Enterprise Software Spending Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Elena Rodriguez | Last updated: August 9, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Worldwide software spending will reach $1.468 trillion in 2026, up 15.5% from $1.271 trillion in 2025, according to Gartner’s July 2026 forecast. Software is now 23.05% of a $6.369 trillion IT market. But the number that should reshape your 2027 budget is different: enterprise technology budgets are growing roughly five times faster than headcount.
Quick Answer
Enterprise software spending hits $1.468 trillion worldwide in 2026 (Gartner, July 27, 2026), a 15.5% increase and 23.05% of total IT spending. In the United States, business investment in software reached $693.0 billion in 2024 (Bureau of Economic Analysis), which Axis Intelligence Research calculates as $4,395 per nonfarm worker — up 30.6% since 2020. The Enterprise Software Pressure Index (ESPI™) reads 146.8 for 2026 against a neutral baseline of 100.
Key Findings
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, software will absorb 23.05% of worldwide IT spending in 2026, up from 22.79% in 2025, based on Gartner’s July 2026 forecast table.
- Worldwide software spending grows 15.5% in 2026 to $1.468 trillion, adding $197 billion in a single year (Gartner, July 27, 2026).
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, US business software investment reached $4,395 per nonfarm worker in 2024, calculated from Bureau of Economic Analysis investment data and Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll counts.
- Gartner’s CFO Budget Priorities survey of more than 300 finance leaders found average enterprise technology budget growth near 10% for 2026 against headcount growth of 2%, a five-to-one wedge (Gartner, February 10, 2026).
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, Oracle and Salesforce alone carry $710.4 billion in disclosed contracted backlog as of their most recent fiscal year ends, a forward commitment larger than half of one year of global software spending.
How Much Do Enterprises Spend on Software in 2026?
The headline is $1.468 trillion. The context is what makes it useful.
Gartner’s quarterly forecast has been revised upward four times for the 2026 year: 9.8% growth in October 2025, 10.8% in February 2026, 13.5% in April, and 14.2% in the July 27, 2026 release. Software was revised along the same path, landing at 15.5% growth.
Worldwide IT spending by segment, 2025 to 2026
| Segment | 2025 spending ($B) | 2025 growth | 2026 spending ($B) | 2026 growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software | 1,271 | 13.9% | 1,468 | 15.5% | Gartner, July 2026 |
| Services | 1,492 | 3.8% | 1,570 | 5.3% | Gartner, July 2026 |
| Communications services | 1,296 | 3.3% | 1,354 | 4.4% | Gartner, July 2026 |
| Devices | 790 | 9.7% | 868 | 9.8% | Gartner, July 2026 |
| Data center systems | 506 | 51.6% | 822 | 62.5% | Gartner, July 2026 |
| Infrastructure as a service | 222 | 25.3% | 287 | 29.3% | Gartner, July 2026 |
| Overall IT | 5,577 | 10.7% | 6,369 | 14.2% | Gartner, July 2026 |
Software adds $197 billion of incremental spending in 2026. That is the second-largest absolute increase of any segment, behind data center systems at $316 billion.
Elena Rodriguez: Run the ratio before you celebrate. In 2025, software grew 13.9% against total IT growth of 10.7% — a premium of 1.30 to 1. In 2026, software grows 15.5% against total IT at 14.2%, a premium of 1.09 to 1. Software is growing faster in dollars and slower in relative terms, because accelerated servers are eating the incremental budget. Any vendor deck that shows you software’s growth rate without the denominator is selling you a chart, not a market.
Source: Axis Intelligence Research — CC BY 4.0
How Much Does Enterprise Software Cost Per Employee?
This is the question procurement teams actually ask, and the one no analyst house publishes for free. Axis Intelligence Research computes it from two federal series that were never designed to be read together.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis tracks private fixed investment in software across three types: prepackaged, custom, and own-account. Summing the three gives total US business software investment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes total nonfarm payroll employment monthly through the Current Employment Statistics program. Divide one by the other and you get software dollars per employed worker.
