The headline lands in your feed on a Monday: software engineers and developer programmers are no longer in shortage on Australia's 2025 Occupation Shortage List [C2] [C3]. For those roles, the software developer shortage in Australia is officially over. You read it twice. Then you open the hiring tracker and count. The backend role went up five weeks ago. Two shortlists, one candidate who took a counteroffer, and a payments epic that has now slid across three sprint reviews.
Both things are true at once. Coming off the shortage list means software roles in Australia now get filled. It doesn't mean they get filled fast. The fill rate for software and applications programmers went from 63% in 2023 to 85% in 2025 [C11]. A permanent hire still takes five weeks on average [C17]. The list measures whether you eventually fill the role. It says nothing about how many sprints you lose while you wait.
The Occupation Shortage List (OSL) is Jobs and Skills Australia's annual assessment of which occupations employers can't fill. An occupation is rated in shortage when fewer than 67% of its vacancies are filled [C5].
Key takeaways
On the official measure, no. The 2025 Occupation Shortage List rates Software Engineer, Developer Programmer, Analyst Programmer and ICT QA Engineer as No Shortage nationally and in all eight states and territories [C6]. Software Tester is the exception [C7].
The OSL's test is blunt: fewer than 67% of vacancies filled means shortage [C5]. Clear that bar and you're off the list.
On the 2025 OSL, the software engineer occupation cleared it. Software Engineer had been in shortage every year since JSA started the study in 2021 [C2]. It is now not in shortage in any state or territory [C2]. Developer Programmer and ICT Quality Assurance Engineer came off too [C3]. By code, that's Software Engineer (261313), Developer Programmer (261312), Analyst Programmer (261311) and ICT QA Engineer (263211) [C6]. Across the whole list, 293 of 1,022 occupations (about 29%) were in national shortage, down from 36% in 2023 [C1].
One dating note, because it gets garbled: this is the 2025 OSL, released in October 2025. As of early October 2026 it's still the latest edition [C10], and a 2026 update is due. If you're reading this after it lands, check whether the ratings moved.
So the government's answer is settled. The more useful question is how the market got there.
Supply didn't flood in. Employers got pickier. By 2025, 98% of employers required prior experience for software programming roles, against a 75% average across all occupations [C12]. The average experience asked for in software engineering roles rose from 3.8 to 4.6 years [C12]. The Tech Council of Australia's own reading is the sharpest line in its report: "Crucially, this equilibrium has been achieved because employers have raised the barrier to entry." [C12]
That changes what "no shortage" means. The OSL doesn't split by seniority. An 85% fill rate built on roles that demand four-plus years of experience tells you mid-level and senior engineers can be found. It doesn't tell you they're waiting by the phone.
The job-ad data points the same way. Software engineer job ads have roughly halved since 2021/22 [C13]. Across the whole Australian market, applications per job ad were at their highest level on record in SEEK's June 2026 Employment Report [C20]. Fewer ads, more applicants per ad, a higher experience bar. That's a market where your inbox fills up and your shortlist doesn't.
Nicole Gorton, a director at Robert Half, put it plainly: "Even in a candidate-rich market, top talent remains in short supply." [C17]
Here's the gap the shortage list can't see. Robert Half surveyed 500 Australian hiring managers in July 2025. Time to hire in Australia for a permanent role averages five weeks, and 31% of employers take six weeks or more [C17]. The consequences weren't abstract: 44% reported more workload landing on existing staff, and 32% reported delayed project timelines [C17].
A caveat before you quote that in a board pack. Robert Half's sample covers finance, HR and IT hiring managers together, not software teams alone [C17]. We couldn't find a public Australian time-to-fill figure for software roles specifically. My reading is that five weeks is a reasonable floor for a backend engineer, not a ceiling, because the experience bar above narrows the pool you're actually interviewing from. That's an inference, not a measurement.
The process itself also costs you candidates. In a separate Robert Half survey, 22% of Australian employers named a "lengthy or impersonal recruitment process" as a reason candidates turned down their offers [C18]. And 54% said they worry about "hiring quickly enough to reduce the cost of a vacant position" [C18].
Run that against a two-week sprint cadence. Five weeks is two and a half sprints before anyone signs, and the start date comes after notice periods and onboarding on top. The OSL scores that role as filled. Your roadmap scores it as a quarter. The cost of that vacancy is its own bill, and we've broken it down in why you can't hire engineers fast enough.
