Revenue per Engineer: Benchmarks and Findings from 300+ Companies

The DX Analytics Team researches developer productivity trends and benchmarks to help leaders make smarter decisions about how they measure and improve. In this report, we focus on Revenue per Engineer (RpE)—a metric from the DX Core 4 framework that gives leaders a frame of reference for understanding how efficient their engineering organization is.

This report provides current RpE benchmarks for leaders to use as a basis for comparison for their own teams. Additionally, it surfaces insights about whether factors such as organization size, growth rate, or spend allocation have an impact on overall efficiency.

We collected data for this report from venture capital and growth investment firms, including ICONIQ Growth and Brighton Park Capital, as well as from publicly traded companies. Our analysis includes more than 300 companies. Our dataset primarily consists of SaaS companies, however the findings are relevant industry-wide.

Report highlights:

• Benchmarks: The median Revenue per Engineer (RpE) across companies is $892K. Top-quartile companies achieve $1.5M+.
• Fast-growing companies are less efficient. Fast-growing companies show lower RpE. Companies growing <20% year-over-year show the highest RpE figures.
• The largest and smallest organizations show the lowest RpE. Organizations with fewer than 50 engineers show the lowest efficiency, but are also highly variable. Organizations with more than 1,500 engineers show the next lowest RpE figures.
• Outsourcing to vendors increases RpE. Organizations that allocate a higher percentage of their total R&D spend to vendor tools and services show higher RpE. This suggests that leveraging third-party tools and services may free engineering teams to focus on higher-impact work.
• Recently founded companies are more efficient. Those founded before 2010 show lower efficiency than those founded after 2010, suggesting that younger companies are benefiting from modern tech stacks and go-to-market strategies.