PHP Maintenance and Tech Debt: 2025 Trends - Zend

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. … ... Yet, when we examine the top challenges around PHP in 2025, shown below, we found that the biggest barriers for teams were Performance Issues (31%), Debugging (30%), and PHP Dependency Management (26% and tied with Hiring) – which all directly link to PHP maintenance work. It is important to note, however, that PHP maintenance is multi-faceted, covering a variety of tasks that could fall into many buckets. This includes Security, which came in second by less than 1% to Building New Features as a development priority. Still, the fact that Performance Issues was the top challenge in using PHP, yet Improving Performance came in fourth as a development priority, shows an interesting disconnect happening in the ecosystem. ### PHP Maintenance vs. Developing New Features ... The largest percentage of teams (approximately 37%) reported spending 25% of their time on PHP maintenance and production bug/issue resolution, and 75% of their time developing new functionalities. This was followed closely by a 50/50 split between PHP maintenance and building new features, with the top three rounded out with teams spending 10% of their time on PHP maintenance.