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TokyoDev Developer Survey 2026

Technology

💻
Work Areas

Back-end development was the most common area respondents worked in, at 71%, followed by front-end development at 50%. Areas with more experienced respondents generally paid more, with people management (13.8 million yen on average) and platform engineering (13.4 million yen) at the top. Machine learning was the exception: respondents working in it averaged the least experience of any area, 7.5 years compared to 8.8 overall, yet made 11.8 million yen, above the 10.7 million yen average. Game development went the other way, averaging 10.7 years of experience but only 9.9 million yen.
Which of these areas of software development are part of your day-to-day work?
Multiple
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
01
Back-end development
467
02
Front-end development
331
03
Systems design & architecture
302
04
Cloud infrastructure
221
05
DevOps
210
06
Test automation
186
07
Developer tools/tooling
174
08
Project management
172
09
AI/LLM application engineering
159
10
Manual testing
158
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
659
90%
5.5
20
10

⚙️
Programming Languages

Python remained the most popular language, used by 49% of respondents. TypeScript overtook JavaScript for second place, at 46% compared to 40%, and Go saw the largest gain, rising from 14% to 21%.

Rust and Elixir users had the highest median compensation, at 12.5 million yen, while PHP users had the lowest, at 6.5 million yen.

Which programming languages do you regularly use at your job?
Multiple
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
01
Python
317
02
TypeScript
+1
294
03
JavaScript
-1
259
04
HTML/CSS
227
05
SQL
184
06
Bash/Shell
156
07
Go
+1
135
08
Java
-1
89
09
Ruby
66
10
C++
59
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
641
87%
3.3
10

🌐
Web Frameworks

React remained the most popular web framework, used by 39% of respondents. FastAPI saw the largest gain, rising from 12% to 17%, while Ruby on Rails fell from 13% to 9%.
Which web frameworks do you regularly use at your job?
Multiple
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
01
React
228
02
🚫 None
155
03
Next.js
129
04
FastAPI
+1
101
05
Vue.js
+2
69
06
Rails
-2
56
07
Spring
-1
54
08
Django
49
09
Express
37
10
Angular
+4
28
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%

Unlike last year's survey, this year the question above let respondents select “None of the above” as an option instead of having to skip the question altogether.

The year-over-year decline shown here is almost certainly due to this increase in total question participation, and not to any real-world trend.

591
81%
2
10

📖
Other Frameworks and Libraries

NumPy and pandas were the most widely used libraries, at 21% and 20% respectively, though 42% of respondents used none of the listed options. Apache Kafka users had the highest median compensation, at 11.5 million yen.
Which other frameworks and libraries do you regularly use at your job?
Multiple
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
01
🚫 None
196
02
NumPy
96
03
Pandas
92
04
Torch/PyTorch
58
05
Spring
-1
51
06
Apache Kafka
+6
51
07
Scikit-learn
-1
48
08
OpenCV
-1
46
09
TensorFlow
-1
41
10
React Native
40
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%

Unlike last year's survey, this year the question above let respondents select “None of the above” as an option instead of having to skip the question altogether.

The year-over-year decline shown here is almost certainly due to this increase in total question participation, and not to any real-world trend.

465
63%
2.2
10

☁️
Cloud Platforms

AWS remained the most popular cloud platform, used by 62% of respondents, down from 66% last year. Google Cloud rose from 31% to 36%.
Which cloud platforms do you regularly use at your job?
Multiple
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
01
AWS
383
02
Google Cloud
219
03
Azure
97
04
🚫 None
80
05
Cloudflare
75
06
Firebase
52
07
Vercel
44
08
Digital Ocean
+1
14
09
Heroku
-1
12
10
Other Answers
29
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%

Unlike last year's survey, this year the question above let respondents select “None of the above” as an option instead of having to skip the question altogether.

The year-over-year decline shown here is almost certainly due to this increase in total question participation, and not to any real-world trend.

613
84%
1.7
10

🛠️
Software Engineering Practices

Greater use of English correlated with a higher adoption rate of software engineering best practices, even among those working at Japanese-headquartered companies.

At those companies, 70% of respondents who used English frequently or always said their employer used continuous integration, compared to 42% of those who rarely or never did. Similarly, 67% of frequent English users worked at organizations with monitoring and logging, compared to 39% of infrequent users. For automated testing, the figures were 68% versus 42%, and for infrastructure as code, 54% versus 32%. The only practice more common among infrequent English users was waterfall development, used by 28% compared to 11% of frequent users.

Which of the following software engineering practices does your current employer use?
Multiple
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
01
Version control
494
02
Code reviews
490
03
Continuous integration
412
04
Agile development
403
05
Monitoring and logging
389
06
Continuous deployment/delivery
379
07
Automated testing
374
08
Infrastructure as code (IaC)
306
09
Blameless postmortems
192
10
Pair programming
95
11
Waterfall development
77
12
🚫 None
15
13
Other Answers
13
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
622
85%
5.9
10