Perforce’s 2026 PHP Landscape Report Highlights a Growing Skills Gap with PHP

Perforce Software announced the release of the 2026 PHP Landscape Report, which reveals that PHP remains one of the most widely used programming languages in the open source software (OSS) ecosystem, but there is increasingly a struggle for organizations to find and retain skilled PHP talent.

A Mature Ecosystem Meets a Shrinking Talent Pool
Based on survey responses from over 700 OSS users worldwide and focusing on those who use PHP, the report shows that while PHP’s technical footprint remains strong, there is growing concern around skill continuity and hiring. Key data includes:

– Over half of surveyed PHP users reported having more than 15 years of experience with the language, while only 15% had 5 years of experience or less. This imbalance points to a maturing workforce with fewer new developers entering the ecosystem.

– Hiring rose to one of the top challenges facing PHP teams in 2026 — for Managers and Directors, it was the number one concern.

– Across the broader OSS landscape, 24% of respondents cited a lack of personnel with the right skills and experience as a leading operational challenge.

“This isn’t just a PHP problem. It’s an open source problem,” said Matthew Weier O’Phinney, Principal Product Manager, Perforce Zend and OpenLogic*. “Organizations depend on PHP for mission-critical applications, but as experienced developers retire or move on, replacing that expertise is becoming increasingly difficult.”

PHP Popularity and Role in Complex OSS Stacks
The survey revealed that PHP continues to serve as a foundational technology for web applications and APIs. It tied with JavaScript as the most used open source language, ahead of Python, Node.js, and Java. At the same time, 99% of surveyed PHP users reported that their organizations maintained or increased their use of OSS over the past year, underscoring PHP’s continued relevance within a growing and interconnected OSS ecosystem.

The report further shows that PHP teams rarely operate in isolation. Most PHP applications integrate with multiple open source technologies, including relational databases, message queues, caching layers, and cloud or container platforms:

– 80% of surveyed developers used PHP to build or deploy services or APIs, with an additional 70% using it for internal business applications — speaking to PHP’s reputation as the “glue language” of the web.

– The top systems integrated with PHP applications were relational databases (92%), web APIs (83%), and filesystems (70%), which highlights PHP’s ease of deployment and integration.

– NGINX outpaced Apache as the top web infrastructure or middleware tool used by PHP teams, at 69% vs. 58%, likely driven by wider container adoption in the ecosystem.
Investment in OSS remains broadly distributed, with organizations spending across programming languages, databases, DevOps tooling, and observability platforms rather than concentrating on a single category:

– PHP users were most likely to invest resources into programming languages and frameworks at 54% of participants, followed closely by databases and data technologies at 50% of participants.

– Cloud and container technologies (38%) and DevOps/GitOps/DevSecOps tooling (38%) were ranked of equal importance by PHP professionals.
This broad integration reinforces PHP’s role as a connective layer in modern application architecture, but it also increases the demand for developers who can manage complexity across the full stack.

Looking Ahead
Despite mounting hiring challenges, the findings in this report speak to PHP’s reliability and longevity in the OSS ecosystem:

– 45% of broader OSS users report using PHP within their organizations.

– Only 3% of organizations reported planning to retire their PHP applications in 2026.

– 76% of surveyed PHP users have a PHP version upgrade or migration planned, with 68% having completed an upgrade or migration in the past 12 months.

“The takeaway from the 2026 PHP Landscape Report is pragmatic optimism,” Weier O’Phinney concluded. “PHP is here to stay. The challenge for organizations now is ensuring they have the skills, support, and continuity needed to sustain it for the long term.”