Companies worldwide burdened with 61 billion workdays of tech debt

United States and Italy carry biggest burden; globally 45% of code is deemed fragile, finds research from CAST

PARIS and NEW YORK, Sept. 24, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Companies and governments would need to spend 61 billion workdays in software development time to ‘pay off’ the technical debt they’ve accrued over the past four decades, finds a report released today by CAST, a leader in software mapping and intelligence technology. The report, based on analyzing more than 10 billion lines of code, finds that the United States, Italy, and France carry the greatest tech debt burdens, while Ecuador, Peru, and Belgium hold the least.

“Tech debt is a sinkhole, and we’re all trying to build the future on top of it,” said Greg Rivera, Head of Product at CAST. “Even if the world’s 25 million developers worked on nothing but this problem, it would still take nine years to solve. That’s not happening. Companies will need more visibility into their own code to prioritize their debt, or they’ll keep sinking.”

Debt Hotspots         
CAST’s research finds that tech debt is compromising some of society’s most critical systems, and those that hold sensitive data. These include software running global supply chains, electronic health records, and consumer lending.

• 45% – nearly half of the world’s code – is deemed fragile, susceptible to failure when it faces unexpected conditions. Consumers experience this fragility, for example, when websites crash during traffic surges or a form is filled out but can’t be submitted.
• 32% of code suffers from bloat, driving up the costs that companies pay for compute resources and requiring higher energy usage.
• 31% of code is too rigid, slowing businesses’ ability to make changes to their software and launching new products.
  
  

Most-indebted        
To compare nations’ tech debt, CAST calculated the average number of workdays needed to repair a line of code, using this standard factor as a consistent basis for cross-country analysis. The 10 countries carrying the greatest tech debt burdens are:

An AI Leapfrog Moment?
Several emerging market countries enjoy low levels of tech debt, unencumbered by decades of accumulated software. This dynamic could spark a replay of early 2000s telecom leapfrogging, this time with AI generating new code. “Just as start-ups are vibe-coding their way to growth, so might countries use AI to speed up development,” notes Rivera. “This overlooks the reality that AI-generated code draws heavily from Open-Source Software, which inherently introduces technical debt.”

Methodology
The data set for this report is based on 10 billion lines of code, drawn from 47,000 applications across 3,000 companies operating in 17 countries. It includes software originally written and installed as early as the 1980s and still in active use, providing a unique long-term view of technical debt. The countries collectively represent 51% of global GDP, based on the most recent World Bank figures available as of July 2025. To reflect meaningful and real-world conditions, only countries with a minimum of 100 scanned applications were included.

Technical debt is defined as the extra work developers must do to fix or improve software that was built quickly at the expense of quality. This definition aligns with industry standards and reflects the practical implications of suboptimal development practices.

The report, “Coding in the Red: The State of Global Technical Debt 2025,” and its full methodology are available at castsoftware.com/CIU.

About CAST
Businesses move faster using CAST to understand, improve, and transform their software. Through semantic analysis of source code, CAST generates dashboards and 3D maps for executives, technologists, and AI to navigate inside individual applications and across entire portfolios. This intelligence enables companies to steer, speed, and report on initiatives such as technical debt, modernization, and cloud. As the pioneer of the software intelligence field, CAST is trusted by the world’s leading companies and governments, their consultancies and cloud providers. See it all at castsoftware.com.

For more information, please contact David Rosen at d.rosen@castsoftware.com.

Legal Disclaimer:

EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.