Colombia Software Development Statistics (2026)

Colombia recorded US$1.942 billion in computer-services exports in 2025, 12.3% more than in 2024. Separately, GSC's weighted analysis of all 12 monthly DANE household-survey files estimates that approximately 91,000 people worked as software developers in an average month of 2025.

The latest verified figures are grouped into market, workforce, compensation, provider, and operating categories. Each statistic retains its source period and population so exports, occupations, covered businesses, provider profiles, and compensation records remain distinct. No combined market total is calculated.

Last updated: August 27, 2026 · Suggested citation: GlobalSoftwareCompanies, “Colombia Software Development Statistics (2026),” last updated August 27, 2026.

The seven headline figures provide a compact summary of the categories below.

Market Size and Export Statistics

Official export and macroeconomic series cover different parts of Colombia's technology economy. Computer services provide the narrowest stable export category in the reviewed sources; the ICT Satellite Account supplies broader national context.

• US$1.942 billion in computer-services exports: DANE's revised EMCES series records this value for 2025.

• 12.3% annual export growth: computer-services exports increased from US$1.729 billion in 2024.

• 62.5% four-year growth: the category increased from US$1.195 billion in 2022, equivalent to a 17.6% compound annual rate through 2025.

• US$2.184 billion in broader services exports: telecommunications, computer, and information-services exports reached this value in 2025. The category includes more than computer services.

The figures come from DANE's Monthly Survey of International Trade in Services. The 2025 value remains provisional and may be revised.

Computer-services export mix

Three named activities represented 86.8% of Colombia's 2025 computer-services exports.

Application design and development remained the largest named activity. IT support and consulting recorded much faster four-year growth. The category does not report project quality, margins, engagement model, or provider-level delivery.

Computer-services export destinations

The United States was the largest named destination in 2025, while three-quarters of export value went elsewhere.

Destination data describes reported export value rather than the end client's location, ownership structure, delivery model, or profitability. Regional context appears in GSC's Latin America software outsourcing comparison.

ICT economic contribution

DANE and MinTIC's preliminary ICT Satellite Account recorded COP 58.1 trillion in ICT-sector gross value added for 2025, 5.5% above the 2024 provisional figure. IT services represented 39.4% of the ICT total and telecommunications represented 34.5%.

The ICT sector accounted for 3.47% of national gross value added in 2025, compared with 3.55% in 2024, 3.65% in 2023, and 3.72% in 2022. DANE uses national gross value added as the denominator, so the percentages are not GDP shares or software-market estimates.

Talent and Workforce Statistics

DANE's household and business surveys describe two separate workforce populations. GEIH estimates people by current occupation; the Annual Services Survey counts all occupied personnel in businesses meeting its coverage rules.

Software-developer occupation estimates

GSC processed the occupied-person file in every monthly 2025 GEIH archive, applied the FEX_C18 survey weight to each record, summed the weighted occupation totals by month, and divided the 12 monthly estimates by 12.

The unrounded narrow estimate is 90,738. The broader definition adds systems analysts, web and multimedia developers, application programmers, and a residual software-and-applications group.

They describe current occupations. They are not administrative counts, unique-person totals across the year, graduate counts, jobseeker counts, or estimates of people available for a specific role. The derivation does not implement DANE's full complex-survey variance design and therefore does not publish a confidence interval.

Employment in covered software-relevant businesses

DANE's 2024 Annual Services Survey investigated 457 businesses in its grouping for systems development, IT consulting, related information services, and software publishing, excluding news agencies. A business entered the survey population with at least 75 occupied people or annual operating revenue of at least COP 3 billion.

The 115,206 figure covers every occupation in the surveyed businesses and excludes businesses below both thresholds. DANE's comparable 446-business panel recorded an 8.6% increase in value added and a 1.8% decrease in occupied personnel from 2023 to 2024. DANE does not attribute the difference to productivity, automation, pricing, or any other single cause.

Developer Compensation Statistics

The GEIH and Stack Overflow figures below use different populations, currencies, and pay definitions. They are presented separately rather than converted into one salary level.

Commercial cost definitions appear separately in GSC's software outsourcing cost guide. The full derivation, selection funnel, and role cuts appear in the Colombia software engineer salary data.

GEIH employee cash pay

For occupation 2512 in the 2025 questionnaire's salaried positions, GSC retained 730 pooled records with positive P6500 and applied the GEIH survey weight. DANE defines P6500 as prior-month cash earnings from the main job before deductions, including tips and commissions and excluding travel allowances and in-kind pay.

The Bogotá and Medellín cuts are descriptive and are not adjusted for experience, employer, industry, role scope, language, or international exposure. Matching medians do not establish equal pay or a city premium. P6500 also excludes independent-worker income, employer contributions, EOR fees, and provider margin.

Stack Overflow reported compensation

A separate analysis selected Colombia respondents in the public 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey whose role field included full-stack, back-end, front-end, or desktop and enterprise application development. Records also needed numeric annual converted compensation above US$5,000 and below US$500,000.

The Stack Overflow sample is self-selected and includes mixed employment arrangements. Reported annual compensation is not necessarily contractual base pay. Within the same 67-person slice, 47 respondents—approximately 70%—reported working remotely. Among the 60 respondents who supplied a programming-language answer, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, and Python were selected most often; multi-select responses do not establish national specialization.

