IT Outsourcing in Eastern Europe 2026: Who Buys It, What a Developer Costs and Where the Margin Is

Founders come to Eastern Europe for one of two reasons. Either they need engineers and the budget doesn't stretch to Berlin or San Francisco, or they want to sell something to the region's software-services firms. Both decisions are usually made on anecdotes: a friend's agency in Kraków, a rate card from a vendor, a blog post with "average developer salary" and no source.

This piece uses official numbers instead: Eurostat, the National Bank of Ukraine, an IT Ukraine Association survey, the Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey, and the filings of two listed outsourcers with large Eastern European delivery teams, EPAM and Endava. Every figure links back to a record in the Atlas cell for this market.

How big the export business is, country by country

The cleanest measure of an outsourcing industry is exports of computer services: what foreign clients paid firms in the country. In 2024 (Eurostat, balance of payments):

• Poland: Poland exported EUR 16,706.3 million of computer services in 2024 and imported EUR 11,192.8 million.
• Romania: Romania exported EUR 8,145.8 million of computer services in 2024 and imported EUR 2,637.6 million.
• Czechia: Czechia exported EUR 5,165.7 million of computer services in 2024 and imported EUR 2,884.5 million.
• Serbia: Serbia exported EUR 3,890.0 million of computer services in 2024 and imported EUR 778.0 million.
• Hungary: Hungary exported EUR 3,780.8 million of computer services in 2024 and imported EUR 2,864.4 million.
• Bulgaria: Bulgaria exported EUR 2,833.0 million of computer services in 2024 and imported EUR 508.8 million.
• Estonia: Estonia exported EUR 2,644.7 million of computer services in 2024 and imported EUR 1,336.9 million.
• Lithuania: Lithuania exported EUR 2,377.7 million of computer services in 2024 and imported EUR 1,223.5 million.
• Slovakia: Slovakia exported EUR 1,602.7 million of computer services in 2024 and imported EUR 701.8 million.
• Croatia: Croatia exported EUR 1,493.9 million of computer services in 2024 and imported EUR 517.0 million.

Outside the EU, Ukraine exported USD 6,655 million of computer services in 2025 and USD 1,644 million in the first quarter of 2026 (National Bank of Ukraine). Serbia's exports grew from EUR 2,511.0 million in 2022 to EUR 3,890.0 million in 2024 (Eurostat).

Two things stand out. Poland is the largest by far, but it also imports a lot: its net surplus is about EUR 5.5 billion (our calculation from Eurostat, exports minus imports), about the same as Romania's (Romania's exports minus imports, same source). Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria import little and export a lot. They are the purest export economies on the list.

Who the clients are

The US is the largest single buyer. Polish firms sold EUR 3,818.8 million of computer services to US-based clients in 2024, EUR 2,492.7 million to German clients and EUR 2,300.2 million to British ones (Eurostat). That puts the US at about 23% of Poland's computer-services exports (our calculation). For Romania the order flips: German clients bought EUR 2,001.4 million and US clients EUR 1,377.6 million.

Ukraine leans further toward the US: 35.9% of its computer-services exports in 2025 went to US clients, worth USD 2,392.4 million (National Bank of Ukraine). In an IT Ukraine Association survey for 2024, 62.6% of Ukrainian IT companies said they had clients in the USA.

The listed vendors show the same split. EPAM made 56.9% of its Q2 2026 revenue from clients in the Americas and 41.2% from EMEA. Endava made 38% of its revenue in North America, 33% in the UK and 23% in the rest of Europe (Q3 FY2026, SEC filings).

What a developer costs

The country comparison that matters for a hiring decision is labour cost per person employed in IT services (NACE J62). That's what a firm pays per head, including employer social contributions. Eurostat, 2024, in thousands of euros:

• Germany 66.73, Netherlands 63.24, France 53.07, Ireland 87.93
• Lithuania 38.04, Bulgaria 37.17, Estonia 35.57, Slovenia 33.67, Czechia 31.93, Latvia 30.92
• Croatia 27.92, Hungary 27.06, Poland 23.12, Slovakia 21.94
• Bosnia and Herzegovina 21.16, North Macedonia 17.88

A German IT-services employee costs the firm roughly 2.9 times as much as a Polish one (our calculation from the two Eurostat figures). The gap to Bulgaria or Lithuania is smaller, at about 1.8 times. One caveat: this is an average over everyone in the sector, juniors and support staff included, so it isn't a senior-developer rate. It also isn't a price. The vendor's day rate sits on top of it.

