Leaving PHP, Part 1: the talent pool is shrinking, and the numbers are worse than you think

This is the first post in a ten-part series on why teams in 2026 are choosing to migrate off PHP. Each post takes one specific reason and looks at it honestly, with data. We start with the reason that gets the least airtime in stack debates and the most attention in budget meetings: the people you can hire to write it.

Three independent surveys, three different methodologies, one trajectory. PHP is not collapsing. It is shrinking faster than the language community wants to admit, while the rest of the market grows around it.

The numbers everyone agrees on

Stack Overflow runs a self-reported survey of tens of thousands of developers each year. JetBrains runs a weighted ecosystem survey with its own panel. TIOBE measures search engine telemetry. They are three different windows on the same population, and they rarely agree on the details. They agree on this:

That is roughly a 40% relative decline over seven years across three methodologies that have nothing to do with each other. For comparison, in the Stack Overflow 2025 survey JavaScript sat at 66% of professional usage, and Python posted a +7 percentage point year-over-year jump from 2024 to 2025: the largest single-year adoption jump for any major language in over a decade.

Professional developer usage, Stack Overflow 2025

PHP is not just declining in absolute terms. It is declining while the market it operates in is growing.

A 12-point drop matters more than it sounds

The naive reading is: "PHP went from 30% to 18%. That is still 18% of millions of developers. Plenty of people." For hiring purposes, that reading is wrong, and it is wrong for three specific reasons.

1. The denominator changed

The total developer population grew substantially over the same period. Eighteen percent today is a different absolute number than 18% would have been seven years ago, but the share of mind among new entrants, tooling vendors, and conference organizers is what determines ecosystem velocity. Share of mind tracks the percentage, not the headcount.

2. The age distribution is bottom-heavy in the wrong direction

JetBrains' State of PHP 2025 surveyed 1,720 PHP-primary developers. 88% of them had more than three years of experience. The largest single cohort sat in the six-to-ten-year range. Translation: only 12% of the active PHP workforce has under three years of experience. The bench is not refilling.

3. The new-entrant signal is unambiguous

Stack Overflow 2024 data shows only 15.2% of new programmers choose PHP as their starting language. People learning to code today are picking JavaScript, Python, and increasingly TypeScript. Five years from now, those are the seniors you will be hiring. Five years from now, the PHP seniors will be the same people who are seniors now, plus or minus retirement.

What JetBrains is too polite to say outright

JetBrains is the company behind PhpStorm. They are arguably the largest commercial backer of the PHP ecosystem. Every year, they publish a Language Promise Index combining growth, stability, and adoption intent. Their own 2025 verdict on PHP is explicit, and worth quoting in full:

The phrasing is diplomatic. JetBrains has commercial reasons to be diplomatic. The signal underneath is not. The peer group JetBrains placed PHP into is Ruby and Objective-C. That is the comparison the PHP community should sit with for a moment, because Objective-C did not stop existing. It just stopped being the answer to any new question.

The salary signal points the wrong way

Across multiple aggregators, the average compensation picture is consistent. PHP sits at the bottom of mainstream backend salaries.

Average US developer salary, 2024–2025

Sources: Glassdoor, DEV, CareerFoundry, Second Talent. PHP lags JavaScript by ~15–20% and Python by ~30%. Stack Overflow's 2017 survey already noted the same pattern: developers using languages such as PHP are paid less even controlling for years of experience.

This sounds like good news for an employer. Cheaper hires. In a thin market, it is a warning. The salary gap reflects a perceived ceiling on career growth in PHP. That perception drives ambitious developers toward other stacks, which thins the senior pool further, which pushes the seniors who remain to demand premium rates anyway.

The result is the inverted compensation curve no hiring manager wants: junior PHP devs are cheap, but high-quality senior PHP developers are scarce and command salaries close to JavaScript and Python parity. You save money on the bottom of the org chart and pay a premium at the top, which is exactly backwards.

A scorecard for hiring in 2026

Lay the data points out side by side and the picture stops being ambiguous.

Is PHP dying? No. It will not die for a long time. Laravel is healthy, Symfony is healthy, the language itself keeps improving, and there is enough installed base to keep good engineers gainfully employed for at least another decade.

That is the wrong question for a CTO. The right question is: do I want to bet a new product, or a five-year roadmap, on a language whose talent pool is shrinking 5–7% per year while the alternatives are growing?

For most teams in 2026, the honest answer is no.

Up next in the series

The talent argument is the easiest to make and the easiest to ignore, because it is about the future and not about a thing that is broken on your laptop today. The next nine posts cover the things that are broken on your laptop today.

If you want to start the migration before Part 10 lands, book a demo and we will walk you through what Pext does to your codebase.