Updated 29 June 2026

CISQ Cost of Poor Software Quality 2022: $2.41 Trillion and $1.52 Trillion in Technical Debt

The single most-cited macro benchmark for technical debt comes from one report. Here is what the CISQ 2022 figures actually say, how they changed since 2020, and how to use them without overstating them.

What the report is

The Cost of Poor Software Quality (CPSQ) report is a periodic study from the Consortium for Information and Software Quality (CISQ), a standards group that develops measures of software size and structural quality. The 2022 edition was authored by Herb Krasner and estimates the aggregate economic cost that poor software quality imposed on the US economy in that year. It is the figure most engineering leaders reach for when they need a defensible top-down anchor for the scale of the problem.

The 2022 edition focused its narrative on three drivers: cybercrime losses arising from unpatched software vulnerabilities, software supply chain weaknesses in third-party and open-source components, and the accumulation of technical debt. Unlike the 2020 edition, the 2022 report did not republish a single clean additive breakdown of the headline number, so the component table below is drawn from the directly comparable 2020 report.

How the numbers changed: 2020 vs 2022

Both headline figures rose by roughly 16 percent between the two editions. That growth rate is itself a useful talking point: poor software quality is not a fixed cost, it compounds.

Sources: CISQ 2020 and 2022 reports. The 2020 edition was published January 2021; the 2022 edition was published in November 2022.

What makes up the total

The 2020 report broke the headline number into three components. The 2022 report did not restate this split, but the categories are the same, which makes the 2020 breakdown the best available guide to where the cost concentrates. Operational software failures dominate.

Source: CISQ 2020 report. Shares are of the $2.08 trillion 2020 total and overlap because failed-project and legacy costs partly feed operational failures; CISQ presents them as the three contributing categories rather than as strictly additive line items. Accumulated technical debt ($1.31 trillion in 2020, $1.52 trillion in 2022) is counted separately and is not included in either annual total.

How to use the CISQ figures correctly

• Do not add the two numbers. The $1.52 trillion in technical debt is an accumulated future cost. The $2.41 trillion is an annual cost. Combining them into a single “$3.9 trillion” figure misreads the report.
• Use it as a top-down anchor, not a per-company number. The figure is a national aggregate. To get to a team or organization number, work bottom-up from engineering time and fully-loaded cost. See Cost by Team Size for that method.
• Cite the year. The current figure is the 2022 report. Quoting “$2.08 trillion” without a date refers to the 2020 edition and now understates the benchmark.
• Pair it with developer-time data. The macro number lands harder next to the Stripe finding that engineers spend about a third of their week on technical debt. See Productivity Cost.