How Big Should Your IT Team Be?

Pave Data Lab
December 3, 2024
1
min read

How big should your information technology (IT) team be? I was recently asked this question by the CEO of a pre-IPO tech company who was worried that his company’s IT department was bloated.

Here's what the benchmarks say.

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IT Team Size Benchmarks

We analyzed Pave data from 1,856 companies with 100+ employees and at least one IT team member to find the median number of full-time employees (FTEs) per IT team member by company size—similar to our analysis of HRBP team size.

Chart showing median ratio of full-time employees to IT team members.

The findings indicate that companies tend to have a median of about 75 FTEs per IT team member. That said, the ratios vary widely from the 25th to 75th percentiles. This variance could stem from factors like IT outsourcing, IT automation tools, the complexity of the company’s tech stack, or how distributed a company’s workforce is.

Where does your IT team fall on this spectrum? Do you think it's lean, balanced, or stretched too thin?

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Matthew Schulman
CEO & Founder
Matt Schulman is CEO and founder of Pave, the complete platform for Total Rewards professionals. Prior to Pave, he was a software engineer at Facebook focusing on user-centric mobile experiences. A self-proclaimed "comp nerd," Matt is known for sharing data-driven thought leadership around all things compensation and personal finance.

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