Methodology
How ITBudgetCalculator.com sources, derives, and verifies IT spend benchmarks. Every percentage range, salary input, and growth rate on this site should be re-derivable from a named public source using the framework below.
Sources
Each benchmark on the site cites the named public source of record. Where two sources disagree, the wider range covering both numbers is shown. Where a source sits behind a paywall (Gartner subscription, IDC subscription), the press-release archive is the publicly verifiable proxy.
| Source | Refresh cadence | What we take from it |
|---|---|---|
| Gartner IT Spending Forecast | Quarterly | Headline global IT spending number ($6.37 trillion in 2026, up 14.2% YoY, per the July 2026 press release), segment splits (data centres $822B +62.5%, devices $868B +9.8%, software $1.47T +15.5%, IT services $1.87T +8.3%, communications services $1.35T +4.4%), and the worldwide AI spending forecast ($2.59T in 2026, +47% YoY, per the May 2026 press release). The press release archive is the public source of record; the underlying Forecast report sits behind the Gartner subscription paywall. |
| Flexera State of Tech Spend | Annual | SaaS waste rates (Flexera reports ~30% of SaaS licences underused), cloud overspend percentages (typical 25-35% over plan), IT budget allocation across hardware / software / cloud / services, and the SaaS-share trajectory that informs the 26-30% software-and-SaaS category band. |
| Deloitte CIO Survey / Global Tech Leadership Study | Annual | CIO priorities for the year (AI scaling, security investment, FinOps adoption), AI deployment timelines, security budget direction signals, technical-debt reduction priorities. Source used for the 76% of CIOs deploying agentic AI by end of 2026 statistic and for the priority-ranking framing on the spending-forecast page. |
| Spiceworks Ziff Davis State of IT | Annual | SMB IT budget breakdowns by hardware / software / cloud / services, per-employee spend ranges in the SMB segment, IT spending year-on-year direction, and SMB allocation shifts across categories. Free public report download. |
| IDC Worldwide IT Spending Guides | Quarterly | Public IDC press releases give worldwide and regional IT-spend dollar context and segment growth. IDC's underlying vertical data sits behind a paid subscription we do not hold, so it does not drive the by-industry percentage-of-revenue ranges on this site; those come from Flexera and Deloitte. |
| US Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS | Annual | Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for IT roles: computer and information systems managers, information security analysts, software developers, network and systems administrators, computer support specialists. Source for the loaded US salary inputs on the staffing-costs page (load multiplier 1.3x base salary for benefits, payroll tax, and overhead). |
| CompTIA IT Industry Outlook | Annual | Industry-trend reference for SMB IT spending direction, hiring patterns, and skills shortage indicators. Used as a secondary cross-reference against Spiceworks State of IT for the SMB segment narrative on /small-business. |
| AWS / Azure / GCP public pricing | On change | Cloud reference rates for the cloud-spending page. Compute, storage, and egress per-unit prices at on-demand list rates in US East 1, East US 2, US-Central-1 respectively. Spot and reserved discounts noted in scope but not used for benchmark ranges since they introduce too much variance. |
| IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report | Annual | Public-source data breach cost reference ($4.44M global average in the 2025 study, down from $4.88M in 2024). Used on /cybersecurity-budget to anchor the 20-40x return-on-investment framing for proactive security spend. |
| Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report | Annual | Breach pattern reference (ransomware share, attack vectors, time-to-detection). Used qualitatively on /cybersecurity-budget for the threat-trajectory framing behind the security-spend discussion. |
| IANS Research / Artico Search Security Budget Benchmark | Annual | Security spend as a percentage of IT budget, measured across 500+ organisations. Source for the 10.9% in 2025 (down from 11.9% in 2024) figure on /cybersecurity-budget, /breakdown and the home page - the first decline in five years, as overall IT budgets grew faster than security spend. |
| Cloud Security Alliance research | On change | Cloud security threat landscape and shared-responsibility-model framing. Reference for the security sub-allocation discussion (40% software / 30% personnel / 15% hardware / 15% services). |
| Apptio Technology Business Management research | On change | Technology Business Management (TBM) taxonomy reference for the categories page. Used as background for the CapEx vs OpEx classification and the five-category allocation model. No specific dated numbers drawn from this source; framing only. |
In scope
- +Published percentage-of-revenue figures from free public sources: Deloitte's Global Technology Leadership Study for the cross-industry level and Flexera's State of Tech Spend Report for the by-industry spread.
