Where does the $1.52T figure come from?

CISQ (Consortium for Information & Software Quality) published 'The Cost of Poor Software Quality in the US: A 2022 Report'. The headline figure was $2.41T for the total cost of poor software quality, and CISQ separately estimated accumulated technical debt at $1.52T. That $1.52T is the technical-debt 'principal': the estimated cost to refactor and remediate the debt already sitting in US software, up from $1.31T in 2020. CISQ reports it on its own rather than adding it into the $2.41T total, to avoid double-counting. It is a US-only, top-down macro estimate and is roughly equal to the total dollars spent on the US IT labour base in 2022.

How does the national figure convert to per-developer cost?

It does not divide cleanly, and that is the point. Splitting $1.52T across the roughly 4.5 million US professional developers (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2022) gives about $338,000 each, which is implausible as an annual per-head cost. That is because the $1.52T is an accumulated remediation principal for the entire installed base, a one-off stock, not an annual productivity flow per developer. The per-developer figure on this page is built bottom-up instead: take the productivity drag Stripe measured (~33% of developer time) against a ~$165K fully-loaded salary, which lands at roughly $54K per developer per year. That bottom-up number, not a slice of the national total, is what maps cleanly to engineering-budget conversations.

Is 33% developer time spent on tech debt really accurate?

Stripe's 'Developer Coefficient' study, run with Harris Poll in 2018, surveyed more than 1,000 developers and more than 1,000 C-level executives across the US, UK, France, Germany, and Singapore. Developers reported 13.5 hours of a 41.1-hour week, about 33%, on technical debt, with 17.3 hours on maintenance overall. It remains the most-cited public benchmark for this specific metric because no replication-scale survey of the same question has been published since, so treat it as a defensible mid-point rather than a precise current figure. Real teams typically land between 20% and 50% depending on codebase age, test coverage, and the discipline of refactoring as features are built; pull your own number where you can.

Why use 18% as the compound growth rate?

18% is the calculator's modelling assumption for how unaddressed debt compounds, taken as a mid-point of a roughly 15-25% per-year range. It is directionally consistent with CAST's structural-quality research (the CRASH Report on application software health), which tracks how structural-quality violations accumulate as codebases grow, rather than a single published constant. Drivers include: coupling growth as new features depend on existing code, dependency drift as libraries deprecate or break, team-scaling friction as more contributors create more places for inconsistency, and workaround accumulation as quick fixes get re-applied rather than replaced. Treat 18% as a conservative planning figure and adjust it to your own codebase.

How does the team-size cost table help when our team can't act on the national figure?

Two ways. First, it converts the abstract national figure into a number that maps to your specific headcount and salary, a 25-developer team at $165K fully-loaded with 33% debt drag is losing approximately $1.36M per year. That number is sized to your engineering budget rather than the US economy, which is the difference between a slide that lands and a slide that gets dismissed. Second, the 5-year compound column shows the cost of doing nothing, $9.8M for that same 25-developer team, which materially shifts the maths on whether to fund a remediation programme this year or defer.

CISQ 2022 national figure

The US carries $1.52 trillion in technical debt.

That number, CISQ's 2022 estimate of the accumulated cost to remediate US technical debt, is the most-cited statistic in the conversation. It is also too big to be useful, “1.52 trillion” doesn't fit in any budget meeting. This page converts the national figure into something that does: cost per developer, cost per team, cost over five years if you ignore it.

the conversion ladder

01 · US national

$1.52T

CISQ 2022, accumulated principal

02 · Per developer

~$54K

33% × $165K fully-loaded

03 · 25-dev team

~$1.36M

annual productivity drag

04 · 5-year team

~$9.77M

18% compound growth

The national figure is CISQ's estimate of the accumulated cost to remediate US technical debt, a one-off stock. The per-developer figure is built bottom-up instead, from the 33% of time Stripe found developers spend on debt rather than building new features, so it maps to an annual budget rather than slicing the national total.

Team-size cost table

Adjust salary and debt-drag percentage to match your reality. Click a row to highlight it. The 5-year compound column applies CAST's 18% annual debt-growth rate, the cost of doing nothing.

Fully-loaded salary per developer

$165K

Base × 1.3-1.5 incl. benefits, equipment, office.

% of dev time spent on debt

33%

Stripe Developer Coefficient: 33% average.

Team size	Annual debt cost	FTE-equivalent waste	5-year compound (18% gr.)
1 developer	$54,450	0.33 FTE	$389,547
5 developers	$272,250	1.65 FTE	$1,947,734
10 developers	$544,500	3.30 FTE	$3,895,467
▶25 developers	$1,361,250	8.25 FTE	$9,738,668
50 developers	$2,722,500	16.50 FTE	$19,477,336
100 developers	$5,445,000	33.00 FTE	$38,954,672
250 developers	$13,612,500	82.50 FTE	$97,386,680
500 developers	$27,225,000	165.00 FTE	$194,773,361

If your team is 25 developers

Technical debt is costing you $1,361,250 this year, equivalent to 8.25 FTE of wasted capacity. If left unaddressed at the typical 18% compound growth, the 5-year total reaches $9,738,668.

Annual cost = team_size × fully-loaded salary × debt fraction. FTE waste = team_size × debt fraction. 5-year compound applies 18% annual debt growth (CAST Software research range: 15-25%).

What CISQ actually measured

It is worth separating two numbers the report is often quoted as if they were one. The $2.41 trillion is the total cost of poor software quality; the $1.52 trillion is the accumulated technical-debt principal, reported on its own:

$2.41T total cost of poor software quality

The headline number. Its largest driver is operational software failures, and most of the rise since 2020 comes from cybercrime costs, which CISQ put at roughly $1.44 trillion in 2022. Unsuccessful or cancelled software projects add about $260 billion.

$1.52T accumulated technical-debt principal

CISQ's estimate of what it would cost to refactor and remediate the technical debt already accumulated in US software, up from $1.31 trillion in 2020 and roughly equal to total US IT labour spend in 2022. It is reported separately and is deliberately not added into the $2.41T total, to avoid double-counting.

Principal vs interest

CISQ splits technical debt into principal (the cost to fix the debt) and interest (the extra effort teams keep paying while the debt stays in place). The $1.52T is principal only; CISQ states it has no good estimate yet for the accumulating interest, so the real burden is higher than the headline figure.

Source: CISQ “The Cost of Poor Software Quality in the US: A 2022 Report”, published December 2022 by the Consortium for Information & Software Quality (co-sponsored by Synopsys and Undo). The full report is downloadable from the CISQ website. The figures above are stated in the report; verify the latest published edition before citing specific sub-figures.

What this number actually unlocks

The national figure is a positioning statistic, it gets quoted in board decks because it sounds large. The team-size figure is an operating statistic, it gets a refactoring budget approved.

Use the national figure for context

Open with CISQ to establish that technical debt is an economic problem, not a culture one. This positions the conversation as a financial decision rather than an engineering preference.

Use the team figure for the ask

Then pivot to your specific team-size annual cost from the table. A $1.36M annual drag on a 25-dev team frames the cost of any refactoring programme as cost-of-doing-nothing avoidance, not cost-of-doing-something incurral.

Use the 5-year compound for urgency

The 5-year compound number is the punchline. It shows that ignoring debt for a year costs the 18% growth, not zero, and compounds over the time horizon executives actually plan for.

Avoid the false-precision trap

All three numbers (national, team, compound) are directional. They are for framing a decision, not pricing a contract. Anyone challenging the precision is missing the point; the order of magnitude is what matters.

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