Software Development Statistics (2026)

What this graphic shows

This graphic gathers the software development statistics that best describe 2026 from three primary sources: Stack Overflow's annual Developer Survey, GitHub's Octoverse report and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Its central chart, The Crossover, tracks two answers from four years of Stack Overflow surveys. In 2023, 44.2% of respondents used AI tools and 76.3% felt favorable toward them. By 2025, use had climbed to 78.5% while favorability fell to 59.7%. In 2026, 82.8% use at least one AI tool at work and 62.0% are favorable.

The other cards follow that gap into daily work: how far developers trust AI output, which tasks they hand to it, which coding agents they use, which languages they write, and what the U.S. job market for software developers looks like.

How many developers use AI tools?

83% of the developers who answered Stack Overflow's 2026 survey use at least one AI tool at work, and 73% of those who use AI coding assistants or agents use them every day. Coding assistants and agents are the most common kind (65.9% of respondents), ahead of general-purpose chat tools (62.5%). Among daily users, 30.9% spend four or more hours a day working with AI.

GitHub's platform data shows the same shift from the other side. By September 2026, more than 40% of pull requests on GitHub started with an agent's first draft, up from 17% in March. That was 110 million agent-started pull requests in September alone.

Do developers trust AI-generated code?

Only 6.6% of developers trust AI output for many tasks including important work decisions. The most common answer, at 48.0%, is that they trust it when they can easily verify the output. Another 16.3% trust it for low-risk tasks only, and 12.3% do not trust it for most work tasks. Developers act on that: 76.5% run AI-generated code locally before using it, and only 9.6% use answers as-is.

Trust shows up in where AI is used. 69.3% use it to generate code in a familiar area and 63.8% for debugging or refactoring, but only 19.9% use it for deploying, operating or troubleshooting production systems.

What are the most popular AI coding tools?

Claude Code is the most used AI coding tool in Stack Overflow's 2026 survey, used in the past year by 65.5% of respondents who answered the question, followed by GitHub Copilot at 58.7%. OpenAI Codex (29.5%) and Cursor (25.5%) follow at less than half those levels. Most developers mix tools: 40.5% use three to five distinct AI products in a typical week.

What is the most popular programming language?

JavaScript is still the most used programming language, at 62.0% of Stack Overflow's 2026 respondents, its 12th straight year at the top. But Python has closed most of the gap, rising from 31.7% in 2017 to 58.0% in 2026, 4.0 points behind. TypeScript climbed from 9.4% to 43.8% over the same decade, while Java fell from 39.3% to 27.6%.

GitHub counts differently, by monthly contributors to repositories, and there TypeScript has been the most used language since 2025, with Python second and JavaScript third.

How many software developers are there in the U.S.?

There were 1,717,800 software developer jobs in the United States in 2025, according to the BLS, plus 187,600 software quality assurance analyst and tester jobs, for 1,905,400 in all. GitHub, which counts accounts rather than jobs, says it serves more than 225 million developers worldwide, including 38.3 million in the United States.

Is software development a growing career?

Yes: the BLS projects software developer employment to grow 10% from 2025 to 2035, against 3% for all occupations. That is 174,700 more software developer jobs, and about 106,100 openings a year for developers, QA analysts and testers combined, many of them to replace workers who change occupations or leave the labor force. The median software developer earned $135,980 in May 2025, about 2.7 times the $50,980 median for all U.S. workers.

Methodology & caveats

Stack Overflow figures come from each year's published results for all respondents. The surveys are online and self-selected, mostly reaching Stack Overflow's own users, so they describe that community rather than every developer. The 2026 survey had 30,903 valid responses from 169 countries, fielded June 23 to August 5, 2026. Many questions were optional, so each chart's base (n) differs. The coding-agent shares use only the 12,255 people who answered that question.

The Crossover's values are derived by adding published answer shares (for example, daily + weekly + monthly users in 2025). The 2026 "use AI" value is 100% minus the 17.2% who said they don't use AI tools. Stack Overflow changed the questions in 2026: use is now asked about "your role at work" instead of "your development process," and the favorability scale now reads "somewhat favorable" and "neutral." Treat the 2025–2026 step as indicative, not exact. Stack Overflow's own rounded headlines (77%, 72%, 60%, 62% favorable) differ slightly from the sums for 2023 and 2024.

GitHub's agent figures are platform measurements for pull requests with a detected agent signal, and its 225 million developers are accounts, not people in jobs. BLS employment and projections are for the United States only, use the 2025 base year, and are rounded to the nearest 100 jobs or whole percent. The "3×" and "2.7×" comparisons are our own arithmetic on those published figures. Gartner's 2026–27 software spending forecast was not used because its release could not be checked at the source.