Pakistan is conducting its first-ever IT census, a joint initiative by the Ministry of IT and Telecom and the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. It will map freelancers, software developers, call centre workers, and video editors — people who have never appeared in official data — giving policymakers the evidence base needed to set realistic export targets and build credible AI policy.
What Is the Pakistan IT Census and Why Is It Happening Now?
For a country that has spent years loudly championing its digital economy, there is something striking buried in a recent government announcement: Pakistan is only now, in 2026, conducting its first census of IT workers. That admission tells you a great deal about the structural gap that has quietly undermined the country’s digital ambitions.
The Ministry of IT and Telecom has decided to conduct Pakistan’s first-ever IT census in collaboration with the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. The objective is straightforward but long overdue: collect reliable, comprehensive data on Pakistan’s IT workforce — its size, skills, geographic distribution, and composition — for the first time in the country’s history.
The scope of the IT census is broader than the title might suggest. It is not just counting software engineers at registered technology companies. It is a ground-up mapping of everyone who earns a living through digital skills, including the vast informal workforce that has driven the sector’s growth but remained officially invisible.
Specifically, the census will include freelancers, video editors, call centre employees, and the broader IT workforce collected from across the country — not just major tech hubs. The most significant aspect of this scope is the explicit inclusion of informal IT labour in national data for the first time.
The census will deploy between 180 and 200 enumerators nationwide to collect data — a field operation of meaningful scale that reflects the geographic breadth of what is being surveyed.
The Scale of the Invisibility Problem
Pakistan’s IT sector has been growing at a remarkable pace. Pakistan’s IT and telecom export remittances reached $4.184 billion during July to May of fiscal year 2025–26. The comparable figure for the same eleven-month period in the previous fiscal year was $3.475 billion, making the year-on-year growth rate for the cumulative period over 20 percent. Yet nearly all of this growth happened without the government knowing exactly who was generating it.
Pakistan’s freelance economy is substantial — the country consistently ranks among the top five globally for freelance workforce size — but because most of it operates outside formal employment structures, it has never been captured in official government statistics.
The existing statistical machinery simply was not built for this reality. The Bureau of Statistics’ standard economic surveys are built around formal employment, registered businesses, salaried employees, and documented transactions. A freelancer earning dollars through Upwork in Faisalabad does not appear in any of those frameworks. A video editor working for international clients on a project basis has no official existence in Pakistan’s employment data. A call centre worker at a small, unregistered operation in Karachi is similarly invisible.
Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan currently registers 34,420 IT and IT-enabled services companies — a number that, while growing, still vastly undercounts the true size of the sector when informal and freelance workers are included.
Setting Billion-Dollar Targets Without Reliable Data
This is where the situation becomes genuinely problematic for economic planning. Pakistan has been making bold export commitments for its IT sector for years, with targets growing ever more ambitious. The government has aimed to achieve an export target of $15 billion by 2030. National strategies aiming to scale IT exports toward $10 billion are now written into budget planning for 2026–27.
These are serious commitments that affect foreign investment pitches, trade negotiations, and budget allocations. And yet, as Business Recorder noted recently, Pakistan is about to conduct its first-ever IT census — a revealing acknowledgement that the government has been setting export targets for a sector it cannot yet fully measure. Policy cannot be evidence-based if the evidence base does not exist.
The consequences of this blind spot are tangible. Policy decisions about the IT sector have been made without accurate data on who is actually working in it, how many people are involved, what skills they have, and where they are located. Infrastructure investments, broadband rollout priorities, and skills training programmes have all been designed on the basis of partial or estimated figures.
Pakistan’s IT exports are growing in volume, not value, due to a digital skills gap and lack of strategic investment. Without knowing the actual shape of the workforce, it is almost impossible to fix that.
What Accurate Data Will Actually Unlock
The IT census is not just a bureaucratic exercise. Done well, it has real downstream consequences for how Pakistan can develop and govern its digital economy. The Ministry of IT has been explicit about the practical applications:
- Targeted skills training: Knowing what skills exist and where the gaps are allows the government and educational institutions to design targeted training programmes rather than generic digital skills initiatives that may not match market demand.
