Who will maintain the web when PHP’s veterans retire?

A new report on the state of the PHP programming language shows that there is an emerging skills gap as fewer early-stage developers have PHP knowledge.

Although PHP continues to be a popular open-source language for web application development, the recently released Perforce 2026 PHP Landscape Report indicates that there is increasingly a struggle for organizations to find and retain skilled PHP talent.

The 15-year problem

The survey of over 700 developers worldwide indicated that over half of the PHP users surveyed reported having more than 15 years of experience with the language, while only 15% had five years of experience or less. This points to a maturing workforce with fewer new developers entering the ecosystem, Perforce officials said.

In fact, hiring rose to one of the top challenges facing PHP teams in 2026, and for managers and directors, it was the number one concern. Moreover, 24% of respondents cited a lack of personnel with the right skills and experience as a leading operational challenge.

One industry analyst agrees.

“We’re also seeing a skills gap as a serious risk for companies that are increasingly leaning on agentic processes to generate and maintain operational code,” Brad Shimmin, an analyst at the Futurum Group, tells The New Stack.

Not just PHP’s problem

“This isn’t just a PHP problem. It’s an open source problem,” said Matthew Weier O’Phinney, principal product manager at Perforce Zend and OpenLogic, in a statement. “Organizations depend on PHP for mission-critical applications, but as experienced developers retire or move on, replacing that expertise is becoming increasingly difficult.”

In its recent 1H 2026 Data Intelligence, Analytics, and Infrastructure Decision Maker Survey, the firm found that there’s an acute skills shortage, which more than doubled to 10.4% over the past six months, which is a “ticking time bomb” for maintaining code, Shimmin said.

Fewer juniors, more debt

“Hand-wiring complex data pipelines and maintaining thousands of lines of bespoke SQL over years of inevitable schema drift is a grueling job, a job that engineering talent simply doesn’t want to do,” he said. “But when you lean on AI to write and maintain that code, you inevitably begin building a mountain of silent technical debt. And with fewer junior developers entering the workforce, this problem will only grow in scope and scale.”

Shimmin added that he hopes that the industry will continue investing in tools that can build and preserve institutional knowledge and domain expertise to help guide systems forward in a transparent, explainable, and ultimately maintainable manner.

“Among developers, PHP is seen as mature technology, and few new developers learn it,” Andrew Cornwall, an analyst at Forrester Research, tells The New Stack. “Having said that, PHP is not hard to learn. PHP originally stood for “Personal Home Page,” and many of the developers who’ve been using it for 15 or more years taught themselves. Although HR departments might have trouble finding junior programmers who’ve taken a PHP class, companies shouldn’t have to look too hard to find someone who’s created a WordPress theme or added custom fields to a WooCommerce site. Since there’s so much PHP code out there — 139,000 public repos on GitHub — it’s also a good candidate for AI generation.”

Meanwhile, as in previous years, the gap in in-house PHP expertise has grown wider, writes Adam Culp, manager of professional services at Perforce Zend, in the report.

“Hiring continues to rise as a top challenge,” he writes. “Across the wider OSS [open source software] ecosystem, access to technical support and skilled personnel remains a persistent concern. Add in that only 15% of our surveyed population had five or less years of PHP experience, and the root of this particular challenge becomes apparent: fewer new developers means a smaller hiring pool, particularly when it’s time to replace an existing role.”

Still running the web

The survey also indicated that PHP continues to serve as a foundational technology for web applications and APIs. It tied with JavaScript as the most used language in 2026 at 72% of participants. These languages were followed by Python (49%), Node.js (46%), and Java (35%).

The report also indicated that a notable statistic is the high percentage of respondents who use Go (21%), with it rising into the top five languages for several segments, including developer teams with 20 or members and PHP developers with 10 or more years of experience.

“It’s not surprising that PHP developers consider PHP to be a popular open source language,” Cornwall tells The New Stack. “However, enterprises tend not to use PHP for new or large applications: the report found 82% of developers who use PHP are from companies with fewer than 500 employees.”

Cornwall mentions that WordPress, WooCommerce, and Wikipedia are all written in PHP. Originally PHP focused entirely on server-side scripting, but modern PHP allows CLI as well, and desktop applications through frameworks like NativePHP. Because it has been around for so long, PHP has great integration with SQL databases. A lot of the web still runs on PHP — including millions of e-commerce sites — just not the enterprise web, he notes.

Regarding which systems PHP applications integrate with, relational databases were the top selection at 92% of applications, followed by Web APIs (83%), filesystem (70%) and key-value storage (60%). MySQL and MariaDB tied for the top-used data technology at 60%.

As far as the primary types of applications written in PHP, the report showed that services or APIs was the top type of PHP application (80%), followed by internal business applications (70%) and content management (56%).

Also, the most used PHP frameworks were Symfony at 47% of applications, followed by Laravel (40%), Laminas/Mezzio (8%), and CakePHP (5%).

“PHP is and will continue to be a major part of the web,” Cornwall says. “Nonetheless, most PHP development is small tweaks to existing programs or changes required by new PHP releases, rather than significant new applications.”