- +Industry-vertical benchmark ranges (financial services, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, retail, professional services, education, non-profit, government, energy).
- +Five-category allocation ranges (personnel 28-32%, software and SaaS 26-30%, infrastructure 20-24%, security 10-14%, support 7-10%) shown as ranges, not point estimates.
- +Company-size brackets (startup 1-50, SMB 51-250, mid-market 251-1,000, enterprise 1,001-5,000, large enterprise 5,000+) with corresponding spend percentages and per-employee dollar ranges.
- +Cybersecurity sub-allocation (40% software / 30% personnel / 15% hardware / 15% services) and the regulated-vs-unregulated split.
- +Cloud share of IT (45% of IT budgets in 2026 across SaaS + IaaS + PaaS) and the SaaS-share trajectory.
- +US loaded salary inputs for IT roles, sourced from BLS OEWS and adjusted by a 1.3x load multiplier for benefits, payroll tax, and overhead.
Out of scope
- -Enterprise-negotiated vendor pricing. Volume commitments, custom MSAs, and sales-led tiers without a public per-unit rate are excluded.
- -Region-specific cost-of-living adjustments beyond US, UK, and EU averages. Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Africa salary inputs are not adjusted here.
- -M&A integration cost spikes. Integration programmes can temporarily push IT spend to 8-12% of revenue for 12-24 months; this site shows the steady-state benchmark.
- -Regulated-industry compliance audit fees (SOX, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR audit costs). Mentioned qualitatively but not priced.
- -Internal change-management and adoption cost. SaaS and cloud migrations carry change-management cost that is hard to attribute across departments; excluded from the IT-budget-narrow definition.
- -GPU and AI infrastructure capex. AI infrastructure spending is shown as a growth-rate signal (worldwide AI spend +47% YoY per Gartner, May 2026) but a specific GPU-cost line item is delegated to sister sites in the AI-cost cluster.
Calculation framework
The level comes from Deloitte's Global Technology Leadership Study, which publishes a measured cross-industry series: 3.28% (2016), 3.64% (2018), 4.25% (2020) and 5.49% (2022), with 5.85% projected for 2024. The 2026 edition does not publish this metric, so 5.49% is the most recent measured figure available and every calculation here starts from it. The industry spread comes from Flexera's State of Tech Spend Report, the only free source publishing this metric by industry, which covers five industries. To be explicit about what this is not: the Gartner IT Spending Forecast is a forecast of worldwide IT spend in dollars and contains no percentage-of-revenue metric, so it cannot be a source for this figure and is not used as one.
This is the one part of the model with no published source behind it, and it is labelled as a model everywhere it appears. No free public source breaks IT spend as a percentage of revenue down by company size; Gartner's IT Key Metrics Data does and is paid, so we neither hold it nor reproduce it. We apply a multiplier to the sourced cross-industry level: 1.35x for startups (1-50), 1.2x for SMB (51-250), 1.05x for mid-market (251-1,000), 1.0x for enterprise (1,001-5,000) and 0.9x for large enterprise (5,000+). The direction is well established, since a baseline of security tooling, helpdesk, core systems and compliance does not scale down with revenue. The magnitude is our assumption. The spread is deliberately narrow because the industry figures are already measured across a mix of company sizes, so a wide size multiplier on top would double-count the same variation.
Financial services 7-10%, technology 6-9%, healthcare 6-9%, telecom 5-8%, professional services 4-7%, e-commerce and retail 3-6%, education 3-6%, energy 3-5%, logistics and transport 3-5%, manufacturing 2-5%, non-profit 2-4%. These ranges are this site's indicative bands, anchored to Flexera's published by-industry figures and Deloitte's cross-industry level; the wider range captures small-vs-large within each vertical.
