Technical debt & legacy platform benchmark
How much of your tech budget is spent keeping old systems alive? We review your platforms, integrations and delivery speed, estimate your technical debt and benchmark it against McKinsey's CIO survey and Stripe's developer research.
What the market looks like.
| KPI | Market reference | Best-in-class / note | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tech debt as share of tech estate value | 20–40% | CIO estimates | 1 |
| New-product budget diverted to tech debt | 10–20% | — | 1 |
| CIOs seeing tech debt rise over 3 years | 60% | — | 1 |
| Developer time on tech debt / incl. bad code | 33% / 42% | Self-reported survey | 2 |
| Application modernisation services market 2025 | USD 22.67B | USD 51.45B by 2031 | 3 |
Legacy systems tax every new initiative, including AI. MarketsandMarkets values application modernisation services at USD 22.67 billion in 2025, growing 14.6% a year to 20313, as companies rebuild on platforms they own.
Is this benchmark for you?
Industries
SaaS & tech · Financial services & insurance · Logistics & transport · Manufacturing
Buyer
CIO, CTO & IT · CEO & founder
Company profile
In-house or outsourced software team
You need it if…
- Most engineering time goes to maintenance
- Small changes take weeks to release
- Legacy systems block new AI or integrations
What we measure. What you get.
What we measure
- System map: platforms, integrations and data flows
- Share of engineering time on maintenance vs new work
- Deployment frequency and lead time for changes
- Incidents, manual workarounds and spreadsheet bridges
- Licence and hosting cost of legacy components
What you receive
- Your tech-debt estimate vs the reference ranges
- Hot spots ranked by cost and business risk
- Modernise, replace or wrap: option per system
- Phased platform roadmap with costs and milestones
The full technical debt study.
Planned contents. Everything behind this page, in depth: the numbers by sector and company size, what top performers do differently, and a model to price your own gap.
- Market size and growth, every analyst estimate reconciled
- KPI quartiles by company size, sector and region
- Original survey data from decision-makers
- Cost-of-the-gap model with worked examples
- How top-quartile companies close the gap
- Solution landscape and a 12-month roadmap
- Self-assessment scorecard
Four steps. No disruption.
Intake call
30 minutes with a senior engineer to agree scope, KPIs and the data we need.
Data, read-only
Exports or read-only access to the systems involved. Nothing is changed.
Analysis
Your numbers placed against the published market references, KPI by KPI.
Readout
Your position, the cost gap in dollars and a costed roadmap to close it.
Reserve this report.
Reserve the technical debt industry report, or ask for a custom benchmark on your own data.
- Your tech-debt estimate vs the reference ranges
- Hot spots ranked by cost and business risk
- Modernise, replace or wrap: option per system
Sources
- 1McKinsey Digital, “Tech debt: Reclaiming tech equity” (Oct 2020; 50 CIOs). mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/tech-debt-reclaiming-tech-equity
- 2Stripe, The Developer Coefficient (Sept 2018; 1,000+ developers). stripe.com/files/reports/the-developer-coefficient.pdf
- 3MarketsandMarkets, Application Modernization Services Market 2025–2031. marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/application-modernization-services-market-149625724.html