What’s a good developer survey participation rate?

In recent years, frameworks like SPACE and DevEx have driven more companies to use developer surveys to better understand productivity and the factors influencing it. At DX, one of our core products is a developer survey platform, and a question we often hear is: what participation rates are other companies seeing?

To answer this, we analyzed survey participation rates from a randomly selected group of over 200 DX customers. Importantly, our dataset is drawn exclusively from DX customers, who consistently achieve significantly higher participation rates than the broader industry.

Here’s what we found.

The companies we studied averaged an impressive 96% participation rate across their last three quarterly surveys. This far outpaces industry benchmarks, where companies like Microsoft, Google, Peloton, and Shopify typically see participation rates ranging from 25% to 50%. Many of the companies in our analysis saw their participation rates jump from 15-20% before using DX to 80-100%. If you’re curious how DX drives this, consider seeing a product demo.

We also examined whether participation rates vary by company size, given the common belief that larger organizations struggle with engagement. Our data revealed a slight decline in participation as company size increases. Companies with fewer than 100 engineers saw a 98% participation rate, while those with 100-500 engineers averaged 95%. For companies with 500-1,000 engineers, participation was 92%, and for organizations with more than 1,000 engineers, it dropped to 91%.

So, what survey participation rate should you aim for? If you’re only gathering qualitative feedback, participation rate may not be a critical concern. But for organization-wide measurement and benchmarking, an 80%+ participation rate is essential. Here’s why:

1. Credibility: Tech executives won’t trust the data without strong participation.
2. Team-level data: Team-level insights are key for action, but managers can’t use the data if only half the team responds.
3. Reliability: Benchmarking and measurements become unreliable with sparse samples.

For more on DX’s approach to developer surveys, read this article.