PHP Maintenance and Tech Debt: 2026 Trends

PHP maintenance is a critical part in any PHP strategy, covering bug fixes, performance improvements, updates, and more. However, when examining our findings from the latest edition of the PHP Landscape Report, we found that many teams are deprioritizing crucial PHP maintenance tasks for other concerns, which can cause technical debt to accrue at an alarming pace.

In this blog, I take an in-depth look at the state of PHP maintenance in 2026, explore how gaps in PHP maintenance can impact your business, and offer practical strategies to help your team stay ahead of PHP maintenance challenges and technical debt this year.

Get the 2026 PHP Landscape Report

About the PHP Landscape Report

The PHP Landscape Report is created from an anonymous survey of self-identified PHP developers and administrators from around the world. We ask questions covering topics across the language, including:

• Monitoring and observability practices
• Migration and upgrade plans
• Security and compliance strategies
• PHP deployment and usage

We then analyze all provided answers to track current patterns and upcoming trends in the PHP ecosystem, providing insights to help your team prepare for the coming months.

The latest edition of the PHP Landscape Report is available for free. Download your copy today, along with all past editions.

PHP Teams in 2026

Before we dive into ongoing PHP maintenance trends and explore how they are impacting technical debt, let’s take a look at who took the 2026 survey.

Experienced PHP Developers and Engineers Were the Top Participants

As we’ve seen in previous iterations of the PHP Landscape Report, the majority of our survey participants were in Developer or Engineer roles (51%). This was followed by Team Leads or Managers (10%) and Architects (9%), with other titles seeing a more even spread of representation.

This tracks and makes sense to me, as developers and engineers usually have the most involved role in managing, building, and maintaining PHP applications.

In another echo of our 2025 findings, we also found that over half of our survey participants have been using PHP for 15 years or more. This is followed by 10 to 15 years (18%), and 5 to 10 years (14%). Only 15% of surveyed PHP users reported 5 years or less of PHP experience.

While the large experience drop-off follows with other surveys and reports in the ecosystem, it is notable. PHP is a mature language with a long history, and it makes sense that many established professionals will have been using it for a decade or more. But, when you or your organization is considering PHP maintenance projects or looking to minimize tech debt, it is likely a cause for concern. 

After all, without an influx of new PHP developers, how will you ensure the long-term success of your PHP applications? You may want to consider training up personnel within your organization, or raising awareness of the language via user groups in your city or region.

Surveyed PHP Teams Skewed Small and Were Located in the EU

We found that just under half of surveyed PHP users worked for companies with 20 employees or less, with 69% of participants working for companies with under 100 employees. The remaining 31% worked at organizations with 100 employees or more.

Additionally, we found that over half of our participants (58%) worked at organizations headquartered in the EU or UK. This was followed by North America (23%) and Asia (9%). 

What Are the Top PHP Maintenance Challenges and Priorities?

We asked our PHP participants to share their top development priorities in 2026, with the option to select multiple answers as applicable. For the 5th year and counting, Building New Features was named the top priority by the highest percentage of respondents (40%). However, compared to 2025, we saw a more even distribution across priorities, as shown in the chart below.

We also found that while the order of the top options mostly remained the same year over year, certain percentages dropped. Notably, Security fell by 6%, Improving Code Quality by 12%, and Improving Performance by 14%. This led to the only shake-up in priority rankings, with Improving Performance landing in last place after Deployment Automation/Orchestration.

Learn More About PHP Performance in 2026

PHP Maintenance vs. Developing New Features

To better understand our surveyed team’s priorities, we asked participants to estimate how much of their team’s time is spent on developing new functionalities vs. maintenance and production bug/issue resolution.

Our 2026 findings followed what we have seen in previous years, with PHP teams feeling the crunch to spend more time developing new features and less on maintaining existing applications. Nearly half (42%) reported that they split their time “25% maintenance, 75% new functionality.” This was followed by 31% splitting their time evenly between the two tasks.

Here is what my colleague, Senior Solutions Engineer Yeshua Hall, had to say about these findings:

“Not all languages are created equal, and it’s interesting to consider how PHP teams are splitting their time compared to other languages. For instance, as we saw in the 2026 State of Open Source Report, Java teams shared very different priorities, with almost a third reporting spending 75 – 90% of their time maintaining and fixing, and only 10 – 25% on developing new functionalities.”

The Link Between Deprioritizing PHP Maintenance and Technical Debt

PHP is a fantastic choice for delivering business value, allowing developers to keep companies productive while engaging their own customers. However, with macro conditions in the development space forcing companies to do more with less, and with an increasingly complex web ecosystem, we are curious about the ongoing trend of deprioritizing PHP maintenance tasks across teams.

After all, although PHP maintenance directly impacts the security, performance, usability, and longevity of your application, many teams still fall behind. Once a backlog of overdue or postponed PHP maintenance tasks has collected, catching up can be an expensive, lengthy, and complicated undertaking. This, in turn, significantly accelerates the accumulation of technical debt.

40% of PHP Teams Deploy EOL PHP Versions

For example, let’s look at what happens when teams fail to upgrade PHP to the latest version, especially since 40% of surveyed teams were deploying end of life (EOL) PHP versions.

As PHP evolves, older versions lose support, functions deprecate, and insecure practices become serious security liabilities. When developers postpone updating, the code base diverges from modern standards and best practices. The longer an upgrade is put off, the more expensive and complex future upgrades become. 

Teams Quickly Find Themselves Buried in Technical Debt

With every skipped PHP maintenance cycle, a new layer of outdated logic and unpatched vulnerabilities gets added, forcing your team to spend more time deciphering legacy code and PHP debugging issues instead of focusing on building new features. 

