India's Tier-2 Tech Openings Nearly Doubled To 41,000 In A Year

Active technology job openings in India's tier-2 and tier-3 cities have risen from about 21,000 a year ago to roughly 41,000 now, a 95 per cent increase, according to September hiring data from staffing firm Xpheno.

The gain comes alongside a broader recovery in IT services hiring. Active talent demand across the IT services cohort reached 57,000 roles for September, the highest since February 2025, when it stood at around 80,000. Overall demand in the Indian technology sector rose to 117,000 roles, close to the 119,000 recorded in March 2026.

Technology's share of India's total active talent demand climbed to 51 per cent, up three percentage points month on month and two points year on year, crossing 50 per cent for the first time this fiscal year. Xpheno counts startups, software product firms, global capability centres, Big Four firms, IT services companies and technology roles in non-technology sectors within that cohort.

The composition of hiring is shifting as well. Roles mentioning AI within software development grew 138 per cent between the second quarter of 2024 and the second quarter of 2026, while overall software development postings stayed roughly flat. Kamal Karanth, Xpheno's co-founder, said employers were hiring differently rather than simply hiring more, with a premium on roles applying AI, cloud and digital skills to immediate business needs. Entry-level opportunities remain, he said, but the bar is rising.

Cities driving the smaller-market gains include Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Kochi, Indore, Nagpur, Jaipur and Chandigarh.

The recovery starts from a low base. Active tech openings stood at about 93,000 in June, a 28-month low, and 103,000 in January, down 24 per cent year on year.

An 18-month high is worth measuring against what came before it.

Indian tech hiring peaked above 260,000 active openings in early 2022. It fell to 103,000 by January this year and 93,000 in June. At 117,000 the sector has recovered meaningfully from June, and remains roughly 55 per cent below its peak. Both statements are true. Only the first is being reported.

The tier-2 number deserves the same treatment. Doubling from 21,000 to 41,000 is a real shift in where work is placed. It is also happening while total demand sits far below peak, which means smaller cities are gaining share of a market that has not returned to its former size.

The reason they are gaining it is cost. Salaries in these locations run 25 to 30 per cent below the established hubs, and commercial rents around half. A sector rebuilding headcount after two years of contraction, under sustained margin pressure, rebuilds where each hire costs less.

That is not a criticism, and it is not a discovery either. Coimbatore and Kochi had capable engineers a decade ago. What changed is that companies now have both the tooling to distribute work and the commercial reason to do it.

Three things are true at once, and only one of them makes a good headline.

There are more technology jobs than there were three months ago. They are in more places than before. And they pay less and demand more than the roles they are replacing.

Karanth's observation that the bar is rising for entry level is the same finding as the 138 per cent growth in AI-mentioning roles against flat software development postings. Employers are not adding headcount so much as substituting the kind of headcount they want. A graduate entering this market finds more openings in more cities, at a wage benchmark 25 to 30 per cent below what the same work commanded in Bengaluru, with a skills expectation that was not there two years ago.

That pattern has run through the sector all week. Ford's India centre said it would hire around 500 people next year, almost all specialists, against pledges of 3,000 over three years made in 2024. TCS took over Best Buy's Bengaluru captive partly on productivity commitments. AMD is training ten thousand Delhi University students on its GPU software stack. Indian technology employment is broadening geographically while narrowing in what it pays for.

The genuinely good part should not be lost in that. Around 60 per cent of India's engineering, arts and science graduates live in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, against 11 to 15 per cent of its tech talent. Closing a gap that wide keeps people near their families, eases pressure on metros whose infrastructure is visibly overloaded, and builds local economies that previously exported their graduates and received remittances back. Roughly 900,000 direct jobs already sit in these emerging hubs.

A tech job in Indore at 75 per cent of a Bengaluru salary, with no relocation and no two-hour commute, is not obviously a worse deal for the person taking it. It is a worse deal for the sector's wage floor. Those are different questions, and they deserve to be asked separately.

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