Countries With the Most Tech Workers and Software Developers (2025)
Photo: Sora Shimazaki / Pexels
Software has become part of almost every industry, from banking and logistics to farming and car manufacturing. The people who build and run it, software developers, network engineers, data specialists, security analysts and IT support staff, are now a significant share of the workforce in the most digital economies. Countries with deep pools of this talent find it easier to start technology companies, attract foreign investment and adopt new tools such as AI.
Counting those workers turns out to be harder than it sounds. Every country uses its own definitions, surveys and industry boundaries, and many popular rankings rely on developer-survey responses or social-network profiles rather than official statistics. This article sticks to official or industry-body data, explains what each source counts, and is explicit about where the numbers cannot be compared directly.
Key takeaways
- Eurostat counted about 10.2 million ICT specialists in the EU in 2024, 4.9% of total employment, up from 3.6% in 2016
- Sweden has the highest share in Europe at 8.6%, followed by Luxembourg (8.0%), Finland (7.8%), Estonia (7.2%) and the Netherlands (7.0%)
- Germany has the largest absolute number in Europe, about 2.18 million ICT specialists, followed by France (1.39 million) and Spain (1.02 million)
- Israel's high-tech sector employed about 403,000 people in the first half of 2025, around 11.5% of the national workforce, according to the Israel Innovation Authority
- In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts about 1.9 million software developers and testers in 2025, with a median annual wage of $134,040
What counts as a "tech worker"?
The phrase means different things in different datasets, and the differences are large enough to change rankings. There are three main approaches:
- Occupation-based. Count people whose job is technical, wherever they work. Eurostat's "ICT specialists" and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' "computer and information technology occupations" work this way. A software developer at a bank counts; an accountant at a software company does not.
- Industry-based. Count everyone who works in the technology sector, whatever their job. Israel's high-tech statistics, India's NASSCOM figures and China's software and IT services statistics are mostly industry-based. A salesperson at a software company counts; a developer at a hospital usually does not.
- Survey or platform-based. Estimates built from developer surveys, code-hosting accounts or professional-network profiles. These are useful for trends but are not representative samples, and they often include students, hobbyists and part-time contributors.
Eurostat defines ICT specialists as workers who can "develop, operate and maintain ICT systems" and for whom ICT is the main part of the job. The definition is based on the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-08) and includes ICT managers, software and application developers, database and network professionals, ICT technicians and user-support technicians. It excludes people who use computers heavily but whose job is something else, such as most engineers, designers or financial analysts.
Because of these differences, this article presents the data in separate tables by source rather than combining them into one global league table that would compare unlike things.
Europe: ICT Specialists as a Share of Employment (2024)
Eurostat's labour force survey data give the only fully harmonised cross-country comparison. The table lists every country in Eurostat's 2024 dataset with a share of 5.0% or more, plus the EU average and the largest EU economies for comparison.
| Rank | Country | ICT Specialists, % of Total Employment (2024) | ICT Specialists (thousands, 2024) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sweden | 8.6 | 450.7 |
| 2 | Luxembourg | 8.0 | 26.0 |
| 3 | Finland | 7.8 | 204.0 |
| 4 | Estonia | 7.2 | 50.6 |
| 5 | Netherlands | 7.0 | 684.4 |
| 6 | Ireland | 6.3 | 173.5 |
| 7 | Denmark | 5.8 | 177.2 |
| 8 | Belgium | 5.7 | 287.5 |
| 8 | Switzerland | 5.7 | 275.3 |
| 10 | Norway | 5.5 | 159.1 |
| 11 | Austria | 5.3 | 237.0 |
| 11 | Lithuania | 5.3 | 77.6 |
| 11 | Malta | 5.3 | 16.7 |
| 14 | Portugal | 5.2 | 262.1 |
| 15 | Germany | 5.1 | 2,184.5 |
| 16 | Croatia | 5.0 | 83.4 |
| 16 | Cyprus | 5.0 | 24.2 |
| — | EU-27 | 4.9 | 10,189.9 |
| — | France | 4.8 | 1,394.9 |
| — | Spain | 4.7 | 1,022.6 |
| — | Poland | 4.5 | 770.6 |
| — | Italy | 4.0 | 945.4 |
| — | Romania | 2.8 | 221.6 |
| — | Greece | 2.5 | 107.2 |
Source: Eurostat, Employed ICT specialists (isoc_sks_itspt), reference year 2024. Based on the EU Labour Force Survey and the ISCO-08 occupation classification. Switzerland and Norway are included in the Eurostat dataset; the UK is listed in the dataset but has no 2024 values.