As this debt continues to accumulate, even small changes can become risky and increase the chances of introducing new bugs or breaking existing functionality. Add in a lack of automated tests, modular architecture, or documentation (which is another PHP maintenance task that often falls by the wayside), and development will be slowed even further as your team’s productivity continues to decline. 

Eventually, the cost of maintaining the application or upgrading it may outweigh the value it provides, leading to the need for a full application rewrite, which is an expensive and time-consuming outcome that could have been avoided with regular, proactive PHP maintenance.

How to Combat PHP Tech Debt Without Overloading Your Team

Tackling technical debt doesn’t have to mean overburdening your PHP team, regardless of the size of your organization or how many years of PHP experience you have. By establishing clear PHP maintenance and development standards, adopting scalable technologies like containers, and integrating smart observability tools, you can improve application health without adding stress to your developers.

Establish Clear PHP Maintenance and Development Standards

Maintaining and developing web applications with PHP requires establishing clear standards. This means defining a set of PHP maintenance best practices that all developers follow consistently across the code base, including but not limited to:

• Adhering to modern coding standards
• Using version control with clear branching strategies
• Setting guidelines for code structure, naming conventions, and more
• Ensuring all new features and fixes implemented include unit tests
• Maintaining thorough documentation and on-boarding materials
• Conducting regular check-ins and trainings with your team

Those last three points are particularly important. Unit tests will help reduce future regressions due to code changes while assisting with PHP upgrades, and you can identify PHP deprecations early and properly plan for them. Documentation, comprehensive on-boarding, check-ins, and continuing trainings also go a very long way in establishing consistent PHP maintenance standards. By providing clear communication at all levels, you can ensure that all developers on your team understand and know how to apply these best practices. 

Taking these steps will slow the accumulation of technical debt and make it easier to keep up with and complete PHP maintenance tasks in the future.

Deploy Container Technologies

According to our findings, 57% of PHP teams are currently deploying containers in their applications, a slight drop from 2025’s 60%. An additional 12% didn’t currently deploy containers but had plans to implement them within the next year (up from 10% in 2025).

Greatly reducing “it works on my machine” issues, containerization ensures that all team members and environments run the same PHP versions, extensions, and configurations, meaning that developers can replicate production issues with ease.  Containers also simplify PHP dependency management, testing automation, and updating without disrupting existing setups.

Ultimately, PHP containers provide the flexibility and control needed to tackle tech debt incrementally without compromising security or compliance. However, they do come with a steep learning curve, adoption difficulties, and other challenges.

Fortunately, a number of organizations, including Zend, have stepped up to provide simpler alternatives, allowing you to make the most of PHP containers without stretching already extended resources. We offer a full container registry, as well as CIS hardened Docker images to ensure compliance with security standards.

Learn More About Zend Container Solutions

Adopt Modern Monitoring and Observability Solutions

As PHP applications grow and scale to meet changing demands, teams can no longer rely on reactive monitoring or basic uptime checks alone. Modern PHP maintenance increasingly depends on deep observability — the ability to understand real-time application behavior across performance, errors, dependencies, and infrastructure. This level of insight helps teams identify issues earlier, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and prevent small performance issues from becoming costly outages.

Zend offers several solutions for improving PHP monitoring and observability. These include ZendHQ, an extension for ZendPHP runtimes, which provides detailed visibility into PHP application performance, error trends, and runtime behavior. You can:

• Integrate with existing PHP APMs, with no re-platforming required
• Reduce time-to-resolution via real-time root cause analysis
• Direct developer attention via curated, custom alerts
• And much more

Try ZendPHP + ZendHQ Free for 21 Days

For those who want even deeper insight, we also offer the Enterprise Web Platform, a custom-configured command center for mission-critical PHP. Built on ZendHQ and ZendPHP, the platform combines monitoring, deployment controls, and runtime management into one security-first solution. This makes it easy for you to manage PHP maintenance more proactively, reduce risk, and keep applications stable as they scale. Plus, you get full support from the PHP engineers who built the platform.

Work With an Experienced Third Party for Additional Support

While the above solutions are fantastic options for managing technical debt and adopting PHP maintenance best practices, they assume that your developer team has the time, knowledge, and experience needed for adequate implementation. If you lack in-house PHP expertise, or if you are looking to offload certain PHP maintenance to free your developers to focus their attention elsewhere, working with a trusted third party, such as Zend Professional Services, can be an effective option. 

Our full suite of expert PHP support options are designed to accelerate development, modernize legacy systems, and provide unparalleled expertise and mentorship for your team. Depending on your needs, you might partner with us for:

• PHP Long-Term Support (LTS) – Enterprise-grade support for EOL PHP two years beyond the community support lifecycle, with upgrades implemented on your schedule
• Migration and Modernization Services – Upgrade and migrate critical PHP applications to remain secure, compliant, and performant
• PHP Web Application Audits – Optimize performance, stay compliant, and identify issues in web apps before they become expensive problems, with PHP CI/CD audits also available
• Black Belt Services – Flexible support hours to maximize your resources and train your team in PHP maintenance best practices
• Custom PHP Consulting – Tailored solutions to meet unique application requirements

Additional Resources

• White Paper - Planning Your Next PHP Migration

• White Paper - The Hidden Costs of PHP Upgrades

• On-Demand Webinar - How to Secure, Scale, and Optimize With ZendPHP + ZendHQ

• Blog - Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP

• Blog - Can You Afford a Web Application Security Breach?

• Blog - Staying Ahead of PHP 8.1 EOL