.27 billion, and projected to reach $407.31 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 18.4% from 2019 to 2026 (source). Based on this data, the demand for mobile app developers will keep growing.
• According to EvansData, there are 5,9 million Android developers and 2,8 million iOS developers in the world. The report predicted 14 million mobile app developers by 2020 (source).

.NET developers:

• Speaking about the number of .NET developers worldwide, there were about 6 million .NET developers according to an old study dated back to 2004. Today, according to many guesses there are approximately 7-8 million .NET developers. The majority of them use C#.

C++ developers:

• In 2015 there were 4,4 million C++ software developers (source). Nowadays, the number has increased slightly and reached 5,4 million (source).

Python developers:

• According to SlashData, the number of Python developers was 7 million in 2018. Nowadays, Python is gradually getting closer to Java in terms of popularity (source).

C# developers:

• The number of C# software developers in the world was estimated to be 6,2 million in 2018 (source).

Worldwide programming language statistics (source: SlashData)

Software Developer Stats in Big Tech (FAANG)

• According to Linkedin, Facebook currently employs approximately 8850 software developers.
• At Amazon, there are around 36,000 developers writing code.
• Apple employs around 20 million developers, and together they have made about $100 billion in revenues (source).
• As of now, Netflix employs only 80 software engineers, who build 50 applications (source).
• According to the official Google employee report, 27,169 software engineers work at Google (i.e. research & development) (source).

Software Developer Demographics

All in all, there’s not really a way to check how accurate the above data is. It’s not that we doubt the credibility of the sources we used — it’s the definitions that pose the problem. Data Evans Corporation, for instance, counts everyone who’s actively involved in the creation of software from rank and file coders to team leaders and managers, all the way up to CTOs.

Both Data USA and DQYDJ used data provided by the US Census Bureau but somehow ended up with very different figures. Again, this most likely is the result of differing definitions.

The one thing that we know for sure is that the number of people writing code is only going to grow in the coming years. The BLS predicts that by 2024, the number of jobs for software and app developers will have increased by 12.5% compared to 2014, and the situation won’t be much different in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that software developer jobs will increase by 24% between 2016 and 2026. According to Burning Glass Labor Insights, there were more than 227,000 software developer job postings in the second quarter of 2018 in comparison to 176,530 during the same period in 2017. The increase was nearly 51,000.

Other Interesting Software Developer Statistics

Regular surveys conducted by Evans Data Corporation, DataUSA and Stack Overflow offer plenty of software developer statistics. Below are the ones we consider the most interesting:

• According to Evans Data, the median software developer age is 36 (EMEA region — 40, North America — 39, Latin America — 35, APAC region — 34). According to datausa.io, the median software, applications & systems software developer age in the US is 39.8, and male employees are generally 0.507 years younger than female.
• According to the Dou.ua 2018 Survey, the average age of software developers in Ukraine is 21-29.
• Ukraine takes 1st place in the world for the number of C++ and Unity3D software developers, the 2nd in Magento, JavaScript, and Scala, and the 3rd in PHP, Ruby, .NET, Python, and Symfony developers.
• 27.5 % of developers in the world are women
• 80.7% of Software developers, applications and systems software in the US are men, the percentage of female software developers is 19,3%
• According to Developer Survey Results 2019, nearly 45% of professional developers learned to code less than 10 years ago.

• Women write their first code later than men

• 76.5% of software developers indicated having a bachelor’s degree or higher.
• 6 million developers are involved in Big Data and Advanced Analytics
• 29% of developers worldwide, or 6,452,000 in all, were using some form of AI or ML as of 2018 and an additional 5.8 million are expected to start using AI or ML within the next six months.
• 2 million developers work on IoT apps
• 4 million developers (26%) use cloud-based development environments.
• 33% of women stated that the most important driver of their development work lies in their personal curiosity and interest in the technologies they use, whereas this was true of only 22% of men.