PHP firms face tougher hunt for skilled developers

Perforce has published its 2026 PHP Landscape Report, which suggests organisations are finding it harder to recruit and retain skilled PHP developers.

The findings are based on responses from more than 700 open source software users worldwide. Within the PHP subset, the workforce skewed heavily towards long-serving developers. More than half of the surveyed PHP users said they had worked with the language for more than 15 years, while 15% had five years of experience or less.

The data highlights a tension at the centre of PHP's role in enterprise technology. The language remains widely used across web applications and APIs, yet fewer newer developers appear to be entering the field even as businesses continue to rely on it for core systems.

PHP now ties with JavaScript as the most widely used language in the open source environments covered by the survey, according to Perforce. The report also found that 45% of broader open source users use PHP within their organisations.

The use of open-source software, more broadly, remained steady. Among surveyed PHP users, 99% said their organisations had either maintained or increased their use of open source software over the past year.

Hiring Pressure

Recruitment emerged as the leading operational issue in the report. Across the wider open source landscape, 24% of respondents cited a lack of personnel with the right skills and experience as a leading challenge, while managers and directors ranked hiring as the top concern for PHP teams.

The issue appears to extend beyond filling vacancies. A large installed base of PHP applications still requires maintenance, security oversight, upgrades and migrations, and many organisations seem to be doing that work while facing a thinner pipeline of incoming talent.

That pressure is visible in version management. Perforce found that 76% of surveyed PHP users have a PHP upgrade or migration planned, while 68% said they had completed one in the past 12 months.

Only 3% of organisations said they planned to retire their PHP applications in 2026, indicating that most expect to keep those systems in place rather than replace them outright. For employers, that creates a practical challenge: sustaining existing applications while competing for experienced developers in a mature market.

The report portrays PHP as embedded in broader technology estates rather than operating as a standalone tool. It found that 80% of surveyed developers used PHP to build or deploy services or APIs, while 70% used it for internal business applications.

Integration data underlines how central that role has become. The most common systems connected to PHP applications were relational databases, used by 92% of respondents, followed by web APIs at 83% and filesystems at 70%.

Stack Complexity

The report also shows that PHP teams increasingly work across mixed infrastructure environments. NGINX was cited by 69% of respondents as a web infrastructure or middleware tool used by PHP teams, ahead of Apache on 58%.

Investment patterns reflected the same spread across the stack. Among PHP users, 54% said their organisations were investing in programming languages and frameworks, 50% in databases and data technologies, and 38% in both cloud and container technologies, as well as DevOps, GitOps, and DevSecOps tooling.

That matters because the hiring challenge is not limited to knowledge of PHP syntax or frameworks. Employers often need developers who can manage databases, APIs, infrastructure and deployment workflows alongside application code, raising the bar for candidates and widening the gap between demand and supply.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney, principal product manager at Perforce, Zend, and OpenLogic, said the pattern was visible across open-source teams, not just in PHP. "This isn't just a PHP problem. It's an open source problem," he said.

"Organisations depend on PHP for mission-critical applications, but as experienced developers retire or move on, replacing that expertise is becoming increasingly difficult."

His comments in the report also pointed to continued confidence in the language despite the strain in the labour market. "The takeaway from the 2026 PHP Landscape Report is pragmatic optimism," he said.

"PHP is here to stay. The challenge for organizations organisationsng they have the skills, support, and continuity needed to sustain it for the long term."