In brief
- After a relatively flat 2025, IT salary trends point toward an upward trajectory in 2026.
- Large-scale AI adoption is the biggest factor driving IT salary increases as demand intensifies for advanced AI skills.
- Other in-demand tech positions include specialists in cybersecurity, cloud engineering, and software development.
- Access to talent surpassed cost reduction as the #1 reason companies turn to IT outsourcing as they seek reliable pipelines for high-quality IT professionals.
Macroeconomic pressures, rapid AI adoption, growing cybersecurity concerns, and evolving workforce expectations are creating an unpredictable talent landscape going into 2026. While average salaries for tech jobs remained largely flat year-over-year in 2025, IT salary trends tracked by multiple research organizations point towards an upward trajectory for compensation in the coming year.
The largely stagnant salaries of 2025 can be attributed to many businesses being in a hiring holding pattern, popularly termed as a “no hire, no fire” market. Companies were hesitant to let go of resources after struggling to get the right talent after the Great Resignation and Great Reshuffle of the pandemic era. At the same time, economic headwinds such as inflation, higher interest rates, and other factors discouraged more hires and pay increases.
This trend is changing. Some major tech companies have announced large-scale redundancies – sparking concerns about a repeat of the mass layoffs the industry saw in 2023-24.
Yet, demand for skilled IT professionals in non-tech industries remains strong. More significantly, demand for expertise in critical roles such as AI, cloud engineering, and cybersecurity remain extremely high across industries, keeping salaries for those roles intensely competitive.
4 key IT salary trends for 2026
This blog explores the major tech salary trends impacting CIOs’ recruiting and retention strategies in 2026. It also offers a practical solution for finding the high-quality resources you need to drive innovation, digital transformation, and sustainable growth for your business.
1. Tech salaries expected to surge ~10% as skills gaps & AI demand intensify
While tech salaries on average rose just a modest 0.8% in 2025, positions in emerging technologies saw sharp pay increases. These include mid-level AI engineers, who saw salaries grow by 9.2%, and senior data warehouse developers, who earned a 5.8% salary bump (Motion Recruitment’s 2026 Tech Salary Guide).
With tech unemployment hitting a historic low of 2.8% in 2025, the upward pressure on salaries is not expected to ease soon. Addison Group’s 2026 Workforce Planning Guide predicts tech salaries to jump 8-10% this year, outpacing expected inflation of 2.6%.
The biggest factor? A shortage of skilled workers, particularly in areas like AI, where many organizations are investing significantly to meet growth and efficiency targets. However, for these investments to pay off, companies need a deep bench of skilled AI talent to manage, implement, and oversee AI integration throughout their operations.
The long persisting tech talent gap is emerging as a major obstacle to achieving this goal.
68% of organizations report being understaffed in AI and machine learning (ML) engineering and operations.
Linux Foundation’s 2025 State of Tech Talent report
This is also true for other critical, foundational IT technologies: 65% of organizations are facing a shortage of skilled resources in cybersecurity and compliance, and 59% in cloud computing, the Linux Foundation report found.
Such high rates of understaffing are concerning: The same report found 94% of organizations expect AI to deliver significant value across core activities, and 53% plan to increase cloud adoption in the next 18 months. Yet without sufficient talent, businesses may struggle to fully capitalize on these transformative technologies – and even risk losing money due to poor execution and oversight.
The result: organizations are stretching their budgets to secure the right talent: 52% are willing to negotiate a higher starting salary with a candidate if the role supports a critical business need, Robert Half’s 2026 Salary Guide found.
2. Tech industry layoffs continue, but IT hiring in other sectors remains strong
Technology firms in the U.S. announced more than 153,000 job cuts through November this year, up 17% from 2024, Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ latest job cuts report found. This includes a slew of major technology companies such as Intel, Amazon, Verizon, and Accenture, who announced cuts numbering in the tens of thousands.
Many of these organizations attributed their layoffs to the shift to AI technologies, moving away from legacy systems and employees who cannot adapt to emerging tech. However, concerns about a wider trend of AI-driven job displacements are misplaced.
AI adoption in the IT sector is expected to have a positive effect on hiring, with net headcount growth projected to grow 23% in 2026.
Linux Foundation’s 2025 State of Tech Talent report
The reason: It’s clear that AI still requires human oversight. Issues like inaccuracies, hallucinations, and fabricated outputs can create critical errors without governance, making full workforce replacement unrealistic for the foreseeable future.