The EU trend
Eurostat's series shows a steady rise. ICT specialists made up 3.6% of EU employment in 2016, 4.0% in 2019, 4.5% in 2021 and 4.9% in 2024. Eurostat's early 2025 figure is 5.0%. Eurostat flags a break in the series at 2021 (its 2021 figure is an estimate), so comparisons across that year should be treated with some caution.
The European Commission's Digital Decade programme has set a target of 20 million employed ICT specialists in the EU by 2030. At about 10.2 million in 2024, the EU would need to roughly double its ICT workforce in six years to hit it, which would require faster growth than at any point in the series.
Sweden, Finland and Estonia: Small Countries, Deep Talent Pools
Sweden has the highest ICT share in Europe, at 8.6% of employment, or about 451,000 people in 2024. Stockholm is home to a cluster of internationally known technology companies, including Spotify, Klarna and the game studio Mojang, maker of Minecraft. Sweden was an early adopter of home computing: a government-backed scheme in the late 1990s let employees buy home computers tax-free through their employer, which spread computer use into many households.
Finland (7.8%, about 204,000 people) has a long-established technology base built around Nokia's mobile-phone era, which trained a generation of engineers who later moved into startups and gaming. Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel in 1991 while a student at the University of Helsinki, and Finnish game studios such as Supercell and Rovio have produced global hits.
Estonia (7.2%, about 51,000 people) is the story that defies scale. With a population of about 1.4 million, it has built one of the most digitised public sectors in the world: online voting, digital identity cards and e-residency for non-residents. Its startup ecosystem includes Skype, which was developed by Estonian engineers, as well as Wise (formerly TransferWise), Bolt and Pipedrive. The country's digital strategy started soon after independence in 1991, including the Tiger Leap programme in the late 1990s that brought computers and internet access to schools.
The Netherlands, Ireland and Luxembourg: Hubs for International Firms
The Netherlands (7.0%) has the sixth largest ICT workforce in the EU in absolute terms, about 684,000 people, behind Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Poland. Amsterdam's strengths include major internet exchange infrastructure and the headquarters or European bases of companies such as Booking.com and Adyen. The Dutch semiconductor-equipment maker ASML is also a large employer of engineers, though many of its staff fall into engineering rather than ICT occupations.
Ireland (6.3%) hosts the European headquarters of many large US technology companies, which helps explain its high share. Luxembourg (8.0%) has a small labour market, about 26,000 ICT specialists in total, with a large financial services sector that employs many IT staff. Its share is also boosted by cross-border commuters, who make up a large part of its workforce.
Germany, France and Spain: The Largest Absolute Numbers
Shares favour small, specialised economies; absolute numbers favour large ones. Germany has about 2.18 million ICT specialists, more than one in five of the EU total, even though its share of employment (5.1%) is only slightly above the EU average. Much of Germany's software work is embedded in manufacturing: car makers, industrial-automation firms and enterprise-software companies such as SAP employ large numbers of developers.
France (1.39 million) and Spain (1.02 million) are next. France's ecosystem includes AI companies such as Mistral AI and a large IT services industry; see our explainer on what Mistral AI is. Spain's ICT employment is concentrated in Madrid and Barcelona.
Israel: The Highest Tech Share Outside Europe
Israel does not appear in the Eurostat data, and its statistics are industry-based rather than occupation-based, so its figures are not directly comparable to the European table. They are still striking. According to the Israel Innovation Authority, about 403,000 people worked in Israeli high-tech in the first half of 2025, around 11.5% of the national workforce. The sector's share of employees rose from 7.9% in 2012 to about 11.5% by 2022 and has stayed roughly flat since.
The Innovation Authority's 2025 reports also show that the long boom has slowed. The Authority reports that the number of high-tech employees grew by about 36,000 in 2022 but only about 10,000 in 2023, and then declined by about 5,000 (1.2%) in 2024, the first fall in at least a decade. Research and development roles make up about half of high-tech jobs. Israeli tech companies also employ large numbers of people abroad, which these domestic figures do not capture.
Israel's tech workforce draws on several sources: universities such as the Technion and the Weizmann Institute, a strong venture-capital industry, and military technology units such as Unit 8200, whose alumni have founded many cybersecurity companies, including Check Point. Israel's press freedom and security situation, and the sector's dependence on foreign investment, remain sources of uncertainty for the industry.