Personnel 28-32%, software and SaaS 26-30%, infrastructure 20-24%, security 10-14%, support and maintenance 7-10%. These add to ~100% with the security and support categories absorbing the slack on either end. Personnel includes contractors and MSP fees; software includes SaaS subscriptions and on-premise licences; infrastructure includes cloud IaaS / PaaS plus on-premise hardware.
Of the security category, approximately 40% goes to software and platforms (EDR, SIEM, WAF, identity), 30% to personnel (security analysts, CISO, SOC or outsourced MDR), 15% to hardware (firewalls, network appliances), and 15% to outsourced services (pen-testing, incident response retainers, awareness training). Regulated industries push the total security share from 10-15% of IT to 15-18%.
Cloud now represents 45% of total IT budgets in 2026 (SaaS + IaaS + PaaS combined). Gartner's November 2024 public cloud forecast, the most recent release with public segment figures, puts total end-user spending at $723.4B in 2025 (+21.5% YoY) with cloud infrastructure and platform services (IaaS + PaaS) at $301B (+24.2%), driven by AI training and inference workloads on GPU instances. The same forecast projects growth accelerating to roughly 21.3% in 2026. Source: Gartner public cloud end-user spending forecast, November 2024 press release.
Refresh cadence
The site is re-verified against named analyst and government statistics sources on the first business week of each month. The visible "Data verified" label and the dateModified field in every page's Article JSON-LD read from a single constant ( LAST_VERIFIED_DATE) so the on-page text, the schema, and the footer are always in lockstep. Cosmetic date refreshes are structurally impossible: bumping the date is a single-line change that touches every page at once.
Out-of-cycle refreshes trigger on:
- ●Gartner publishes a new IT Spending Forecast press release (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 cadence).
- ●Flexera, Deloitte, or Spiceworks publishes an annual State-of report with materially different segment numbers.
- ●A vertical industry shows a >2 percentage point shift in the benchmark range, or security as a percentage of IT budget moves year-on-year (per the IANS Security Budget Benchmark).
- ●A new AI / cloud spending wave shifts the segment growth-rate ranking (e.g. IaaS overtaking SaaS in growth rate).
- ●US BLS releases a new OEWS occupational wage survey; staffing-cost salary inputs update.
Refreshes that move a benchmark range by less than 0.5 percentage points are batched into the next monthly pass. Refreshes that materially shift the segment narrative (for example, an IaaS growth-rate revision driven by a new GPU-supply data point) ship as soon as the change is confirmed against the named source.
Limitations
Calculator outputs and benchmark ranges are estimates. Production IT budgets depend on industry, growth stage, compliance scope, M&A activity, AI infrastructure exposure, and digital maturity factors that a percentage-of-revenue plus headcount input cannot fully capture. Always validate the output against your finance team's actual cost base before treating it as more than a sanity check.
Analyst forecasts drift between releases. Gartner's IT Spending Forecast revises segment growth rates quarterly; Deloitte's CIO Survey shifts priority rankings year to year; Spiceworks State of IT changes its panel mix between annual editions. The site reflects the most recent public-source-of-record value at the verification date; older releases may give different segment numbers.
Salary inputs in the staffing-costs page use US BLS OEWS national means with a 1.3x load multiplier. Companies operating in high-cost-of-living metros (San Francisco, New York, Boston) should apply a 1.2-1.4x metro premium on top; companies in lower-cost metros should expect a 0.85-0.95x adjustment. The formula is shown so the math is portable.
Corrections process
Spotted a stale benchmark, a recently revised Gartner segment forecast, a new BLS OEWS release we have not folded in, or an analyst-report number that disagrees with what is on this site? Email [email protected] with the page URL and the source you would like cited. Substantive corrections (percentage range changes, new analyst-report releases, BLS OEWS updates) are typically actioned within five business days. Non-substantive corrections (typo fixes, link rot, structural edits) batch into the next monthly pass.
See also the about page for the site's editorial position, disclosures, and full coverage map.