CHENNAI: Tech sector hiring in India is expected to decline by 1% compared with December 2025, with job openings in the sector standing at 1,03,000 in January 2026. This marks the second-lowest demand level recorded in the past five years, since 2021. According to the January outlook report by talent solutions and staffing firm Xpheno, the current active demand volume is down sharply by about 60% from its peak in January 2022.
The report notes that full-time openings in the tech sector, at around 79,000, are down 5% from December 2025 and 24% lower than in January last year. Hiring activity has remained sluggish over the past six to eight months. Sustained pressure continues to weigh on the IT services segment, which remains the largest consumer of tech talent but has shown little hiring aggression.
Active openings in the IT services cohort stood at roughly 41,000, down 18% from a year earlier, reflecting cautious enterprise spending and delayed decision-making by global clients. In contrast, global capability centres, or GCCs, have emerged as a relative bright spot, registering modest growth in hiring volumes and accounting for a rising share of overall demand.
Analysts, however, caution that GCC-led hiring, while steady, is not yet large enough to offset the broader slowdown across the sector. Openings in GCCs stood at about 17,000, up 13% from December and 7% on a year-on-year basis. Among tier-1 cities, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Delhi-NCR recorded the highest number of openings at around 24,000, 10,000 and 8,000, respectively. Delhi also saw the steepest year-on-year decline in active demand for tech professionals, with openings falling 59% compared with January 2025.
In contrast, tier-2 and tier-3 cities witnessed a sharp increase in openings, which rose to about 38,000, up 12% from December and 30% from January 2025. The report highlights that while demand at the entry level has picked up, hiring at mid-level and senior positions declined in January 2026. Mid-to-senior roles account for about 56% of all active openings and registered a 5% drop in volume compared with the previous month.
“The Indian tech sector, which once dominated the country’s overall talent action, seems to have caught a cold in late 2022 and continues to struggle with a low-to-no recovery trajectory,” said Kamal Karanth, co-founder of Xpheno.
“After being the first to recover from the COVID-induced lockdowns, the tech sector went into a phase of hyper hiring from early 2021 to late 2022. Active demand peaked in January–February 2022 at over 260,000 openings, accounting for more than 85% of overall active jobs,” he added.
However, as headwinds intensified in the latter half of 2022, the sector witnessed one of the sharpest and fastest rollbacks in hiring. Active demand fell by nearly 50% to around 133,000 by January 2023, setting the sector on a downward slide from which it has struggled to recover. Barring a few short-lived periods of improvement, the decline has largely persisted, and the outlook for a meaningful recovery to earlier volumes remains unencouraging, he said.