US software investment per nonfarm worker, 2020 to 2024
| Year | Software investment ($B) | Nonfarm employment (thousands, annual avg) | Software per worker | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 478.2 | 142,162 | $3,364 | BEA / BLS; Axis calculated |
| 2021 | 533.1 | 146,284 | $3,644 | BEA / BLS; Axis calculated |
| 2022 | 601.0 | 152,549 | $3,940 | BEA / BLS; Axis calculated |
| 2023 | 644.6 | 155,895 | $4,135 | BEA / BLS; Axis calculated |
| 2024 | 693.0 | 157,694 | $4,395 | BEA / BLS; Axis calculated |
Formula: software_per_worker = (prepackaged + custom + own_account software investment) / annual average total nonfarm payroll employment. For 2024: ($334.591B + $261.038B + $97.368B) / 157,693,800 = $4,395.
According to Axis Intelligence Research, software investment per US worker rose 30.6% between 2020 and 2024, while employment rose 10.9% over the same span. Software investment itself compounded at 9.72% annually. The per-worker figure is rising because the numerator is growing more than four times faster than the denominator.
Two boundaries on this figure, stated plainly. BEA measures capitalized software investment, so a portion of subscription spending that firms expense rather than capitalize sits outside it — the true per-worker cash outlay is higher, not lower. And nonfarm payroll excludes the self-employed and farm workers, which makes the denominator conservative for a metric about corporate seats.
The 2024 BEA figure is the most recent annual observation published; the next annual update to the intellectual property products tables is scheduled for May 2026 and later. [older data]
Elena Rodriguez: $4,395 per head, per year, is the number to carry into a renewal. At 240 employees that is $1.05 million of software before anyone opens a negotiation, and it is the all-in economy-wide average across a warehouse worker and a quant. In a knowledge-work organization the real per-seat figure runs far above it, which is precisely why per-seat pricing keeps clearing.
Which Sectors Are Increasing Software Budgets Fastest?
Gartner surveyed more than 300 CFOs and senior finance leaders in October 2025 for its 2026 CFO Budget Priorities research. Technology was the single highest-increase budget category across industries.
Enterprise technology budget growth by sector, 2026 plans
| Sector | Planned technology budget increase | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Financial services | ~15% | Gartner CFO Budget Priorities, Feb 2026 |
| All industries (average) | ~10% | Gartner CFO Budget Priorities, Feb 2026 |
| Manufacturing | ~6% | Gartner CFO Budget Priorities, Feb 2026 |
Supporting detail from the same survey: 75% of CFOs plan to raise technology budgets, and 48% plan increases of 10% or more. Nearly 60% will raise finance-function AI investment by 10% or more. Against that, HR budgets grow 0.7% in 2026, down from 2.4% in 2025, with 22% of CFOs cutting outright.
The financial services to manufacturing spread is 9 percentage points — a two-and-a-half-times ratio in budget growth between the top and bottom sectors surveyed. That spread is the practical definition of software intensity by industry: a bank’s marginal unit of output is a transaction processed in software, a manufacturer’s is a part that comes off a line.
Elena Rodriguez: Manufacturing at 6% is not underinvestment, it is a different denominator. When your cost base is materials, energy, and machine hours, a 6% software increase can still outrun a 15% increase at a bank whose entire cost base is people and licenses. Ask what the software is displacing before you benchmark the percentage.
Is Software Spending Growing Faster Than Headcount?
Yes, and the gap is the most consequential number in this report.
The same Gartner survey puts average enterprise technology budget growth near 10% for 2026 while workforce headcount growth expectations fall to 2%, down from 6% in 2025. Only 21% of CFOs plan staff increases in the 4% to 9% band, against 31% a year earlier.
According to Axis Intelligence Research, that produces a budget-to-headcount wedge of 5.0 — technology budgets expanding five times faster than the workforce they equip. Formula: wedge = technology_budget_growth / headcount_growth = 10 / 2 = 5.0.
