IT sector salaries are showing signs of a resurgence following a dip that led to South African salary offers shrinking by as much as 44% in certain cases, according to Pnet.
Pnet’s Jobs Market Trends report for January 2026 shows that solutions architects, systems analysts and database administrators are among the top earners in South Africa IT sector as demand begins to tick up again.
“Over the past three years, we have seen a sustained decline in salary offers across IT roles. This trend mirrors a broader slowdown in labour demand for IT professionals, which has been evident for the past four years,” Pnet said.
“Importantly, this softening in demand is not unique to South Africa but reflects a global pattern across the IT sector,” said Anja Bates, head of data at Pnet. “There are, however, early signs of recovery. Recent data points to a modest but encouraging uptick in labour demand for IT and technical professionals. As labour demand strengthens, salary offers typically follow, particularly in areas where skills are scarce.”
As part of its January report, Pnet posted a salary guide looking at over 100 job roles across 11 sectors, 21 of which are in the IT sector. The salary ranges in the report are based on job offerings across Pnet’s various job sites and represent national averages for each over the last 12 months.
IT project managers were among the roles most affected by the dip in salaries over the past few years, with Pnet data showing a 44% decline between 2022 and 2025. According to the salary guide, IT project manager salaries range between R31 000 and R50 000, depending on experience and the role.
Skills in demand
Roles with the lowest average pay include network administrators and IT support technicians, which range between R20 000 and R30 000 monthly.
Developer roles specialising in specific ecosystems or programming languages command some of the largest salaries, with .NET, Java and C# skills garnering salaries between R36 000 and R50 000 monthly. With a salary range of between R22 000 and R37 000 monthly, PHP developers command the lowest salaries compared to other developers using other languages. Bates said the availability of skills will determine which roles will be the first to benefit as salaries rise.
Read: SA tech graduates arrive in jobs unprepared as skills gap widens
The uptick in demand for IT talent has been gradual. In the October 2025 edition of the Jobs Trends report, Pnet noted that “software developer” had returned to the top of the list of most in-demand jobs in South Africa for the first time in three-and-a-half years.
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While the previous spike in demand was fuelled by a need for rapid digitisation due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated work-from-home phenomenon, the need for data scientists, machine learning and robotics experts as AI-first paradigms becoming the norm is behind the current demand. Not surprisingly, roles with the highest scarcity of skills are among the first to see salary offers rise, Bates said.
“Roles such as software developers, where the supply pool remains limited, are likely to benefit first,” she said. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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