Each year, JRebel’s annual Java Developer Productivity Report collates valuable information on the biggest challenges Java developers are facing — and the tools and technologies they’re using to solve those challenges.
Now in its 13th edition, this year’s Java Developer Productivity Report is our biggest and most-in-depth yet. In this post, we outline key findings from the 2025 Java Developer Productivity Report — and what these Java trends mean for your organization. Read on to learn more about:
Spending Is Slowing, But Investing in Java Tools Is More Important Than Ever
Long-forecasted economic headwinds have arrived in force for nearly all industries. While it’s clear development spending has slowed across the board, enterprises (1,000+ employees) are still carving out budgets for the people and tools necessary to maintain their mission-critical business applications.
Regardless of company size, development teams are now being tasked with doing more with less — and in increasingly complex development environments. Compounding that issue is tightened budgets and oftentimes blanket hiring freezes. Developers now have more to do and greater time burdens for those tasks, which makes investing in Java tools more important than ever.
Source: 2025 Java Developer Productivity Report
According to the 2025 Java Developer Productivity Report, 51% of respondents said their companies plan to add Java developers in the coming year, 16% did not plan to add any developer headcount, and 32% were not sure. Similarly, respondents were asked if their companies planned to increase their developer tool budget for 2025: 34% said yes, while 21% said there would be no tool budget increase and 45% were unsure.
Want more data points like these? Download the report.
Back to topAI Isn’t the Only Answer
AI is often the de facto answer to stalled hiring and increasing complexity, but our experts found that as AI development tools continue to mature, they will create a clear competitive advantage for companies that buy in. Companies that are skittish about adopting AI tools or create blanket policies prohibiting their use will get left behind. That said, AI coding assistants are far from perfect today, and it’s not easy to know which AI vendor and model will work best for a given programing language, codebase, use case, etc.
Source: 2025 Java Developer Productivity Report
Among those using AI tools, there are clear trends in what tasks they help save time. Respondents were most likely to turn to AI tools for code completion (60%) and refactoring (39%). Error detection (30%), documentation generation (28%), debugging assistance (26%), and automated testing (21%) were also ripe use cases.
While ChatGPT (52%) was the most popular AI tool overall, enterprise respondents showed a clear preference for GitHub CoPilot, with 52% of that cohort reporting usage. Our experts expect businesses to continue to gravitate towards enterprise-grade tools with the security and stability to meet their needs. And while AI tools are in the news, they work best in a development environment that’s optimized with traditional Java development tools, too.
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Remote Redeploy Times Are a Barrier to Java Productivity
The 2025 Java Developer Productivity Report found that 70% of respondents are using remote, containerized, or cloud-based development environments. That stat should surprise exactly no one, given the flexibility that cloud affords.
That flexibility comes at a cost, however. 23% of respondents say their redeploys are five minutes or longer for local development environments, but 52% saw redeploys of that length for remote development environments. And 13% of respondents said that remote redeploys take 10-plus minutes.
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About This Year’s Survey
We surveyed 731 Java developers, Java architects, Java team leads, Java managers, and more for this year’s survey. This year’s survey not only captures the opinions of Java developers, but also the business leaders who oversee those teams. While most respondents listed their role as developer (62%), this year’s survey saw more respondents in leadership roles compared to 2024, including team lead (19%), director/manager (6%), and vice president/executive (4%).
Final Thoughts
The 2025 Java Developer Productivity Report was one of our biggest and best yet in 13 years of conducting this original Java ecosystem research. We hope you find these data points valuable as you search for effective solutions to your Java development challenges in 2025.