The wedge is not a forecast. It is an arithmetic consequence of two survey medians, and it explains a market behavior that per-seat pricing models cannot survive indefinitely. If the seat count stops growing while the software budget grows 10%, the increase has to arrive as price, as consumption, or as new product categories. All three are visible in vendor results: Salesforce lists Agentforce at $800 million in annual recurring revenue after 15 months, and Gartner forecasts generative AI model spending growth of 80.8% for 2026.
Our AI statistics report tracks the adoption side of that same shift, and our analysis of AI coding assistant adoption documents where consumption pricing is already colliding with seat-based budgets.
The Enterprise Software Pressure Index (ESPI™)
ESPI™ — Enterprise Software Pressure Index. An original metric published by Axis Intelligence Research, measuring how hard enterprise software is pulling against the total technology budget in a given year.
Three components, each a ratio against a stated reference condition:
| Component | Definition | Reference | 2026 input | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Budget share (S) | Software as % of worldwide IT spending | 20.00% | 23.05% | 0.40 |
| Growth premium (Rg) | Software growth / total IT growth | 1.00 | 1.0915 | 0.35 |
| Headcount wedge (W) | Tech budget growth / headcount growth | 2.00 | 5.00 | 0.25 |
Formula: ESPI = 100 * [0.40 * (S / 20.00) + 0.35 * (Rg / 1.00) + 0.25 * (W / 2.00)]
2026 computation:
- 0.40 * (23.05 / 20.00) = 0.4610
- 0.35 * (1.0915 / 1.00) = 0.3820
- 0.25 * (5.00 / 2.00) = 0.6250
- Sum = 1.4680 -> ESPI = 146.8
A reading of 100 describes a market where software takes a fifth of IT spending, grows in line with total IT, and where budgets outpace headcount two to one. The 2026 reading of 146.8 is the baseline reading for this metric; no prior-year history has been computed, and none is implied.
What moves it: the headcount wedge contributes 0.625 of the 1.468 total, more than the budget-share component despite carrying the smallest weight. Software pressure in 2026 is driven less by software’s share of IT and more by the collapse in workforce growth underneath it.
What would reverse it: headcount growth returning to 6%, which alone would drop the reading to 105.1. A software growth rate falling to the total IT rate would remove another 3.2 points.
Inputs: Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (July 27, 2026) for S and Rg; Gartner CFO Budget Priorities research (February 10, 2026) for W. Methodology edition 2026-08. Snapshot date: August 9, 2026.
Where Does the Money Actually Land?
Software spending is a buyer-side measure. Vendor revenue is a seller-side measure. They are not the same population, and Axis Intelligence Research does not merge them — Microsoft’s fiscal year revenue includes gaming, devices, advertising, and cloud infrastructure that fall outside Gartner’s software segment. Publishing a “share captured” percentage from incompatible definitions would produce a number that means nothing.
What is comparable across vendors is contracted backlog: the disclosed value of signed commitments not yet recognized as revenue.
Vendor scale and contracted backlog, most recent fiscal year
| Vendor | Fiscal year end | Total revenue | Growth | Contracted backlog | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft | June 30, 2026 | $331.8B | 18% | not disclosed as single figure | Microsoft FY26 Q4 8-K, SEC |
| Oracle | May 31, 2026 | $67.357B | 17% | $638B remaining performance obligations | Oracle Q4 FY26 release |
| Salesforce | January 31, 2026 | $41.5B | 10% | $72.4B remaining performance obligations | Salesforce Q4 FY26 release |
| SAP | December 31, 2025 | EUR 36.8B | 8% | EUR 77B total cloud backlog | SAP FY2025 results |
According to Axis Intelligence Research, Oracle and Salesforce together disclose $710.4 billion in contracted backlog. Formula: $638B + $72.4B = $710.4B. SAP’s EUR 77 billion is reported separately rather than converted, because inserting an exchange rate we did not source would add error to a number that is exact in its filed currency.
