SaaS Statistics 2026: App Sprawl, Spend, and Waste
Companies bought software faster than they built any way to track it, and the bill arrives in three parts: the subscriptions, the seats nobody opens, and the time people lose moving between tools. The numbers below cover app counts, spend per employee, unused licenses, and shadow IT, each sourced inline with the year noted.
How many SaaS apps a company actually runs
305 SaaS applications is what the average company manages, per Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index (2026), built on more than 40 million licenses and $75 billion in spend under management.
118 apps is the average across a broader mix of company sizes in 2026, up from 106 the year before (BetterCloud State of SaaS, 2026). The distance between 118 and 305 is a sampling difference worth naming rather than averaging away: Zylo measures large enterprises, BetterCloud surveys further down the market.
41% is the growth in app count at mid-sized firms (1,500 to 4,999 employees) in a single year, from 116 to 164 applications (BetterCloud, 2026). That reverses two years of consolidation, a 14% decline in 2024 and a 5% decline in 2025.
211 renewals is what the average organization processes annually, and renewals account for 87% of total software spend (Zylo, 2026).
What companies spend on SaaS per employee
$9,455 is the median SaaS spend per employee (Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, 2026).
$9,324 is the average SaaS spend per employee as of Q2 2026, up 1.3% from $9,200, which had held flat for three straight quarters (Vertice, 2026). Two independent datasets landing within $150 of each other is about as close to a settled figure as this category offers.
$55.7M is the average annual SaaS spend per organization, against a $20.6M median (Zylo, 2026). Enterprises above 10,000 employees spend between $123.5M and $375.5M a year.
The licenses nobody opens
36% of SaaS licenses sit unused when measured against recommended utilization levels (Zylo, 2026).
$19.8M is average annual license waste per organization, down 5.3% from $20.9M the year before (Zylo, 2026). Utilization climbed from 47% in 2024 to 54% in 2025, which still leaves close to half of provisioned seats unopened.
63% of organizations say too many unused or underutilized apps, plus license and budget pressure, is what drives them to consolidate (BetterCloud, 2026).
25% is the overspend Gartner expects from organizations without centralized visibility into their SaaS portfolio, a projection running through 2028 (Gartner, cited 2026).
Shadow IT: who is buying the software
Shadow IT is software bought and run by individuals or departments without IT’s knowledge or approval.
81% of SaaS spend is now controlled by business units, with IT directly managing just 15% (Zylo, 2026, from a survey of 218 IT leaders).
34% of the SaaS portfolio is shadow IT, while it accounts for only 4% of spend (Zylo, 2026). Many small purchases, little money, a lot of surface area. Expense reports do not catch all of it either: 51% of software expenses are miscategorized as something other than software.
44% of apps are not IT-sanctioned (BetterCloud, 2026). Shadow IT makes up 24% of total IT budgets, and 39% of employees run apps on work devices that company IT does not manage.
77% of IT leaders have found AI features or applications operating without IT’s awareness (Zylo, 2026). Expense-based SaaS spend grew 267% year over year, and ChatGPT is now the single most expensed application.
SaaS prices are climbing faster than inflation
16.4% was SaaS inflation in June 2026, the highest monthly rate Vertice has recorded (2026), roughly four times US CPI at 4.2%.
4.3 percentage points is how far SaaS inflation moved in two months, from 12.1% in April 2026 to 16.4% in June, the fastest acceleration in that dataset (Vertice, 2026).
33.8% is the average discount off list price won by companies negotiating renewals with benchmark pricing data (Vertice, 2026).
What a big stack costs in switching time
1,200 times a day is how often workers toggle between apps, adding up to just under four hours a week spent reorienting after each switch (Harvard Business Review, 2022). The study tracked 137 users across three Fortune 500 companies for up to five weeks.
Every 2 minutes is how often employees are interrupted during core working hours by a meeting, email, or notification, 275 times a day (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2025).
9 apps per day is the average number workers switch between, and 56% say they feel they must respond to notifications immediately (Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index, as cited by Asana in 2026).
7 apps is the average number of generative AI tools sitting in one portfolio, which put the function on Zylo’s most redundant app functions list for the first time, at number 10 (Zylo, 2026).
Who becomes the integration layer
None of these numbers are really about the price of software. A stack in the hundreds means a person is doing the integration by hand: copying a decision out of email into a project tool, retyping a date into a calendar, chasing a status that already exists two tabs over. That is where the four hours a week goes. Carly takes the re-entry work off a person’s desk, running email, calendar, and the follow-through between them, and Carly connects to thousands of apps, so an update lands where it belongs without anyone opening the tab to put it there.
FAQ
How many SaaS apps does the average company use? The average company manages 305 SaaS applications (Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, 2026). Datasets weighted toward smaller companies put it lower, at 118 apps in 2026, up from 106 the year before (BetterCloud, 2026).
How much do companies spend on SaaS per employee? Median SaaS spend per employee is $9,455 (Zylo, 2026). Vertice puts the average at $9,324 as of Q2 2026, up 1.3% after three flat quarters.
What percentage of SaaS licenses go unused? 36% sit unused against recommended utilization levels, costing the average organization $19.8M a year in license waste (Zylo, 2026). Utilization reached 54% in 2025, up from 47% in 2024.
What is shadow IT? Software bought and used without IT’s knowledge or approval. It makes up 34% of the average SaaS portfolio while accounting for just 4% of spend (Zylo, 2026), and 44% of apps are not IT-sanctioned (BetterCloud, 2026).
Related: Workplace Automation Statistics · Context Switching Statistics · Productivity Statistics · Email Statistics · Customer Retention Statistics · CRM Statistics
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