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PHP powers 71.8% of all websites with a known server-side language, making it the backbone of the public web.
WordPress alone runs on PHP and accounts for roughly 43% of all websites.
Despite expectations of its decline, PHP keeps growing its installed base, and PHP 8.x has introduced modern language features that have closed most of the ergonomic gaps that gave newer alternatives their early advantages.
While PHP may not be the language most developers reach for when starting something new in 2026, the sheer volume of systems already running on it, the size of the WordPress and Laravel ecosystems, and the continued demand for legacy maintenance mean PHP development skills remain commercially relevant in a way that's easy to underestimate.
Let’s look at everything you need to know about
If you need PHP developers for a fintech or web product, request a consultation.
PHP (which now stands recursively for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a server-side scripting language designed specifically for web development and embedded HTML.
It is for code that runs on the server, not in the browser. The server processes the PHP, generates standard HTML, and sends that HTML to the client.
This server-side execution model is the basis for how PHP handles dynamic web pages, database queries, form processing, session management, and API responses.
Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts and later released as PHP 3 in 1998, PHP grew into the de facto language of web development in the early 2000s.
A big reason for this was that it was easy to set up, worked seamlessly with MySQL, and shipped with most shared hosting environments. The LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) became the default infrastructure for web applications for a decade and a half.
We still see a lot of this in legacy systems today, but the language has evolved considerably since then.
PHP 7 (2015) brought substantial performance improvements, with roughly 2x faster performance than PHP 5.6 and significantly lower memory usage, while PHP 8.0 (2020) introduced the JIT compiler, named arguments, match expressions, and union types.
PHP 8.1 added enums and fibers. PHP 8.2 and 8.3 continued adding readonly classes, typed class constants, and other modernisations that bring PHP closer to the type safety and expressiveness of newer languages.
With all of these changes, the result is a language that looks quite different from the PHP of ten years ago, making it worth a fresh look if you have evaluated it in the past.
A PHP developer builds, maintains, and extends web applications using PHP and the technologies that typically surround it. In practice, most PHP developers work in one of three contexts:
PHP developers typically carry strong backend skills, and we have seen many of them branch into frontend work as well.
Most PHP applications also involve HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and the line between backend PHP developer and full-stack developer is blurry in practice.
PHP's continued dominance is occasionally treated as a mystery in technical circles, since it hasn’t followed the typical pattern of phasing out once newer technologies arrive.
There are several reasons for this.
First, the installed base is massive. When 71.8% of websites with a detectable server-side language run on PHP, there's no practical route to migrate away from it. The cost and risk just aren’t justified, so the systems just end up getting maintained in PHP.
WordPress also makes PHP unavoidable, since it has 43% of the web and runs on PHP.
Every WordPress plugin, every WooCommerce customisation, every theme that does anything non-trivial requires PHP. The WordPress ecosystem alone creates more PHP development demand than most other ecosystems combined.
Laravel is also genuinely good. Laravel's developer experience, with Eloquent ORM, Artisan CLI, built-in queue management, and Blade templating, is competitive with Rails or Django.
Instead of just settling, teams choosing it are making a legitimate architectural choice. Laravel 11 (2024) and the continuing development of Livewire and Inertia.js have extended Laravel's reach into full-stack application development.
PHP 8.x closed the modernisation gap almost entirely.
The features added in the PHP 8.x line (JIT, fibers, enums, readonly properties, named arguments, match expressions, intersection types) have produced a language that handles most use cases competently and safely.
A PHP developer's day-to-day scope typically includes:
It’s important to note that, for fintech or other data-sensitive applications, PHP developers also need to handle sanitisation and validation of financial inputs correctly, implement proper authentication and session management, and understand the security implications of the systems they build.
We have already touched on many of the benefits of using PHP, but it’s worth going into more detail to help you make a decision.
PHP has no licensing cost, and its major frameworks (Laravel, Symfony) are similarly free.
Hosting environments that support PHP are widely available and also generally cheaper than platforms optimised for Node.js or Python.
PHP runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS and works with all major web servers (Apache, Nginx) without platform-specific modifications.
PHP has one of the largest developer communities of any server-side language, thanks to how old it is and how much it is used in legacy software.
Stack Overflow, GitHub, and the Laravel/WordPress community forums contain answers to most questions you'll encounter, so the documented history of solutions to PHP problems is extensive.