Instead, we’re seeing a fundamental shift in IT roles – with new responsibilities emerging to meet the demands of today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape.
At the same time, IT hiring outside the tech sector remains strong. While employment within the tech industry continued to decline through August, tech occupations – roles such as software developers, network engineers, and data scientists that exist across sectors – grew by nearly 250,000 in the same period, Motion Recruitment found.
Just 40% of tech workers are employed directly within the tech industry, CompTIA states.
Looking ahead, tech roles are projected to grow significantly faster than the average for all occupations, adding more than 356,000 jobs by 2033, Addison Group predicts.
3. Key tech areas remain understaffed – driving salaries higher
Demand for specialized talent in AI, cybersecurity, and cloud computing continues to outpace supply. Employers are increasingly paying a premium to secure top talent – with 87% of tech and IT leaders saying they offer higher salaries to candidates with advanced or specialized skills, Robert Half reports.
At the same time, many IT roles are undergoing a transformation. Advanced technologies such as Generative AI and Agentic AI are reshaping job responsibilities, automating routine tasks, and creating demand for skills in AI management, integration, and ethical oversight – in addition to traditional expertise.
For instance, software engineers must now validate AI-generated code, use AI-development tools securely, and ensure AI outputs meet strict security, quality, and compliance standards. Cloud computing professionals who can build, deploy, and secure AI systems in cloud environments have become especially valuable as cloud-based AI architectures become the norm.
Below we explore the most sought-after tech roles for 2026:
AI and machine learning roles
Today, the hardest roles to hire require experienced AI/automation and data science knowledge, according to Randstad’s Global In-demand Skills research report. AI is prompting a significant shift in talent requirements, with new roles created to manage, implement, and oversee AI integration including AI & ML Operations Engineer, AI Product Manager, AI Quality Assurance Engineer, AI Safety Engineers, and AI Ethics Officers.
All of Robert Half’s top emerging technology roles for 2026 are in AI.
Organizations already face significant capability gaps in AI implementation. Even the most common AI skills – AI-assisted development and AI tool integration – are present in only 43% and 38% of organizations, respectively, Linux Foundation’s report found.
Not surprisingly, AI/machine learning engineer and data scientist salaries are projected to increase 4.1% on average in 2026, according to Robert Half.
Cybersecurity professionals
Cybersecurity breach costs in the U.S. surged to $10.22 million this year – a 9% year-over-year increase and the highest costs worldwide, IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report found. As financial and operational risk escalates, it’s more vital than ever for organizations to recruit experienced cybersecurity professionals who can protect data, systems, and infrastructure.
Yet, skilled talent is hard to find. More than 750,000 cybersecurity jobs remain unfilled in the U.S., according to the latest data from Cybersecurity Ventures. Even organizations that have expanded headcount are feeling the strain: 59% now report critical cybersecurity skills gaps, up from 44% last year, the 2025 ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study found.
These gaps can prove costly: IBM found organizations with significant skills shortages incur $5.22 million in average breach costs – a staggering $1.57 million more than companies with minimal or no skills gaps.
Not surprisingly, 88% of organizations experienced at least one significant cybersecurity incident tied to skills deficiencies, with 69% experiencing multiple, ISC2 found.
The result is mounting pressure on compensation. In 2025, 57% of cybersecurity practitioners and decision-makers received salary hikes of 1-9%, while 20% saw raises exceeding 10%, ISC2 reports.
Salaries for mid-level roles, such as cybersecurity analysts and engineers with seven to nine years of experience, are up 10-15%. Highly specialized positions – including cloud security architects and DevSecOps engineers – command even higher compensation due to their niche expertise.
Software developers
Rumors of AI causing the demise of the software developer role have been greatly exaggerated, as evidenced by the resurgence in demand for filling this position. There are more job postings for software developers and engineers than any other tech job title, with an average of over 40,000 postings every month, Motion Recruitment reported.
React developer (a frontend developer that builds JavaScript-based websites and applications with the ReactJS open-source library ecosystem) salaries grew by 6.85% year-over-year on average – one of the largest jumps in tech, the same report found.
AI is not replacing software developers, it’s amplifying the need for human expertise to ensure accuracy, security, and alignment with business objectives.
As software development shifts toward AI-driven processes and AI-enabled products such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, the risk of security flaws has increased – spanning faulty code, unsafe dependencies, data leaks, training data poisoning, and more. As a result, demand is rising for senior software developers who are savvy with cybersecurity and quality assurance who can mitigate the risks of AI-generated code.
