Average SaaS Spend per Employee: 2026 Benchmarks by Quarter, Industry and Company Size

Spend sat at $9,200 for three straight quarters, then started moving again: $9,324 in Q2 2026 and a preliminary $9,450 in Q3. The pause is over.

From $7,900 in 2023 to $8,700 in 2024 to about $9,100 at the end of 2025. The yearly jumps are getting smaller, but the line has not turned down.

Healthcare ($10,150) and IT ($10,050) spend the most per person, while media and entertainment sits at $3,250. Compare yourself to your own industry, not the overall average.

Mid-market companies saw the steepest rise at 40%, against 28% for enterprises and 21% for SMBs. Vertice's numbers show the size of the jump, not the reason for it.

SaaS spend per employee benchmarks compared

Source: Vertice, SaaS spend per employee; Zylo, Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index Finds AI-Native App Adoption Is Surging, with ChatGPT Now the Most Expensed App; Zylo, Tech Stack Management: Strategy & Best Practices; Vertice, SaaS Inflation Index 2026 Report; Vertice, SaaS Spend per Employee; Zylo, Announcing Zylo's 2025 SaaS Management Index. Download as image

Who controls SaaS spend and how it is changing (Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index)

Source: Zylo, Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index Finds AI-Native App Adoption Is Surging, with ChatGPT Now the Most Expensed App. Download as image

Average total SaaS spend and app count by company size (Zylo 2025 SaaS Management Index)

Source: Zylo, Announcing Zylo's 2025 SaaS Management Index. Download as image

What is the average SaaS spend per employee in 2026?

The short answer is roughly $9,450 a year. Vertice's Q3 2026 average is $9,450, a preliminary figure based on data processed so far, and Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index reports a median of $9,455. Two different datasets, built from different customers, landing within a few dollars of each other is a decent sign the number is real.

You will also see $11,530 quoted as Zylo's 2026 average. Treat it with care. It comes from a Zylo blog post rather than the press release, and the median printed alongside it conflicts with Zylo's own published median. A higher average than median is normal, since a handful of heavy spenders pull the mean up, but this pair does not line up cleanly.

The same goes for older figures. Zylo's 2025 edition reported an average of $4,830, up 21.9% year over year, but its sample changed a lot between editions, from $40 billion of spend under management to $75 billion. Do not read the gap between $4,830 and $9,455 as spend doubling in a year. One figure is an average and the other a median, and the pool of companies behind them changed.

Keep in mind who these numbers describe. Zylo's data skews toward large organizations, and Vertice's comes from global processed spend rather than US companies alone. Neither is a government statistic. They are good for a sanity check, not for a budget line you copy straight into a spreadsheet.

Why does SaaS spend per employee keep going up?

Vertice's yearly series tells the story plainly: $7,900 in 2023, $8,700 in 2024, about $9,100 at the end of 2025. Its quarterly tracker shows spend holding at $9,200 for three quarters through Q1 2026, then rising again. Because this is a per-employee figure, hiring alone does not explain the climb. The data points instead to pricing and to how much software sits behind each seat.

Three forces show up in the data. First, pricing has become harder to predict. In Zylo's 2026 report, 78% of IT leaders said they got unexpected charges from consumption-based or AI pricing, up from 66.5% a year earlier, and 61% said unplanned SaaS cost increases forced them to cut projects. Usage-based billing sounds fair until a busy month turns into a surprise invoice.

Second, the people buying software are no longer just IT. Zylo found business units control 81% of SaaS spend, while IT directly manages only 15%. The average organization adds 21 applications a month, and expense-based SaaS spend grew 267% year over year. When a manager puts a tool on a company card, there is often nobody negotiating the renewal terms.

Third, new categories are stacking on top of old ones. Year over year, spend on AI-native apps rose 108% across all organizations and 393% at companies with 10,000+ employees.

How does your company compare by industry and size?

Industry matters more than most people expect. In Vertice's Q1 2025 data, healthcare led at $10,150 per employee and IT at $10,050, followed by financial and professional services at $8,750 and retail and consumer goods at $7,750. Media and entertainment came in at just $3,250. A software consultancy spending more than a retailer per head is not a warning sign on its own.

Size shapes the growth rate. Between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025, spend per employee rose 40% at mid-market companies, 28% at enterprises and 21% at SMBs. Zylo's 2025 figures show the scale gap too: companies with 1 to 500 employees averaged $11.5M in total annual SaaS spend across 152 apps, while those with 10,000+ employees averaged $284M across 660 apps.

Here is a quick way to find your own number. Add up every recurring software charge for the past year, including the ones on expense reports and personal cards that got reimbursed. Divide by your headcount. Then compare it to your industry figure, not the headline average.

If you land well above your industry, look first at seat counts and duplicate tools. If you land well below, do not assume you are lean. You may simply have software spread across personal cards that never made it into your total. Either way, the number gives you a starting point for a renewal conversation, and vendors take a buyer who knows their own costs more seriously than one who does not.

What does this mean for freelancers and small teams?

If you work for yourself, you are a company of one, and your software bill is your per-employee spend. Design suites, a CRM, cloud storage, invoicing, a scheduling tool and a video app add up fast. You will not hit enterprise numbers, but the same leaks apply: annual plans that renew quietly, a price bump at renewal, and tools you stopped using months ago.

Small teams have one advantage. You can see every subscription on a single statement. Spend an hour on it each quarter and you will catch most of the waste that larger companies need a whole procurement team to find.

Employees feel this too. In Zylo's survey, 61% of IT leaders said surprise SaaS cost increases forced them to cut projects. Those are often the projects people on the team were counting on.

How do you lower your SaaS cost per employee?

• Build one list of every subscription, owner, seat count and renewal date. Include tools bought on expense cards.
• Put renewal dates on a calendar with a reminder well before each cancellation deadline, not on the renewal day itself.
• Check seat usage before renewal and drop licenses for people who left or never logged in.
• Ask for a cap on renewal price increases in writing before you sign, not after the invoice arrives.
• For usage-based or AI pricing, set spend alerts and ask the vendor for a hard ceiling or a pre-approval step for overages.
• Consolidate overlapping tools. Two project trackers or three file-sharing apps usually means one can go.
• Read the termination and data export terms so you can actually leave when a cheaper option comes along.

Sources and method

Every number on this page comes from the sources below, each opened and read on or before October 18, 2026. A second, independent review checked every figure against its source and corrected anything that did not match. Figures that could not be confirmed were left out.

1. Zylo, Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index Finds AI-Native App Adoption Is Surging, with ChatGPT Now the Most Expensed App (January 29, 2026 (2026 SaaS Management Index, eighth edition))
2. Zylo, Tech Stack Management: Strategy & Best Practices (May 28, 2025; updated February 17, 2026)
3. Zylo, Announcing Zylo's 2025 SaaS Management Index (January 16, 2025 (2025 SaaS Management Index, seventh edition))
4. Vertice, SaaS spend per employee (Last updated October 2026)
5. Vertice, SaaS Inflation Index 2026 Report (2026 edition)
6. Vertice, SaaS Spend per Employee (May 7, 2025)