Read past the headline and the list isn't empty for tech. The software tester shortage hasn't eased: Software Tester (261314) is still in shortage nationally and in all eight states and territories [C7]. Cybersecurity engineers and cybersecurity operations coordinators are in shortage nationwide [C4]. Cyber governance, risk and compliance specialists are in shortage everywhere except the Northern Territory [C4].
The split is odd at first glance. ICT QA Engineer is off the list [C6] while Software Tester is on it [C7]. Penetration testers came off [C3] while cybersecurity engineers stayed [C4]. The practical takeaway doesn't depend on explaining the classification: the occupation codes matter, and "tech is fine now" is too coarse to plan with.
If your gap is testing or security, you're still hiring in a market JSA rates as in shortage [C4] [C5] [C7]. Budget the timeline accordingly. A release that's waiting on a software tester is waiting on one of the few tech roles the list still flags in every state.
The other reason not to bank on 2025's numbers is that the supply side is wobbling. The ACS's Digital Pulse 2026 found Australian tech employment fell 0.3% to 967,000 in 2025, the first decline on record [C15]. It estimates around 259,000 more tech professionals will be needed by 2035 [C15].
The Tech Council counts differently and puts the tech workforce at about 977,000 in November 2025 [C14]. The two numbers come from different methodologies, so don't subtract one from the other. The direction is what matters, and the ACS series turned down for the first time.
Policy is moving the same way. The government's target of 1.2 million tech jobs by 2030 was pulled from the Department of Industry's KPIs, with FOI documents stating it "will not reach the 1.2 million target by 2030" [C16]. ACS operations director Betsy Gregg told a parliamentary committee that visa processing for migrants "is slowing down actively in IT" [C16].
None of that puts software engineers back on the list tomorrow. My reading is that the 85% fill rate is a snapshot taken during a soft patch in demand, while the pipeline that refills the market gets narrower. I wouldn't build a hiring plan that assumes next year is easier.
Hiring faster isn't the fix. You can tighten a process, but you can't make the market produce an engineer with 4.6 years' experience on demand [C12]. What you can do is stop letting the roadmap wait on the requisition.
Treat the open role and the blocked work as two separate problems. Keep the permanent search running at whatever pace finds the right person. In parallel, put an engineer on the specific work that's slipping, so the payments epic ships while the shortlist is still forming.
That's the job Dev On Demand is built for. After signing, yousource assigns an engineer the same business day, and that engineer ships your first task within 5 business days. Matched isn't shipping, so plan around the five days. It's a flat monthly subscription: $3,495/mo for one engineer, $6,795/mo for two. Work runs on a 3-day task cycle with daily async updates, and you sign off on each task before the next one starts. You own all the code, the IP assignment is signed up front, and you can cancel any time with no notice period. The bench covers dev, QA and UX engineers, which matters if your gap is the software tester role the OSL still flags.
If you want the wider hiring numbers behind this, they're in our developer hiring statistics for 2026.
Here's the concrete version. Open your tracker and find the oldest unfilled engineering role. Look at the work it was meant to unblock and pick the smallest piece of it that a competent engineer could ship in a week. Write that up as a task this afternoon. Then decide whether it sits in the backlog for another five weeks, or whether you start with one real task and judge the engineer on what comes back.
Not for software engineers or developer programmers, on the official measure. The latest edition is the 2025 Occupation Shortage List, released in October 2025, and a 2026 list had not been published as of early October 2026 [C10]. On the 2025 list, Software Engineer is not in shortage in any state or territory [C2], and Developer Programmer is no longer in shortage [C3]. Software Tester is the exception and is still in shortage [C7].
Yes. On the 2025 Occupation Shortage List, Software Tester (ANZSCO 261314) is in shortage nationally and in all eight states and territories [C7]. ICT QA Engineer (263211), by contrast, is rated No Shortage nationally and in every state and territory [C6].
A permanent hire in Australia takes five weeks on average, and 31% of employers take six weeks or more, according to a Robert Half survey of 500 Australian hiring managers [C17]. That sample covers finance, HR and IT hiring managers, not software teams alone [C17]. We couldn't find a public Australian time-to-fill figure for software roles specifically.
Mainly because employers raised the bar, according to the Tech Council of Australia. By 2025, 98% of employers required prior experience for software programming roles, against a 75% average across all occupations, and the average experience asked for in software engineering roles rose from 3.8 to 4.6 years [C12]. Applications per job ad across the Australian market were at their highest level on record in SEEK's June 2026 Employment Report [C20].