The United States: Occupation Data From the BLS
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes detailed occupation data through its Occupational Outlook Handbook. For 2025, the BLS reports:
| US Occupation (BLS, 2025) | Jobs | Median Annual Pay (May 2025) | Projected Growth 2025–35 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software developers | 1,717,800 | $135,980 | 10% |
| Software QA analysts and testers | 187,600 | $104,300 | 6% |
| Developers, QA analysts and testers combined | 1,905,400 | $134,040 | 10% |
| All computer and IT occupations | — | $109,470 | "Faster than average" |
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Software Developers, QA Analysts and Testers and Computer and Information Technology Occupations.
The BLS expects about 280,000 openings a year on average in computer and IT occupations between 2025 and 2035, from both new jobs and the need to replace workers who leave the field. The median wage for this group, $109,470 in May 2025, is more than double the $50,980 median for all occupations.
The broader US tech workforce is considerably larger than the software-developer figure suggests, because it includes computer support specialists, network and systems administrators, database administrators, information security analysts, computer systems analysts and web developers. The US also relies heavily on foreign-born talent, particularly through the H-1B visa programme for specialty occupations, which is one reason immigration policy is central to debates about the American tech workforce. Our overview of the web development job market looks at one slice of this market in more detail.
India: The World's Largest IT Services Industry
India's figures come from NASSCOM, the national IT industry association, and are industry-based. NASSCOM's February 2025 Strategic Review estimated that India's technology industry would employ about 5.8 million people in fiscal year 2025, after adding about 126,000 net new jobs. Its February 2026 review put direct employment at about 5.82 million at the end of FY2025 and about 5.95 million in FY2026.
That headcount includes IT services, business process management, software products, engineering research and development, and global capability centres (GCCs), the in-house technology and operations hubs that foreign companies have set up in India. GCCs have been the fastest growing part of the industry in recent years. India's largest employers include Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCLTech and Wipro, and the main hubs are Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and the National Capital Region.
Relative to India's population of about 1.4 billion, the tech workforce is small, well under 1% of the population, but India supplies a large share of the world's outsourced software and IT services and a large share of foreign-born tech workers in the US.
China: The Largest Software Workforce
China's official statistics are also industry-based. According to the results of China's Fifth National Economic Census, as reported by Yicai, legal-entity units in the software and information technology services industry employed 11.07 million people in 2023. That figure counts everyone working at those organisations, not only programmers, and it uses a different scope from the annual industry bulletins of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Even with those caveats, China almost certainly has the world's largest software and IT services workforce in absolute terms. Its technology giants, including Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, ByteDance and Baidu, employ large engineering staffs, and Chinese universities produce very large numbers of engineering and computer science graduates each year. Comparable headcount figures for later years have not been published in the same form.
Comparing the Big Workforces
The table below sets the main national figures side by side. Because the definitions differ, they should be read as orders of magnitude rather than as a strict ranking.
| Country | Figure | What It Counts | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| China | 11.07 million | All employees of software and IT services legal entities | 2023 | Fifth National Economic Census (via Yicai) |
| India | ~5.8 million | Employees of the technology industry (IT services, BPM, products, ER&D, GCCs) | FY2025 | NASSCOM Strategic Review |
| Germany | 2.18 million | ICT specialist occupations (ISCO-08) | 2024 | Eurostat |
| United States | 1.9 million | Software developers, QA analysts and testers only | 2025 | BLS |
| France | 1.39 million | ICT specialist occupations | 2024 | Eurostat |
| Israel | ~403,000 | Employees of the high-tech sector | H1 2025 | Israel Innovation Authority |
The US entry looks small here only because it covers a narrow occupation group. If the US were measured with Eurostat's broader ICT-specialist definition, which also includes IT managers, network and database professionals and user-support technicians, its total would be several times larger.
Why Some Countries Have More Tech Workers
Across the data, several factors recur.
Education pipelines. Countries with strong university systems in computer science and engineering, and widespread vocational IT training, produce more specialists. Our ranking of the countries with the best education systems covers learning outcomes more broadly.
Digital infrastructure. Fast, reliable broadband and early digitisation of public services create demand for ICT workers and make technical careers visible to young people. Nordic and Baltic countries score highly on both; see the countries with the fastest internet speeds.
Investment and company formation. Venture capital, research funding and successful local companies create a cycle in which experienced employees leave to start new firms. The same countries tend to rank highly for AI startups and research output.