Cost isn't the only constraint. Hiring is hard everywhere. Among Czech firms with 10 or more employees that tried to recruit ICT specialists in 2024, 70.47% had vacancies they found hard to fill. In Slovenia the figure was 63.93% and in Hungary 62.43% (Eurostat). A cheap market with no free engineers is not cheap.

Where the margin sits

Eurostat's gross operating rate (gross operating surplus as a share of turnover) for IT services in 2024 is 18.96% in Romania, 17.87% in Hungary and 17.23% in Bulgaria. In Germany it's 9.19% and in France 9.53%. Estonia is the outlier in the region at 6.38%. Poland's latest figure is 13.03% (2023).

So the lower-cost countries also tend to have thicker operating margins. Those margins are now under pressure at the top of the market. Endava's revenue fell 8.4% year over year in Q3 FY2026 (6.4% at constant currency). It guided to a full-year constant-currency decline of up to 6.0%, and its adjusted profit-before-tax margin was 1.8%. EPAM's Europe segment grew 10.0% year over year in Q2 2026 (8.5% at constant currency), while its US revenue grew 0.7%. The same region can produce opposite results depending on whose budgets a vendor depends on.

The industry is mostly one-person companies

In 2023 Poland had 178,586 enterprises in computer programming and consultancy. 176,606 of them had 0–9 people, and only 100 had 250 or more (Eurostat). That's about 99% micro-firms (our calculation). The statistics do not say how many are one-person contractor companies, but the size distribution points that way. Czechia (48,129 firms, 46,771 of them micro) and Romania (43,424 firms) look similar.

For a buyer, that means the "outsourcing market" is really two markets: a few hundred mid-size and large vendors, and a long tail of independent engineers who invoice through their own companies.

What buyers say goes wrong

The best recent survey of buyers is Deloitte's 2024 Global Outsourcing Survey. It covers buyers worldwide, not Eastern Europe specifically, so treat it as a proxy. Among executives moving some outsourced work back in-house, 68% cited better control over service quality and performance. Yet 82% of that same group said their outsourced services met or exceeded expectations. Only 29% still described their model as legacy staff augmentation, and 67% reported adopting outcome-based relationships. 30% expected more than a 20% efficiency gain from vendors' use of AI over the next two years.

Buyers are mostly satisfied but want more control, and they are moving from paying for heads to paying for outcomes.

What this means for your startup

If you're hiring a team. Pick the country on labour cost and hiring difficulty together, not on price alone. Poland and Slovakia have the lowest per-head cost in the EU part of the region (Eurostat, 2024). Czechia, Slovenia and Hungary have the hardest ICT hiring (Eurostat, 2024). Romania and Bulgaria combine mid-range cost with high vendor margins, so there's room to negotiate a rate.

If you're building for outsourcers. Your buyer is a firm whose biggest clients are in the US, Germany and the UK. Its margin is thick in Romania or Bulgaria and thin in Estonia. And its clients want outcome-based contracts it can measure. Tools that help a vendor prove delivery have a clear buyer: delivery reporting, benefit tracking, outcome pricing. So do tools that let a small or mid-size firm compete with EPAM-scale vendors. The tail of hundreds of thousands of micro-firms is a different customer. It's a freelancer market with freelancer budgets.

If you're betting on the AI squeeze. The data so far shows growth diverging between vendors, not a collapse of the region. Watch Endava's guidance and the next Eurostat export release before you write "AI is killing outsourcing" into a pitch deck.

What the data doesn't tell you

• Day rates. None of these sources publish what a vendor charges per developer-day. Labour cost per employee is the floor, not the price.
• Seniority mix. Sector averages mix juniors, testers and support staff. Earnings by occupation exist for some countries but aren't comparable across the region.
• Ukraine's EU-comparable data. NBU figures are in US dollars and by client country, so they line up with Eurostat in direction but not to the decimal.
• Freshness. Most structural figures are for 2023–2024. Vendor filings are from 2026, but they describe two companies, not the market.

The Atlas cell keeps these numbers current and adds new countries as statistics offices publish.