Australia's Software Shortage Ended. Your Remote Team Is Now A Timezone Decision.

Software engineering came off Australia’s national occupation shortage list, and the pay premium attached to it did not move. That is the fact to build a remote software team on an Australian timezone around, because it changes the reason you would build one. Scarcity is no longer the answer. Cost and hours are.

Most founders running a 30-person tech business still plan as though 2022 never ended. We have argued the scarcity line ourselves, in a 2022 post telling Australian tech firms the talent shortage would only get worse. The sector’s own numbers have since gone the other way. We sell hiring, so weigh what follows: Outstaffer runs a recruitment service that does not take a percentage of salary.

The software shortage ended and nobody updated the plan

The Tech Council of Australia’s Tech Jobs Update 2026 puts the Australian technology workforce at roughly 977,000 people as at November 2025, 424,000 of them in direct tech roles. Software engineering is the largest single technical occupation and has grown about 7 per cent a year since 2022.

The report says that growth is why technical occupations have left the shortage list compiled by Jobs and Skills Australia. Software engineering was formally in shortage until recently. It is not now.

Advertising says the same from the other end. Software engineering job ads halved, from over 8,000 in 2022 to just over 3,000 in 2025.

If employment grew, why did the advertising halve?

Because fewer people left. The Tech Council reads the fall as slower attrition rather than lost jobs: staff are staying in roles longer, and firms are filling seats through targeted recruitment and internal mobility rather than the open market. The roles still exist. They are just not advertised to you.

What a software engineer still costs in Australia

The price did not follow the shortage down. Citing Jobs and Skills Australia data, the same report puts the Australian median weekly wage at $1,852 and gives Software and Applications Programmers, the largest technical cohort in the country, a premium of $685 a week above it.

That is $35,620 a year per head above the national median, and it survived the shortage ending. Four engineers is $142,480 a year of premium. On a ten per cent net margin, a business needs about $1.42 million of revenue standing behind that premium before it is square.

So how did employers fill the roles?

They raised the bar. The same report has the fill rate for Software and Applications Programmers rising from 63 per cent in 2023 to 85 per cent in 2025. Over roughly the same period the share of employers expecting prior experience for software roles climbed from 70 to 85 per cent, while across all occupations it fell from 84 to 75. Average experience required went from 3.8 years to 4.6.

The market cleared, and it cleared by excluding anyone who needs training.

A remote software team in an Australia timezone is a cost and hours question

If the people exist and the price is the obstacle, the design question changes shape. You are not hunting scarce talent. You are deciding which hours of your week need a trained engineer in them, and what each hour of cover is worth.

That is a different brief and it builds a different team. The national version of this argument is that the role stays open because of how you hire rather than who is out there. For software, the Tech Council figures put a number on the how.

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The premium may be earned, which is the better counter-argument

An engineer with 4.6 years behind them is worth more than a graduate, and the Tech Council reads the held premium as a market that matured rather than one in decline. It also argues the premium counts against the idea that generative AI is commoditising programming work, because prices would be falling if it were. Both readings are fair.

The open question is whether every seat needs 4.6 years. Where two years and some supervision would do, you are paying a scarcity price in a market that stopped being scarce, against a bar you set yourself. Price an hour of covered engineering time, then put one role through it. Which of your software seats genuinely needs 4.6 years, and which inherited that number from 2022?