PHP was designed with database interaction as a first-class concern.
PDO (PHP Data Objects) provides a secure, database-neutral abstraction layer. Eloquent (Laravel's ORM) makes common query patterns readable and maintainable.
The LAMP/LEMP stack (Linux, Nginx/Apache, MySQL, PHP) is generally a very well-understood deployment pattern.
If your company runs existing PHP infrastructure, maintaining it in PHP is the practical choice.
The alternatives of rewriting all of your code in Node, Python, or Go carry significant risk and cost for systems that are working adequately.
JIT compilation in PHP 8.0 delivered meaningful performance improvements for CPU-intensive applications.
PHP 8.x is substantially faster than PHP 5.x and competitive with many newer alternatives for typical web workloads.
The average US PHP developer salary runs $102,005–$108,818/year depending on the source (ZipRecruiter at $102,005; Glassdoor at $108,818), with the middle 50% earning between $81,000 and $150,000.
Laravel and Symfony specialists typically cost as much as 15–25% more than the general PHP average, reflecting genuine scarcity relative to demand.
Hourly rates for US PHP contractors average $61–$80/hr.
LATAM nearshore rates are significantly cheaper:
| Seniority | US annual | LATAM annual | LATAM hourly |
| Junior (0–2 years) | $65,000–$85,000 | $22,000–$36,000 | ~$18–$30/hr |
| Mid-level (2–5 years) | $85,000–$115,000 | $36,000–$52,000 | ~$30–$46/hr |
| Senior (5+ years) | $115,000–$145,000 | $45,000–$70,000 | ~$40–$65/hr |
| Lead / Laravel specialist | $145,000+ | $65,000–$90,000 | ~$58–$80/hr |
The specific skills worth screening for depend heavily on the context of the role:
If you are specifically looking for a Laravel developer, you’ll need to look for proficiency in Laravel 10/11, Eloquent ORM, queues and jobs, Blade and Inertia/Livewire, testing with PHPUnit/Pest, and Composer dependency management.
It’s important that you ask candidates to walk through how they'd handle a complex database query with multiple relationships. Eloquent's eager loading and the N+1 problem are a common area where experience separates strong candidates from inexperienced ones.
For more traditional websites built on the CMS, they’ll need an understanding of WordPress hooks and filters, the WP_Query API, custom post types, plugin and theme architecture, and WooCommerce if relevant.
WordPress and Laravel are genuinely different contexts; a strong Laravel developer may have minimal WordPress experience and vice versa.
Familiarity with PDO and prepared statements (vs deprecated mysql_* functions), PHP version migration paths, and the ability to modernise code incrementally rather than requiring full rewrites.
For fintech or compliance-sensitive applications, it is critical that you also screen for input validation and sanitisation practices, understanding of session security, and awareness of the OWASP Top 10, particularly SQL injection.
All of this is still disproportionately common in PHP codebases that use string concatenation rather than prepared statements.
A significant portion of PHP development work in 2026 involves maintaining and modernising systems built on older PHP versions.
For example, PHP 5.6 reached end-of-life in December 2018. PHP 7.4 reached end-of-life in November 2022. Applications still running on these versions receive no security patches from the PHP community, creating a meaningful operational risk.
This risk is even more pronounced for any system handling financial data or personal information.
The practical path forward for most legacy PHP systems is incremental modernisation:
This work requires developers who understand both old PHP patterns (so they can read the existing code) and modern PHP practices (so they can move the codebase toward them), which is an entirely different skill set from greenfield Laravel development.
PHP isn't the first language that comes to mind for fintech development. Instead, most new fintech infrastructure gets built in Node.js, Python, Java, or Go.
But PHP appears in the fintech context more than the developer survey numbers suggest:
For PHP developers working on financial applications, the same domain knowledge considerations apply as in any fintech context.
They need a solid understanding of why monetary amounts should never be stored as floating-point types, that payment flows require idempotency controls, and that database queries touching financial records need to be correct before they're fast.
At Trio, we place pre-vetted PHP developers from LATAM with US companies, including teams maintaining or building on PHP infrastructure for fintech and e-commerce products.
These engineers have 4–8 hours of daily US timezone overlap, making synchronous code review and architecture discussions practical.
Our staff augmentation model places engineers as embedded team members who work in your codebase, with your code review process, and your deployment workflow.
They can be placed in 3–5 days at $40–$80/hr.
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