One qualification that matters more than the total: Oracle’s remaining performance obligations are dominated by cloud infrastructure commitments tied to AI capacity, not application licences. Oracle’s own segment detail shows FY2026 cloud revenue of $34.0 billion, up 39%, against software revenue of $24.5 billion, down 1%. Reading the $638 billion as an applications backlog would be a category error, and it is one that has already appeared in several secondary write-ups.
Microsoft’s fiscal 2026 revenue of $331.8 billion was filed with the SEC as an 8-K exhibit on July 29, 2026. SAP filed its 2025 annual report on Form 20-F with the SEC on February 26, 2026.
Elena Rodriguez: Backlog is the honest forward indicator in this market because it is contracted, audited, and disclosed on a defined basis. Bookings language on an earnings call is not. When Oracle’s backlog jumps to $638 billion in one year, the question is not whether the demand is real — it is which of those contracts are datacenter capacity with a construction schedule attached, and how much of the schedule is inside the fiscal year.
For the infrastructure layer underneath these commitments, see our cloud market share analysis and cloud computing statistics.
Why Sector-Level Spend Per Employee Is Not Published
Every procurement team wants software spend per employee for their own industry. No primary source publishes it, and the reason is a data gap worth documenting.
The US Census Bureau collected exactly this through the Information and Communication Technology Survey, which reported non-capitalized and capitalized software expenditure by industry. The last published cycle covered 2013. The survey was folded into the Annual Integrated Economic Survey, whose first main data release landed February 26, 2026 for the 2023 survey year.
The AIES detailed operating expenses dataset carries the two variables that would close the gap: EXPS_EXSOFT_VAL (expensed purchases of software) and EXPS_DATAPROC_VAL (data processing and other purchased computer services), both at NAICS sector level, published through the Census Data API. Paired with sector employment from the same survey, they yield software expense per employee by industry directly, without any modelling.
Axis Intelligence Research is building that series and will publish it as a companion dataset. Until then, treat any sector-level per-employee software figure you encounter as a model output, and ask what its denominator was.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure in this report was retrieved from a primary source during production on August 9, 2026. Gartner segment figures come from the Worldwide IT Spending Forecast press release of July 27, 2026, which publishes Table 1 in billions of US dollars. CFO survey figures come from the Gartner press release of February 10, 2026, based on an October 2025 survey of more than 300 CFOs and senior finance leaders. US software investment comes from Bureau of Economic Analysis NIPA Table 5.6.5 series for prepackaged, custom, and own-account software, retrieved through the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED service. Employment comes from Bureau of Labor Statistics series CES0000000001. Vendor figures come from company earnings releases and SEC filings.
Calculations performed by Axis Intelligence Research.
- Software share of IT spending: 1,468 / 6,369 = 23.05% (2026); 1,271 / 5,577 = 22.79% (2025).
- Growth premium ratio: 15.5 / 14.2 = 1.0915 (2026); 13.9 / 10.7 = 1.2991 (2025).
- Annual average employment: arithmetic mean of the twelve monthly seasonally adjusted observations per year.
- Software per worker: total software investment / annual average nonfarm employment.
- Budget-to-headcount wedge: 10 / 2 = 5.0.
- ESPI: as specified above.
Currency. No exchange-rate conversion was applied to SAP figures. Euro-denominated values are published in euro.
Scope and caveats. BEA software investment measures capitalized business investment and excludes software costs firms expense in the period, so the per-worker series understates total cash outlay on software. Gartner’s software segment is a market-sizing estimate built from vendor sales analysis, not a survey of buyer budgets, and its revisions during 2026 were substantial. The CFO survey reports plans stated in October 2025, not realized spending. Vendor backlog definitions differ between US GAAP remaining performance obligations and SAP’s cloud backlog measure, which is why the two are not summed. The 2024 BEA observation is the most recent annual figure published at the time of writing.