Foreign multinationals. Ireland, the Netherlands and India show how the location decisions of global technology companies can shape a national workforce.
Open labour markets. Countries that make it easy for skilled foreigners to work there, through targeted visas or EU free movement, can grow their tech workforce faster than their education systems alone would allow.
Limitations and Open Questions
- Definitions drive rankings. Occupation-based and industry-based counts can differ by a factor of two or more for the same country. No single global table compares like with like.
- Gender balance is a gap almost everywhere. In most countries, women make up a minority of ICT specialists, which limits the potential talent pool.
- Survey data have margins of error. Eurostat's figures come from a sample survey; small countries' numbers are less precise, and differences of a few tenths of a percentage point should not be over-interpreted.
- AI's effect on demand is uncertain. AI coding assistants may change the mix of skills employers want. The BLS still projects growth for software developers through 2035, but entry-level hiring has been weaker in some countries since 2023. Our articles on AI jobs and the ML engineer career path look at how roles are shifting.
- Self-employment and freelancing are undercounted. Labour force surveys capture freelancers, but industry-based counts such as NASSCOM's or Israel's mostly cover company employees, so independent developers can be missed.
- Remote work blurs borders. A developer in Estonia may work for a US company, and an Israeli company may employ more people abroad than at home. National statistics count where people live and work, not who they work for.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Which country has the most tech workers? A: In absolute terms, China almost certainly has the largest workforce, with 11.07 million people employed by software and IT services organisations in 2023, according to its national economic census. India's tech industry employs about 5.8 million people, according to NASSCOM. Definitions differ, so these figures are not directly comparable.
Q: Which country has the highest share of tech workers? A: Among countries with official data, Israel's high-tech sector employs about 11.5% of the workforce, according to the Israel Innovation Authority. That is an industry-based measure. In Europe, using Eurostat's occupation-based measure, Sweden leads with ICT specialists at 8.6% of employment in 2024, followed by Luxembourg and Finland.
Q: How many software developers are there in the United States? A: The US Bureau of Labor Statistics counts about 1.72 million software developers in 2025, plus about 188,000 software QA analysts and testers, for a combined 1.9 million. The median annual pay for the combined group was $134,040 in May 2025.
Q: What is an ICT specialist? A: Eurostat defines ICT specialists as workers who can develop, operate and maintain ICT systems, and for whom ICT is the main part of their job. The category is based on the ISCO-08 occupation classification and includes ICT managers, software developers, database and network professionals, technicians and user-support staff.
Q: How many ICT specialists work in the EU? A: About 10.2 million in 2024, or 4.9% of total employment, according to Eurostat. That is up from 3.6% in 2016. Germany has the largest number, about 2.18 million, followed by France with about 1.39 million.
Q: Is demand for tech workers still growing? A: Official projections still point to growth. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 10% growth for software developers between 2025 and 2035 and about 280,000 openings a year across computer and IT occupations. However, Israel's high-tech employment has stalled since 2022, and AI tools are changing which skills are in demand.
The bottom line
The countries with the deepest tech talent pools fall into two groups. Small, highly digitised economies such as Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Luxembourg and Israel have the highest shares of tech workers, built on education, early digitisation and dense startup ecosystems. Large economies such as China, India, the United States and Germany have the largest numbers, which give them scale in software, services and AI. Because countries count tech workers in very different ways, the most reliable comparisons are within a single dataset, such as Eurostat's for Europe. Read across datasets, the figures are best treated as broad orders of magnitude.
Sources
- Eurostat, Employed ICT specialists (isoc_sks_itspt) (2016–2025 series; 2024 values used)
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers (2025 data)
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Computer and Information Technology Occupations
- Yicai, report on China's Fifth National Economic Census results (software and IT services employment, 2023)
- Israel Innovation Authority, 2025 High-Tech Employment and State of High Tech reports
- NASSCOM, Technology Sector in India Strategic Review, 2025 and 2026 editions
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About the Author
SciHub101 is an independent science and technology publication founded and edited by Buğra Sözeri, a software engineer and app developer based in Türkiye. AI tools assist with drafting and research. Source documentation in the existing archive is uneven, and articles are being reviewed and corrected. The Editorial Team byline identifies editorial responsibility; it does not certify specialist or independent human review. Where we compare products, anything built by our own team is labelled as such — see the editorial guidelines and About page for how corrections and disclosures work.
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