Engineering Leadership Benchmarks 2026: 14 sourced stats

Estimated delivery stability change associated with increased AI adoption

DORA 2024 also estimates -1.5% delivery throughput. More than 75% of respondents rely on AI for at least one daily task and 39% report little or no trust in AI-generated code. A 25% increase in AI adoption is associated with +7.5% documentation quality, +3.4% code quality and +3.1% code review speed. These are survey associations, not causal effects.

AI adoption among software development professionals, up 14% year on year

About 5,000 respondents. Median 2 hours a day with AI; 65% rely on it heavily and more than 80% say it improved their productivity. 59% report a positive effect on code quality. 24% trust AI "a lot" or "a great deal"; 30% trust it "a little" or "not at all".

of developers use or plan to use AI tools

50.6% of professional developers use them daily. On trust in AI accuracy, 46% distrust and 33% trust (33,244 responses).

Experienced open-source developers took 19% longer with AI tools

Randomised controlled trial: 16 developers, 246 real tasks. The developers had predicted a 24% speed-up. METR now labels this study out of date and points to a February 2026 update, which we have not reviewed here.

Developers using Copilot completed a task 55% faster

Controlled experiment with 95 developers on one scoped task. Compare its design with the METR trial above before quoting either number.

metrics in DORA's current software delivery performance set

Change lead time, deployment frequency, failed deployment recovery time (which replaces MTTR), change fail rate, and deployment rework rate.

of professional developers name technical debt as their top frustration at work

It ranked first among frustrations. In the same survey 32.1% of professional developers are unhappy at work, against 20.2% who are happy.

a week the average developer spends on maintenance such as debugging and refactoring

Developers also report about 4 hours a week on "bad code". Stripe estimated a $3 trillion global GDP opportunity over 10 years. This is a 2018 survey; treat it as a dated reference, not a current average.

of engineering leaders report critical burnout, with another 24% at moderate burnout

n=617, measured on the Maslach scale. 38% are working longer hours, 40% say their teams are less motivated than a year ago, 65% report expanded responsibilities and 40% manage more direct reports. Figures as reported by LeadDev.

of managers are engaged at work globally, down from 30%

Global employee engagement fell from 23% to 21% over the same period. All-industry data (2024), not specific to engineering.

Median R&D spend of private B2B SaaS companies, unchanged year on year

15th annual survey of more than 1,000 companies, March 2026. Private B2B SaaS only; public companies and non-SaaS businesses differ.

Average startup CTO salary at Series A (2024); Seed $146K, Series B $245K

2022 comparison: Seed $142K, Series A $174K, Series B $250K. Payroll data from more than 250 US VC-backed startups.

Median annual pay for computer and information systems managers (May 2025)

Employment is projected to grow 16% from 2025 to 2035, with about 53,500 openings a year. A broad US occupation group that includes IT directors and CTOs, not a CTO-specific figure.

engineers is where Bessemer says to add at least one engineering manager

From seed to about 10 engineers the CTO is a hands-on leader and engineers report to them. At about 20, decide whether the current CTO can scale the organisation or a VP or SVP is needed. In a highly regulated business, put security in from day one.