Robert Half predicts salaries for software and applications development roles to increase 2.3% in 2026, with the greatest salary gains in DevOps and QA automation.
Other in-demand roles
Other in-demand roles commanding high salaries in 2026 include:
- Cloud computing: Cloud computing remains in high demand for businesses both inside and outside of the tech industry as cloud infrastructure becomes increasingly interwoven with legacy systems, security frameworks, and business processes. With 75% of North American tech leaders planning to increase their 2026 spending on cloud, data centers, and security (Forrester), engineers specializing in network security and cloud computing stand among the most sought-after professionals in the market.
- Data engineers and architects: AI, automation, and analytics all rely on clean, secure, and accessible data. As a result, data engineers, architects, and infrastructure manager candidates with the skills to manage data integrity, security, and accessibility rank at the top of hiring managers’ lists, Motion Recruitment found.
Robert Half projects a 4.1% average increase in data scientist salaries – along with a 1.7% increase for data engineering, analytics, and reporting positions – due to high demand for specialists who can build reliable data pipelines, deliver actionable insights, and support AI-driven decision-making.
4. IT leaders increasingly look to Latin America for new talent pipelines
As hiring budgets tighten across cybersecurity and other mission-critical IT functions, IT leaders are being asked to do more with less – and do it with teams that can hit the ground running. Risk-averse environments, rising threat levels, and rapid technology changes are exposing a growing gap in critical skills across IT organizations both inside and outside the tech sector.
While upskilling is often viewed as the long-term answer, many organizations lack the budget, infrastructure, or expertise to deliver meaningful AI and advanced technology training, Pluralsight’s 2025 Tech Skills report found.
Instead, many organizations are turning to IT outsourcing to relieve talent shortages, access specialized expertise, and accelerate execution without the long lead times of internal hiring and training. Within cybersecurity alone, 82% of decision-makers plan to outsource key functions to managed service providers (MSP) or other third parties in the next 12 months, Foundry’s latest Security Priorities Study found.
In fact, “access to talent” is now the #1 driver for outsourcing decisions, eclipsing “cost reduction” (Deloitte’s latest Global Outsourcing Survey).
In this environment, nearshoring has emerged as a particularly strategic solution, combining access to a deep, cost-effective tech workforce with the agility and real-time collaboration needed to resolve urgent issues and manage high-stakes IT and security environments effectively. IT leaders now rank proximity as the #1 factor for choosing an outsourcing partner due to reduced operational challenges – even if a lower cost can be found in a more distant location, the latest IT Outsourcing Statistics Report by Computer Economics states.
Latin America stands as the #1 up-and-coming tech talent market globally on CBRE’s 2025 Scoring Tech Talent report, as ongoing investment from local governments and multinational corporations support a highly skilled, rapidly growing talent pool.
IT processes are now performed on a greater scale at LATAM shared service organizations (SSOs) than other regions (64% vs. 32% globally), the State of the GBS & Outsourcing Industry in Latin America study found. The same holds true for Intelligent Automation functions, performed by 59% of LATAM SSOs vs. 28% globally.
Why Auxis: Overcome tech talent shortages and rising costs
Winning the tech talent war requires more than better hiring – it requires a smarter operating model. Partnering with a reputable nearshore IT provider enables organizations to access scarce technical skills, ensure continuous improvement, operate with greater agility, and advance digital innovation without the cost, risk, and delays of traditional hiring.
Auxis, now a Grant Thornton company, helps CIOs and CISOs strike the optimal balance between business innovation and operational excellence. Combining decades of IT managed services execution, strategic advisory, and award-winning AI and automation capabilities into one powerful modernization engine, our turnkey, tech-enabled outsourcing solutions provide the skilled talent, best practices, and innovation required to run today’s IT environments – while your internal teams gain the bandwidth to build what’s next.
Our industry-leading nearshore platform can also expand globally across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East to help you maximize results and cost savings.
Skills gaps and talent shortages remain a top issue for CIOs in 2025. Understanding the reality of IT salary trends in the U.S. – and the unique opportunities presented by alternative talent pipelines in Latin America – can help you create a modern IT function that stands as a strategic enabler of efficiency, innovation, and growth.
Want to learn more about how our IT nearshoring solutions can benefit your organization? Schedule a consultation with our IT outsourcing experts today! You can also visit our resource center for more IT outsourcing tips, strategies, and success stories.
Frequently Asked Questions
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