Employee cash pay, reported annual compensation, loaded employment cost, and provider billing describe separate measures. The comparison therefore retains monthly COP employee cash pay and annual reported USD compensation in their original units.

Software Provider Supply and Published Rates

GSC's May 2026 documented Colombia provider snapshot describes company profiles encountered in custom-software research. It is a comparison set rather than a census of Colombian technology businesses. Disclosure varies by field. Each distribution therefore uses profiles that disclose the relevant location, headcount, founding year, service, or rate value, and the rounded percentages cannot be combined into a national company total.

Company age, reported headcount, service tags, and rate bands describe what a profile discloses; none verifies current staffing, delivery quality, financial capacity, or a signed commercial price.

Primary locations

The location field records the primary city displayed on each documented profile.

• Approximately 45% of documented profiles use Bogotá as their primary location.

• Approximately 23% use Medellín.

• Cali and Barranquilla each account for approximately 6%.

• The remaining profiles are distributed across other Colombian locations.

Primary location is a profile field rather than a complete office or workforce map.

Reported company size and operating history

Company size and founding year appear only where the profile discloses the relevant field.

• Approximately 78% of profiles with employee-size information report bands below 50 people.

• Approximately 18% report 50–249 people, leaving a small share in larger bands.

• The median founding year among profiles that report one is 2012.

• Approximately 43% predate 2010, while approximately 37% date from 2015 onward.

Reported employee bands are not verified payroll headcounts. Founding year records operating history rather than financial strength, technical quality, or staff retention.

Visible adjacent services

Service tags overlap because a company can display several capabilities.

Profiles can list several services, so the percentages cannot be added. A service tag records public positioning rather than delivery volume or available capacity.

Published hourly-rate bands

The distribution below covers profiles that disclose an hourly-rate band.

These directory-profile bands are not signed contract rates, employee salaries, or complete project budgets. Route-level employment obligations and buyer costs are covered under Colombia developer hiring costs. Current provider profiles appear in GSC's guide to Colombian software companies.

Locations, Infrastructure, and Working Overlap

Location statistics differ according to whether the measure covers export value, provider profiles, or household-survey pay records.

• 81.9% of broader services export value was attributed to Bogotá: DANE reported this concentration for the 2025 telecommunications, computer, and information-services category.

• 12.8% was attributed to Antioquia: the export measure uses the reporting department rather than each worker's location.

• Approximately 45% of documented provider profiles use Bogotá as their primary location: approximately 23% use Medellín.

• COP 5.0 million monthly median employee cash pay in both Bogotá and Medellín: the smaller, unadjusted GEIH cuts do not establish equal city pay.

Colombia uses UTC−5 all year. Most US locations change clocks seasonally; the general 2026 US daylight-saving period runs from March 8 to November 1. With both locations working a nominal 09–17 local day, Colombia shares five to eight hours with the four main continental US time zones, depending on location and season.

The seasonal clock conversions and their delivery implications are developed in the Colombia nearshore delivery guide.

MinTIC reported 10.49 million fixed internet accesses in the first quarter of 2026, including 6.2 million fiber accesses, and a national average fixed-internet download speed of 255.2 Mbps. These national figures do not measure provider-office uptime, home connectivity, latency, power continuity, endpoint security, or recovery performance.

Methodology, Definitions, and Limitations

Each headline measure has a separate statistical boundary.

Those boundaries are explicit.

The derivations and analytical limits behind those boundaries follow.

GEIH derivation

The occupation analysis processes Ocupados.CSV in all 12 official 2025 monthly archives. The annual occupation estimates equal the sum of the monthly FEX_C18 weighted totals divided by 12. The employee-pay distribution retains salaried-position records in occupation 2512 with positive P6500 and applies the same survey weight.

An independent calculation reproduced the occupation totals, pay record count, weighted quartiles, median, and mean. Summing all occupied-person weights reproduced DANE's published 2025 occupied-population total within displayed rounding. Pooled rows are person-month analytic records rather than unique people observed across the year.

Provider and compensation analyses

Provider findings are rounded country-specific distributions from GSC's May 2026 documented Colombia provider set and remain separate from provider rankings or quality judgments; Stack Overflow findings come from public 2025 survey microdata and retain the country, role, compensation, and quality filters described above.

The populations stay separate.

Education-data omission

The official SNIES consolidated-database page lists a 2025 graduate workbook. That workbook and its 2024 fallback were unavailable when research closed on August 27, 2026, so this edition does not publish a software or computing graduate total. No vendor or trade-association estimate has been substituted.

Publication limits

The reviewed evidence does not establish:

• an administrative census of Colombian software developers or companies

• one combined software-development or outsourcing market size

• a universal software-engineer salary or provider rate

• city-level developer populations or an adjusted city pay premium

• project-level savings versus the United States

• available specialist capacity at a particular company

• causation for the difference between business-survey value-added and employment changes

Research and source checks were completed on August 25, 2026, with the SNIES and GEIH verification updated on August 27. Provisional DANE series, provider fields, compensation sources, time-zone dates, and connectivity statistics require a new check before a later publication cycle. GSC's broader software outsourcing guide covers sourcing and delivery decisions outside this statistical scope.

Each answer retains the period and definition attached to the headline figure.