The IT Industry in Poland 2027: Market, Roles, Pay and Trends

The IT industry in Poland has stopped growing at the rate everyone got used to. That is not the same thing as a downturn, but it does call for different decisions than the ones that worked three years ago.

The figures here come from the ITDS IT Talent Trends 2026 report, built on more than three and a half thousand recruitment conversations our team ran during 2025, supplemented with external market analysis.

The IT industry in Poland: size and structure

In practice, Poland has consolidated its position as the leading technology hub in Central and Eastern Europe. The talent pools in Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław and the Tri-City have been reinforced by investment commitments from global players, Google and Microsoft among them, alongside regional investment.

More telling than the scale, though, is what changed in the nature of that investment. Announcements around cloud, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity position Poland as a research and development centre rather than only a delivery location. A good share of those projects run as nearshore teams based in Poland, which feeds directly into the competencies employers now look for.

Indeed, you can see it in the structure of job ads. Senior roles account for roughly fifty-two percent of all openings, while junior positions made up about five point nine percent in the first half of 2025. At the same time it is juniors who send the most applications, up to twice as many as people with more experience.

Which roles the IT industry in Poland actually wants

Note that the order below reflects who our clients ask us for most often, rather than a general market ranking.

Swipe the table sideways to see both columns.

One pattern is worth pulling out. Fullstack remains the base, but the strongest growth now sits in the adjacent roles, the specialised ones that combine several competencies at once. Steady demand also holds for Node.js, Big Data and data analysts.

Pay in the IT industry in Poland, briefly

In short, average salary growth came in at five to seven percent, after years of double digits. However, where supply has not caught up with demand, meaning cloud, cybersecurity and SAP, the movement still runs closer to eight to ten percent a year.

That split is the most important pay change of the past two years. The market stopped raising everyone equally and started paying for a specific shortage.

Full bands by role, technology and contract model sit in our breakdown of what developers earn in Poland and in the profile of the business analyst role.

Three trends that genuinely change recruitment

Artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and data engineering have stopped being experimental initiatives. They are now part of long-term strategy, and you can tell from which roles open permanently rather than for a single project.

1. 01
   AI stops being a separate department

   Recruitment for AI-related roles is growing several times faster than for traditional positions. More importantly, AI competencies are starting to appear in requirements for roles that did not carry them until recently.
2. 02
   Cloud matured, so the requirements changed

   The migration phase has ended in many organisations. What they look for now is people who can maintain, cost-optimise and secure what already runs, and that is a different profile from somebody who only moved it.
3. 03
   Business ecosystems are back in play

   SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce are in focus again. ERP and CRM modernisation stopped being a technical change and became part of competitive advantage, which is where a separate skills shortage comes from.

Is the IT industry in Poland in a downturn or a correction

From a recruiter's chair this is a correction rather than a downturn, and two things show it at once. Openings are not disappearing, but they are distributed differently. Companies stopped hiring ahead of need and started opening roles against a specific gap.

Three signals suggest the market is maturing rather than breaking.

• The share of junior roles is rising, slowly. Five point nine percent of openings in the first half of 2025 is still small, but it is a clear improvement on 2024. The market is reopening to people at the start of a career.
• Pay is not falling, it stopped rising everywhere. Five to seven percent is still growth, and in narrow specialisations it remains double digit.
• Investment is going into R&D, not only delivery. That means projects in Poland are getting harder, not fewer.

Separately, the working model is worth noting. Fully remote work has been losing ground since 2022, and hybrid has won, though in practice more often on paper than in how the week is actually arranged.

Getting into the IT industry in Poland today

Still, changing career into IT is realistic, but it needs a different strategy from the years when a bootcamp and three portfolio projects were enough. Juniors send twice as many applications as the rest of the market while competing for under six percent of openings.

From the perspective of somebody who reads those applications, three things change the outcome most.

• Choosing a specialisation by shortage, not by popularity. Data, cloud and cybersecurity have more entry points than frontend, even though more courses teach frontend.
• Domain knowledge from your previous job. Somebody from accounting entering a finance project holds an advantage no bootcamp can supply. This is the most underrated asset in the whole conversation.
• Evidence of practice instead of a list of courses. One project you can talk about, including what went wrong and why, weighs more than five certificates.

Finally, the scale of competition is worth keeping in mind. A single junior opening can attract a very large number of applications, which makes thinking about a career over years a practical strategy rather than a consolation.

Frequently Asked Questions

A mature market asks for more specific decisions

The IT industry in Poland is no longer a market where being available was enough. It is a market where you need to be available in a specific competency, and that changes how to plan a career for people entering and for people several years in.

If you are working out where you sit in this market, it is worth seeing how nearshore teams run from Poland are put together, since a fair share of the projects described here are delivered in exactly that model.