How Many Developers Are There In The World?

Published on September 27, 2011

I have always been curious over the number of developers in each country. Recently, out of a need to present this statistics for my work, I went deeper to search for an answer.

StackExchange provided me with data for a few countries. For example, US has a population of 300 million, and has 1 million programmers (that is 0.33%). 

I took a lower figure and estimated that around 0.1% of a population are active developers who work on web/mobile. With that, I estimate the number of developers in each country as such:

Country Population No. of developers (0.1%)
US 300 mil 300,000
UK 61 mil 61,000
Japan 127 mil 127,000
Singapore 5 mil 5,000
Hong Kong 7 mil 7,000
Australia 22 mil 22,000
China 1,330 mil 1,330,000

Quora also provided me a good answer, adding that around 10% of developers specialize in mobile development. That estimate does relate to the 40,000 iOS and 10,000 Android developers reported in appstorehq in 2010.