- Smarter infrastructure spending: Geographic data on where IT workers are concentrated allows more targeted decisions about broadband expansion, co-working infrastructure, and technology park development.
- Stronger trade positioning: Accurate sector data strengthens Pakistan’s negotiating position in trade discussions about digital services — an increasingly important category in international trade agreements.
- A credible national talent database: “The project will create a comprehensive national database of digital talent for the first time,” sources in the IT Ministry confirmed. The initiative will give Pakistan a structured view of its workforce capacity at a moment when global enterprises are demanding transparency on talent depth, skill specialisation, and delivery readiness.
The AI Policy Connection
The timing of the IT census is especially relevant given Pakistan’s active push into artificial intelligence. Pakistan’s National AI Policy 2025 targets 3,000 AI scholarships annually and the establishment of AI Centres of Excellence in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad. These are ambitious goals — but their success depends entirely on understanding the baseline workforce that will be trained and deployed.
The problem is not ambition but foundation. Pakistan produces more than 75,000 IT graduates annually. Yet only a fraction enters the formal technology workforce, and fewer than 10% of active IT professionals possess applied AI skills. The reason is structural: university curricula are misaligned with industry demand, and there is no credentialing system connecting AI skill acquisition to employment outcomes.
Planning a national AI strategy without a clear picture of existing digital talent is, to put it bluntly, building on sand. The IT census provides the foundation that makes AI policy actionable rather than aspirational. As Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal stated at the launch of Pakistan’s broader economic census: “even artificial intelligence cannot function effectively without reliable data — in the digital economy, data is the true fuel driving growth.”
The stakes are significant. The Access Partnership estimates that narrowing Pakistan’s digital skills gap could add Rs2.8 trillion to annual GDP by 2030. That number only becomes achievable if policymakers actually know what the gap looks like. For a deeper look at how AI is already being deployed in Pakistan’s public sector, see our coverage of the FIA’s AI system being used to fight human smuggling, an example of government AI applications that also depend on quality data pipelines.
What Comes Next
The IT census represents a maturation moment for Pakistan’s digital policy ecosystem — a shift from rhetoric and round numbers toward evidence-based governance. The sector’s growth has been real and impressive. Freelancer export earnings are cited between $856 million and $959 million for the year, roughly 50% growth, with the finance minister saying the figure is on track to cross $1 billion. But sustaining that trajectory through intelligent policy requires knowing the workforce driving it.
Beyond domestic policy, the census is being positioned as a tool to elevate Pakistan’s standing on the international stage. Foreign investors and global technology companies evaluating Pakistan as a delivery or outsourcing destination consistently demand evidence of talent depth. Anecdotes and estimates no longer suffice in a competitive market where India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam are all making structured, data-backed pitches for the same business.
The census will not solve everything. But it closes the most basic gap of all: not knowing who is actually in the room.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Pakistan’s IT census?
The Ministry of IT and Telecom has decided to conduct Pakistan’s first-ever IT census in collaboration with the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. The objective is to collect reliable, comprehensive data on Pakistan’s IT workforce — its size, skills, geographic distribution, and composition — for the first time in the country’s history.
Who will be counted in the IT census?
The census will document IT professionals across Pakistan, including freelancers, video editors, software developers, and call centre employees. It will also identify and classify the different skill sets of workers in the call centre industry — a level of granularity that has been missing from the country’s outsourcing sector.
Why has Pakistan never had an IT census before?
Pakistan’s IT sector grew largely through informal and gig-based work that existing statistical frameworks were never designed to capture. Pakistan’s IT sector has grown largely organically, driven by private initiative, individual enterprise, and global demand for affordable digital services rather than government planning or formal industrial policy. That organic growth produced results — nearly $3 billion in IT exports in just eight months of FY26 — but it also produced a sector that government data systems could not see.
How does the IT census affect Pakistan’s AI policy?
Pakistan’s National AI Policy sets ambitious targets for scholarships and Centres of Excellence, but these require knowing the real size and skill level of the existing digital workforce. Pakistan is about to conduct its first-ever IT census — a revealing acknowledgement that the government has been setting export targets for a sector it cannot yet fully measure. Policy cannot be evidence-based if the evidence base does not exist.
