# Where Software Developers Live: A Map of 1.1M Located Profiles

> Where software developers actually live, based on 1.1 million located profiles — top countries, surprising mid-tier markets, and what it means for remote hiring.

- Canonical: https://www.realgreatdevs.com/blog/where-software-developers-live
- Target query: where do software developers live
- Funnel: top
- Published: 2026-08-06
- Tags: data study, remote hiring, geography

Remote hiring changed the question from "who is in our city?" to "who is in a timezone we can work with?" The answers people give are still mostly vibes — US, India, Eastern Europe — which is incomplete enough to waste months.

We mapped 1,115,277 developer profiles with a resolvable country in a 2.5 million profile index. Here is where they actually are.

<Callout title="About the data">
Location comes from what developers state on public GitHub profiles. Not every profile has a country; these figures are the located subset. Data as of August 2026.
</Callout>

## The top 20 countries by indexed developers

| Rank | Country | Developers |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | United States | 251,534 |
| 2 | India | 128,786 |
| 3 | China | 82,597 |
| 4 | Brazil | 65,199 |
| 5 | Germany | 37,907 |
| 6 | Canada | 36,692 |
| 7 | Australia | 30,950 |
| 8 | United Kingdom | 28,442 |
| 9 | Mexico | 26,363 |
| 10 | South Korea | 21,360 |
| 11 | Colombia | 19,878 |
| 12 | Russia | 19,568 |
| 13 | Argentina | 19,031 |
| 14 | France | 17,865 |
| 15 | Japan | 17,657 |
| 16 | Indonesia | 17,052 |
| 17 | Bangladesh | 16,621 |
| 18 | Pakistan | 13,457 |
| 19 | Spain | 13,209 |
| 20 | Netherlands | 12,262 |

The United States alone is about **23%** of located developers. The top three countries together are roughly **42%**.

## The mid-tier markets most teams skip

Colombia (19,878) sits ahead of France (17,865). Bangladesh (16,621) is close to Japan (17,657). Indonesia (17,052) is larger than Spain.

These are not obscure talent deserts. They are simply less saturated with the same five job posts every US company sends to London and Berlin. If your search returns too few people, widening geography usually beats lowering the bar.

Full country pages — skills, cities, activity — are free to browse under [/hire-developers-in](/hire-developers-in/united-states).

## What this means for remote hiring

**Timezone is the real constraint, not passport.** A strong engineer eight hours offset may be worse for your standup than a slightly less famous market with four hours of overlap.

**Competition concentrates.** Everyone fishes the US, UK, Germany, Canada and India. The next ten countries on this list are large enough to hire from and quieter.

**Skill mix varies by country.** A country hub that is huge overall may be thin in your stack. Always check the skill × country page (for example [TypeScript in Poland](/hire-developers/typescript) via the skill page’s country list) rather than assuming population equals fit.

**Public-code coverage is uneven.** Markets where more work happens in private enterprise repos will be undercounted here. Treat these numbers as a lower bound, not a census.

## Practical sourcing moves

1. Pick three countries with timezone overlap you can live with.
2. Open each [country page](/hire-developers-in/india) and check whether your stack appears in the top skills.
3. Run the same filters you would domestically — recency, language, activity — before you touch compensation assumptions.
4. Write outreach that acknowledges location and timezone instead of pretending everyone is local.

For the skill-side view of the same dataset, see [What Makes a Great Developer?](/blog/what-makes-a-great-developer) and the [hire-developers directory](/hire-developers).