The benchmark

What businesses spend on IT

The share of revenue going to technology has climbed for a decade. Here are the numbers.

The direction

Technology spending has nearly doubled as a share of revenue

Across all industries technology now takes about 6% of revenue, heading for 8% within two years.

2016

3.28%

2018

3.64%

2020

4.25%

2022

5.49%

2026

about 6%

2028

about 8%, projected

Deloitte’s technology leadership surveys 2016 to 2022; the 2026 reading and the two-year projection from the 2026 study, 662 technology leaders, fielded December 2025 to February 2026.

The table

Every figure, its date, and what it measured

Sector

Indexed to 2026 ∗

Architecture, engineering and construction≈2.8% to 7.9% indexed

Zweig Group and Stambaugh Ness put median AEC IT spending in September 2025 half again above where it stood two years before. Deloitte CIO Insider measured construction at 1.68% in 2018 and business and professional services, the nearest category to a design practice, at 4.80%; carried forward at × 1.65, those are the two ends shown. JBKnowledge, surveying 2,825 construction firms the same year, found 54% spending 1% or more of annual sales volume.

Manufacturing (discrete)≈1.7% to 3.9% indexed

Measured at 1.4% to 3.2% in the 2021 edition, carried forward at × 1.23. Avasant / Computer Economics, 25th to 75th percentile. Percentiles because the distribution is skewed upward. Robotics firms fall in this category; no study cuts robotics out on its own.

Healthcare≈7.1% indexed

Measured at 5.0% in 2020, carried forward at × 1.41. Flexera State of Tech Spend, 303 IT executives at medium and large enterprises. Flexera has since stopped publishing this metric.

Financial and insurance services≈5.4% to 14.0% indexed

Measured at 4.4% to 11.4% in the 2021 edition; the same × 1.23 carries it forward. Avasant percentiles. The widest spread of any sector.

Technology and SaaS≈22.5% to 34.9% indexed

Measured at 15.9% to 24.7% in 2020, carried forward at × 1.41. Flexera, hosting at the low end and software at the high end. Outliers, and kept out of any general range.

Other industriesabout 6%

Deloitte’s cross-industry average for 2026, which includes the sectors above.

∗ How the measurement is indexed

The Deloitte series is one source asking one question at each date, so the ratio between two of its readings is a usable multiplier. Each row above names the measurement it started from, the year it was taken and the multiplier that carries it to 2026.

An indexed figure is an estimate. It assumes a sector climbed at the cross-industry rate, and nobody has checked that for any sector here. We show it because reading an older number as though it were current is the bigger error. If the projection holds, multiply again by 1.33 for where 2028 lands.

Are your competitors spending more on technology than you?

Enter your figures and this shows the range firms in your sector are running at, carried onto 2026, with the source behind it.

Your sector

Annual gross revenue

US dollars, gross or total. Every source here measures against gross, so if you budget from net revenue add your pass-through consultant fees and reimbursables back in first.

People on the payroll

Shows the figure per person. It has no effect on the range.

Annual IT spend range

All IT, per person, per month

Against one in-house hire

The hire comparison. One loaded systems administrator in this metro costs about $195,000 a year. The wage behind that figure, and the arithmetic, are set out in the questions further down this page.

This is your whole IT bill. Every figure here covers everything technology costs you: salaries, software, hardware, licenses, connectivity and any outside help. A managed service fee is one line inside that total. The per-person figure is not a price per user.

What this cannot tell you. Every source above measures against gross or total revenue, and none of them reports net revenue separately. It also knows nothing about the state of your environment, which is what actually moves the figure: the age of your servers, whether anyone has timed a restore, how much of your licensing you are paying for twice. A benchmark tells you whether you are in the normal band. It does not tell you whether you are spending it on the right things.

A firm that lands above the range is not always overspending. Accurate Firestop was paying for a cloud its office network could not use, and that is a design problem before it is a budget one.

See what an assessment covers

Questions

The ones we get asked

Is IT spending in architecture and engineering going up?

Sharply, and faster than the cross-industry average. That is the one thing about design firms somebody does measure every year, and the most recent round is dated September 2025, which is why anything carried forward from 2018 is a floor and never a ceiling.

What does it cost to hire an IT person in the Bay Area?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the mean wage for a network and computer systems administrator in the San Jose metro at $65.58 an hour, about $136,400 a year, against a national median of $99,130 for the same role. Wages and salaries are 70.0% of what a private-industry employer pays per hour worked, with benefits, paid leave and legally required payroll taxes making up the rest, which puts one loaded hire near $195,000. Tooling, recruiting and cover while that person is away sit on top of it.

What counts as IT spending?

Everything technology costs the business: salaries for anyone doing the work, software and licenses, hardware, connectivity, plus whatever you pay an outside provider. Quoting what you pay a provider as though it were the whole figure is the most common way these comparisons go wrong, and it makes a firm look far cheaper to run than it is.

What can a benchmark not tell you?

Whether the money is buying anything. A firm can sit squarely inside the normal band and still have no tested restore, servers a year past their useful life, and two licenses for every person. The band answers one question. What condition the environment is in answers a harder and more expensive one.

Where the number comes from matters more than the number

A band tells you whether you are typical. An assessment tells you what that spend has bought. If you want the second answer, the one-time IT assessment counts every machine, tests a restore and hands you a costed remediation list.

See what an assessment covers Talk it through in fifteen minutes