About This Dataset
The accompanying CSV contains every figure in this report with its source organization, source document, URL, retrieval date, and a flag for whether Axis Intelligence Research calculated the value. Rows flagged axis_calculated = yes carry a method note pointing to the formula disclosed above.
Coverage: worldwide IT and software spending 2025 to 2026; US software investment and employment 2020 to 2024; vendor revenue and backlog for the most recent completed fiscal year; ESPI components and reading for 2026.
License: CC BY 4.0
Cite as: Axis Intelligence Research, Enterprise Software Spending Statistics 2026, 2026.
Citation
APA: Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Enterprise software spending statistics 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/enterprise-software-spending-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research. “Enterprise Software Spending Statistics 2026.” Axis Intelligence, 9 Aug. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/enterprise-software-spending-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research. “Enterprise Software Spending Statistics 2026.” Axis Intelligence, August 9, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/enterprise-software-spending-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I benchmark our software spend per seat against the market?
Start with the economy-wide anchor of $4,395 per nonfarm worker for 2024, then adjust for two things it does not capture: your sector’s technology budget growth rate, and the share of your software that is expensed rather than capitalized. A financial services organization budgeting 15% growth in 2026 should expect a per-seat figure well above the national average; a manufacturer at 6% growth should expect the opposite. Benchmark against your own prior-year figure first — the cross-industry number is a reality check, not a target.
Why is software growing 15.5% when the growth premium over total IT is shrinking?
Because the denominator is growing faster than it used to. Data center systems grow 62.5% in 2026 and IaaS grows 29.3%, which lifts total IT spending growth to 14.2%. Software’s 15.5% is a strong absolute rate, but relative to the whole budget it is closer to parity than in 2025. For budget owners this matters at reallocation time: software is no longer the fastest-growing line item competing for the same approval.
Does contracted backlog predict how much we will actually pay next year?
Only partially, and the distinction is worth holding onto. Remaining performance obligations represent signed commitments, but the recognition schedule can extend several years, and multi-year AI infrastructure contracts skew the aggregate heavily. Oracle’s $638 billion is the clearest example: it is a real commitment, but it is not an indicator of application software price movement in the next renewal cycle.
What happens to per-seat pricing when headcount stops growing?
Vendors have three routes and are using all of them. Price increases on existing seats, consumption-based add-ons layered above the seat, and new product categories billed separately. Agentforce reaching $800 million ARR in 15 months is the third route in practice. For budget planning, assume the 10% technology budget increase arrives as some combination of the three rather than as more seats.
Is generative AI spending inside the $1.468 trillion software figure?
Yes, and it is the fastest-moving component of it. Gartner forecasts generative AI model spending growth of 80.8% for 2026 within the software segment. That growth rate is what pulled the software forecast up through four consecutive quarterly revisions during the year.
How should we treat capitalized versus expensed software in our own benchmark?
Keep them separate and label them. The BEA series behind the per-worker figure counts capitalized investment only, which is why it is a floor rather than a full picture. If your finance team expenses most subscription spend, your internal per-seat number will exceed the national figure without indicating overspend. Comparing a fully-loaded internal figure against a capitalized-only external benchmark is the most common error in software cost benchmarking.
What is the difference between software spending and cloud spending in these forecasts?
Gartner counts infrastructure as a service as a separate segment from software, at $287 billion for 2026. Software-as-a-service applications sit inside the software segment. That means a cloud migration can shift spending between segments without changing your total, which is why cloud and software figures from the same forecast cannot be added together without double-counting risk. Our cloud computing statistics page covers that boundary in detail.
Why does Axis Intelligence Research refuse to publish a vendor market-share figure against the $1.468 trillion?
Because the two measures count different things. Gartner’s software segment is buyer-side end-user spending; a vendor’s reported revenue includes hardware, services, advertising, and infrastructure depending on the company. Dividing one by the other produces a percentage with no defensible meaning. Where the underlying definitions align, as they do for contracted backlog across US GAAP filers, we do aggregate and disclose the formula.